Thoughts Too Long

Incontrovertible Scriptural Evidence

2011-06-27T15:58:00.000-07:00

In response to: "If you can provide me with clear, incontrovertible Scriptural evidence that life begins at conception, I will believe it."

You don't need clear and incontrovertible scriptural evidence. Your standard for ethical judgements should be (and, I'm sure, is) something more like 'consistency with principles drawn according to clear and incontrovertible scriptural evidence'. If you were to take clear and incontrovertible scriptural evidence as your only standard for making ethical judgements, you would be left quite without support for a number of judgements I'm sure you already make.

I could name a dozen, but one should suffice. If you were to find yourself in Durham, NC in the year 1800, somebody might well say to you, "If you can provide me with clear, incontrovertible Scriptural evidence that the African race is human, I will believe it." You would find it very difficult to give them what they want. The African race is not mentioned in scripture.

In fact, you believe that black people are human because it is consistent with principles drawn according to clear and incontrovertible scriptural evidence, not because scriptural evidence exists for the position itself. And that is a perfectly valid reason to hold an ethical judgement of that kind. Scripture was never intended to give an answer to any particular ethical question the human race can come up with (It would have to be infinitely long!) - But it provides us with some trustworthy principles from which to reason ethically.

BUT, despite the fact that no direct scriptural support exists for the position that life begins at conception, I can give you a few verses that strongly imply it. These present the speaker as having been, in the womb, a separate, unique, important, differentiable human being in the eyes of the Lord.

Psalm 139:13
For you created my inmost being; you knit me together in my mother’s womb.

Jeremiah 1:5
“Before I formed you in the womb I knew you, before you were born I set you apart; I appointed you as a prophet to the nations.”

In the eyes of the Lord, the fetus is a different person from the mother.

In any case, the question of whether life begins at conception isn't even the current state of the argument. The conservative side won that point ages ago. The current state of the argument is to question whether personhood and rights begin at conception. This guy's page pretty much sums up the current state of the pro-choice argument.

I'm not going to give any actual arguments at this point, since that's not what you asked for. But I will leave you with this: The history of the last two centuries is in large part the history of the idea of human rights. Various questions arise, are resisted, and then are finally answered. Are peasants fully human? Should they have rights? Are non-whites fully human? Should they have rights? Are women fully human? Should they have rights?

It seems like a good idea to be on the "yes, they are human, yes, they have rights" side of things rather than the "no, they aren't human, no, they don't have rights" side of things.

Yes, I will be on the pro-robot rights side.

On Education and the Fourteenth Amendment

2011-02-06T13:47:00.000-08:00

It is a simple fact that if you do not educate your children they will be taken from you. It is by this means that your child is compelled to give up some measure of their liberty. For a certain amount of time each year, they are not permitted to do as they wish, or as you would have them do. During this time they are to be educated.

If you do not want your children educated by the public schools, alternatives exist. If you have the time you may homeschool them, or, if you have the money, send them to a private school.

If you are under a certain age, there exists no legal alternative to the surrender of some part of your liberty. If you do not give it up to the public school, you must give it up to homeschooling or to a private school. The alternative is that you will be placed under some stricter form of control: You will be given to a foster family, or institutionalized, or imprisoned.

It is not your parents that put this state of affairs into place. If they disagree, it does not matter. Still you will either give up part of your liberty or have it taken from you.

I now quote Section One of the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution of the United States of America:

"All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside. No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws."

I am a citizen of the United States no matter how young I am. A State can deny me my liberty, as long as they maintain due process of law, but they cannot deny me the equal protection of the laws.

The reason for this Amendment is that many States were passing legislation that applied differently to African-Americans than it did to white people. What is known as the 'equal protection clause' means that the States are not permitted to either make or enforce any such law.

Is there anything in the language of this Amendment that implies in any way that while black people must be offered equality under the law, children need not be? No. Do children fall any less under the category 'all persons born or naturalized in the United States' than black people do? No. Therefore, this Amendment must apply equally to black people and to children. If it disallows any law which discriminates on the basis of race, it must also disallow any law which discriminates on the basis of age.

Children ought to be given equal protection under the law, just as much as black people or Catholics or homosexuals.

I was born in the United States. For a time the State of Maryland deprived me of liberty, and it did not do so to others who were of a different age. Those others and I were not protected equally from deprivation of our liberty.

Currently I reside in the State of North Carolina. I am not deprived of my liberty except in connection with such matters as jury duty and taxation. But when it comes to those matters, the law is equally applied to all of my fellow citizens, except for children. They are protected by law from the deprivation of liberty connected with these things, and I am not. We do not have equal protection.

Right now, children are being systematically deprived of their liberty in a way that I am not. They are undergoing education, whether or not they wish it. Those children and I are not equal under the law.

If we are to comply with the Fourteenth Amendment, education must be made optional.

Personal Notes:
1. The reason that I am not a teacher, despite the fact that I would be a good one, and that I consider education to be of primary importance, is that I do not wish to be complicit in systematic government oppression. I'm certain that many people work within the school system with a clear conscience, but I would not be able to. I don't accuse or condemn them, because I trust that they're doing what God wants them to be doing.
2. I recently used the language of human rights abuse in connection with this subject. However, I have become aware of Article 26 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which states, among other things, that, "Elementary education shall be compulsory." I believe that under a philosophically consistent conception of human rights, compulsory education would be listed as an abuse, rather than as a right, but since the public idea of human rights has been so deeply influenced by this document, I don't think I'll use the language of human rights in connection with this issue, at least in short treatments.
3. I believe that an essential part of a democratic government's duty is to give its citizens the resources to discover the truth. This entails at least a system of public libraries, schools, and universities with laboratories. The government ought to spend money on such things. But having an educational system available is a very different thing from compelling citizens to spend their time making use of it.
4. Just because something is beneficial does not make it constitutional.

The Scientific Method and Repetition

2010-06-30T06:35:00.000-07:00

Kierkegaard said, "...repetition is a crucial expression for what 'recollection' was to the Greeks. Just as they taught that all knowing is a recollecting, modern philosophy will teach that all life is a repetition."

Here's another epistemological limitation of the scientific method: It is blind to the unique.

The scientific method requires experiments repeatable by any competent observer. Moreover, the essential mode of the scientific method is to generalize from corellations to causes, and then to abstract from causes to laws. Everything that science touches, it puts through this process: Events become corellations, corellations become causes, and causes become laws. This is what the scientific method is.

So when you get a person who only believes what can be shown scientifically, that person can only believe what can be corellated. And to be corellated, it must be repeatable.

The unique experience is left out of the 'scientific worldview'. Again, this isn't to say that science isn't good. Science is great! It's a wonderful tool. But it has its limitations, and it would be foolish to suppose that because there are limitations to science, these limitations are somehow universal.

So, for instance, it's wrong to say, "Nothing exists in the universe except for particles suspended in fields of force. Science proves this." In fact, science is by its nature blind to anything except particles suspended in fields of force. It doesn't prove it -- It presupposes it.

And that's how I understand Kierkegaard's claim that modern philosophy will teach that all of life is repetition. If nothing exists except for what science can prove, and science can prove nothing that isn't repeated, then nothing exists that isn't repeated.

Nothing can be ephemeral. Nothing can be unique. If something totally unique actually did exist, the person who holds the scientific method as their entire epistemology would be unable to believe in it.

Just for thought, consider a few of the following. Can science prove that these exist? Do they exist?

1) All of existence. (There can be only one. It cannot be repeated.)
2) The last, most beautiful ice sculpture of the greatest ice sculptor ever to live.
3) A really good rock concert. (Where members of the audience lose some hearing -- which is to say, they lose part of their capacity to experience future rock concerts in the same way as they experienced this one.)

The Scientific Method and the Political

2010-06-27T20:36:00.000-07:00

I need to go to bed, but I don't want to forget this one:

You can't let a freshman who messed up their experiment derail an entire scientific theory. Right? If somebody messes up, it doesn't count, even if THEY think they did it absolutely right.

And so we don't say that a scientific experiment must be repeatable by ALL observers, but rather that it must be repeatable by any COMPETENT observer.

But who decides who's competent? The question cannot be answered scientifically. Who would run the experiment? How would they be judged competent to run the experiment before the experiment has been run?

No, the question of competence must be decided in some other way, and this is how I understood that the scientific method must always be secondary to the political process.

By the way, our current answer to the problem of who decides competency is called the 'peer review process', and it's fundamentally political. That's not a bad thing. It works very well in very many fields, and it's been a fantastic tool for getting many great things accomplished.

But it's important to realize that this is a fundamental limitation to the scientific method, and it's one of the reasons it's abhorrent to philosophical rigor to count the scientific method as one's primary epistemological apparatus.

I'm not saying that there aren't excellent individual scientists, and even groups of them, who boldly defy the will of their political bosses in the name of truth. I am saying that when they do so, they are in a very real sense going against the nature of the scientific method.

Their first job, within that method, is to make themselves into whatever it is society considers a 'competent observer', in accord with whatever political process society puts over them to judge their competency.

I'm not sure how to end this. Here: The scientific method is great, but it has limitations, and it's not appropriate as a primary epistemology.

This Should Be Simple Ethics

2010-05-26T04:53:00.000-07:00

Here are some ethical principles. (I'll use 'right' and 'wrong' because it's more familiar language, but really I mean 'praiseworthy' and 'blameworthy'. The question ethics asks is, "At Judgement Day, will God praise you for this action, or blame you for it?") There's a conclusion at the end of this that seems inescapable to me as long as you accept these principles, so as you read, think about whether you agree or not. Ready? Go:

1) Just because other people do something doesn't make it right. In fact, even if every other person does it, that doesn't make it even a little bit more right (or more wrong) than it would be otherwise. For example: Say a big crowd of people is kicking somebody and the person dies. You only actually kicked him once. None of you kicked him more than one time. Yet in fact each is entirely guilty of murder. There's no such thing as being guilty of one hundredth of a murder.

2) Just because you do something through intermediaries doesn't make it right. In fact, even if you aren't perfectly aware of what your henchman is doing, this doesn't reduce the blame you take for the actions done in your name. 'Plausible deniability' isn't a good enough excuse for God. For example: Say you're the head of a mafia family, and you casually mention to one of your goons that so-and-so is bothering you, and you wish he'd stop it. So your goon goes out and kills him. Just because you didn't actually pull the trigger doesn't make you any less guilty.

These two principles give us an easy way of talking about the sort of ostensibly democratic government we have now in the US. It is a big giant intermediary for all of us, acting in the name of 'the people', which is you and me.

And now, two practical corollaries to the principles above:

1') You ought to consider actions done by a crowd of which you are a part as though they had been done by you alone, because the addition of the crowd dillutes the ethics of the action not at all.

2') You ought to consider actions done by someone else in your name as though they were done by you personally.

If you accept these two principles, and you accept the idea of the democratic government as an intermediary for us all, then the unavoidable conclusion is that you are guilty of whatever wrong the government does, and you are also responsible for the right that it does.

And so here's the practical conclusion:

3) You ought not to support the government doing anything that you would not do yourself.

Would you taze your neighbor to get them to pay taxes for new roads? No? Then don't support the government doing it, because when the government does it on our behalf, this is ethically indistinguishable from you doing it personally. Would you personally waterboard somebody who might have information that would save lives? No? Then don't support the government doing it.

Used Book Store + Rainy Day =

2010-05-17T16:26:00.000-07:00

Crazy people. They love to visit used book stores on rainy days. I've only worked at used book stores for a couple years total, but the rainy days generally stand out in my mind as times when the customers were especially irritating. In Durham we theorized that we were getting a higher than usual percentage of homeless people, coming indoors out of the weather.

But I don't think that's the case in my current job. Our customers today were mean, purposefully ignorant, rude, and obnoxious, but they had legitimate business to transact with us.

In case you think this is just in my head, my coworkers observed the phenomenon as well, at two separate locations. So either people get worse when it rains, or we get more easily irritated when it rains, or some combination of the two.

Anyway, I've found that I tend to treat customers like children when they're rude or mean. It's easier for me because I don't have to blame them: They don't know any better. And they like it. The customers enjoy being treated like children. My voice is higher and nicer, I phrase things so that mentally undeveloped people can understand them, and I repeat myself. They seem to like it, at least.

But it's not right. I ought not to treat them like children. They're adults, and they ought to be held to adult standards of behavior. If that means they get upset, at least I've respected them.

Analysis: Penny-Arcade Art Argument

2010-04-22T07:03:00.000-07:00

Polite Prologue: I don't use this blog much, sorry, etc. Who cares? but I feel like I have to say it.

Recently Roger Ebert made the claim that video games will never be art. I don't mind very much because it's obvious to me that video games are art and I don't care what he thinks. Both Tycho and Gabe of Penny-Arcade responded, in what I think is a very telling way. These are cultural commentators who I respect very much for their depth of insight, but also (and more relevantly) for their ability to craft their message in the form most likely to penetrate their audience.

Tycho in particular is a great genius. His writing is beautiful, and his analysis is deep and self-aware even when it's misguided. Here's my point: When he writes something in a particular way, this is strong evidence that writing it that way is the best way to communicate the idea to his audience.

His writing is typical of the kind of prose that resonates with my generation. The arguments that he uses are typical of the kind of arguments that resonate with my generation. I know that they're not the only kind of arguments that Tycho is capable of -- But he's limited by his audience and his medium.

And so when I analyze his choice of arguments, I'm actually trying to (in a way) analyze my own generation, and the kinds of arguments that work on us. Also, let me be clear that I'm talking about a viewpoint I agree with. I agree with Tycho on this issue. It's not even an issue. Of course video games are art. Why discuss it?

Now is when you should read the post if you haven't already (http://www.penny-arcade.com/2010/4/21/)

Here are the arguments he makes:
A) Ironic Name-Calling: 'wretched, ancient warlock' for instance. This works because we know that he would not name-call if he were seriously attempting to engage Ebert in argument, so by name-calling he indicates that Ebert is not worthy of serious engagement.
The Flaw: Ironic Name-Calling is also Name-Calling. It ends any serious conversation.

B) Denial of Validity: This is the claim that the other guy's argument is for some reason logically invalid. Note that it does not address whether the other guy is right. Tycho uses this when he says "in an internally contradictory way" and "with nebulously defined terms".
The Flaw: There are two kinds of arguments that look invalid: Ones that are invalid, and ones you just don't understand yet. Nebulously defined terms are often just terms you don't understand, and the appearance of internal contradiction often follows directly from such misunderstanding. The best response, if one is arguing seriously, is to get clarification, not to deny the validity of the argument. Take a lesson from Socrates, who when faced with this, would only ask questions, thus forcing his interlocutors to show the internal contradiction themselves.

C) Denial of Dialogue: This is the direct claim that the other guy is not worthy of serious engagement (Ironic Name-Calling only implies it). If Ebert is arguing "in bad faith", then it frees Tycho from having to argue well. He says, "He is not talking to you, he is just talking".
The Flaw: Once this has been deployed by either side, all serious argument ends.

D) The Hegel: This is the claim that the other person's argument is a necessary part of some historical development, and need not be considered seriously. Tycho uses it when he says, "He's simply a man determined to be on the wrong side of history". Gabe deploys this one as well.
The Flaw: This invalidates your own argument, which must also be a necessary part of some historical development, since it's an antithesis to the other guy's thesis.
Note: The attached comic makes it clear that they are aware that their own arguments are also vulnerable to The Hegel, which means that the argument as deployed in the comic would more properly be called The Ironic Hegel. The Ironic Hegel, however, doesn't show up in the newspost.

E) The Ironic Appeal to Authority: This is when you say, essentially, "I could make an appeal to authority, but I don't respect authority, and so I won't". In this case, Gabe makes a claim to authority, but in a way that makes it clear that he's not serious about it. It works well because Ebert is considered an authority on art. In one stroke he can establish his own authority and undermine the other guy's.
The Flaw: In one stroke he has undermined his own authority and established the other guy's.

Here's my point: None of these address the issue at hand. The medium and the audience are simply not capable of sustaining an actual substantial discussion of such an important issue. These are arguments in that nether region somewhere between a true argument and an ad hominem, and it's where my generation lives.

We're floating.

Politics and Epistemology

2009-11-18T06:14:00.000-08:00

Sin epistemologically cripples you. This is clear in scripture, from all the times Paul calls sinners 'blind' to Jesus' "remove the log from your own eye and you will see clearly to remove the speck from your brother's eye", to all the mentions of God as light and sin as darkness. The idea is that a person's mechanism for perception and cognition can be damaged, and that sin inevitably damages such internal mechanisms, eventually unto death, but first unto blindness.

So bipartisanship is doomed. So, for example, I don't support affirmative action, except possibly in emergencies. I think in the vast majority of cases it does more harm than good, and what's worse, it upholds racism rather than destroying it. But let's say there's a liberal who thinks that government-mandated affirmative action really is the only solution to racism, and that any opposition to it must come from racist atttitudes.

Are they going to trust that I can think through economic policy as well as they can? They shouldn't, not if they believe that sin cripples you epistemologically. They ought to see me as blinded by my own 'racism'.

This example is just me trying to see from the other guy's point of view. For me, the issue is really abortion. When liberals try to get me to feel guilty about something, like income disparities or environmental issues or whatever, it just doesn't work, because this is the worldview that supports abortion.

I believe that abortion is murder. Lots of us do. So when a liberal calls something wrong, I hear, "Burning coal is wrong, and also killing babies is alright." "It's unjust that men make more money than women for the same work, but it's perfectly just to kill certain people." "Illegal immigrants should have the same rights as citizens, but people below a certain age should have no rights at all."

They're just coming from such a different place from me, ethically, that it's impossible to decode their statements. Like listening to a blind person talk about what color a traffic light is. I'm not going to listen to them. I'm going to look at the light for myself.

And of course I must remember that Jesus' own teaching on this is that I should first clear out the sin from my own life before I criticize other people's lives. And far be it from me to call liberals 'sinners' -- To their own Master they will stand or fall. They don't owe an account of their actions or political beliefs to me, so who am I to judge them? Maybe they're right. God knows, and I don't.

But by the same token, to my own Master I will owe an account of what teachers I listened to in this life. Who did I allow to guide me? Did I try to search for the truth, or did I follow blind guides?

In any case, the principle of sin affecting epistemology doesn't make bipartisanship look very possible. As long as we have one party that mainly thinks the other party supports murder, any kind of real cooperation is down the tubes.

I Should Clarify

2009-11-12T06:30:00.000-08:00

I should clarify that last post. Start over from the beginning.

Let's say the universe is one thing, and that in it are things that can surprise us.

If the universe is one thing, then there is one principle, being, or power that determines what is part of the universe and what is not. Somehow the distinction is made between what's real and what's not, and if the universe is one thing, then that Somehow is one thing as well.

Here's a little reductio ad absurdum upholding this argument: If there were two things determining what's real and what's not, then there would be some difference between them. If there were some difference between them, then they would determine different objects as being real or not. This would give us a situation in which, in our one universe, some object would be both real and not real -- Real as determined by the one thing, not real as determined by the other. But since we find that we experience each object as either real or not real (if my socks are real they will keep my feet warm. Otherwise my feet will be cold) this is not the case.

Now, this thing, which determines what's real and what's not, must be in one of two 'places': Inside of me or outside of me. If I hold to solipsism, which is the belief that nothing else besides me is real, then the realness-determiner is inside of me. If I don't, then it's somewhere outside of me. The key distinction here is surprise: The solipsist cannot believe himself to have truly been surprised. He must account for surprises as having come from some other part of his own mind, as things that he himself created but was unaware of. The rest of us can believe that we have been truly surprised, by things that exist but are in no way part of us.

Now, what do we know about this realness-determiner? What does it do? Well: Everything that's real, is real because this thing 'chose' it to be real. So, at least in one very important way, it's the Creator. It's what gives realness to things at any given moment. Without it, nothing which is real would be real. Nothing would exist.

Another aspect of this thing is that it touches everything in the universe. As long as something is part of the universe, this thing has some contact with it. That makes it Omnipresent, and goes a long way towards making it Omniscient.

Now, 'physics' (whatever that is) or 'nature' fits this description as well as God does. But these are just a few conclusions we can draw from these axioms, that everybody already believes.

...And We're Back

2009-11-10T21:52:00.000-08:00

Not everything I do is on purpose -- But can failing to write anything in one's blog for a number of years be considered an accident? It doesn't just happen, and yet I didn't mean to.

So what makes the universe? How does one distinguish between what is part of the universe and what isn't? This is easy for a solipsist: Whatever they think of is part of the universe. It's not so easy for those of us who believe that it's possible to be really and truly surprised by something.

Universe. Noun. Whatever actually is.

I think, just between us, we can take it as an axiom that there are things in the universe that we just don't know about. But this leaves us with a universe in which the thing that determines what's in the universe is not in us. It's not 'your universe' or 'my universe' but Something Else's universe. This doesn't even leave room for 'our universe' -- Something like a shared social construction of reality isn't possible if 'we' as a society could ever be truly surprised by something.

What is that thing? What is it that makes it so that when I'm surprised, it's by something like a dog, or a tattoo, or a street sign, but not a unicorn, or a four sided circle, or a talking sandwich? -- Things which are (for the sake of argument) not part of the universe. Not real, that is.

Whatever that thing is, it's never surprised, which is to say: It's omniscient. It's what makes it so that what is, is.

Now this is all assuming that the universe is one thing. That is to say: If we're standing in a room, and I see a brown couch, you also see a brown couch. This is not necessary to assume. It could be that you and I live in separate universes which only intersect at one point, and everything I experience, except for you, is totally different from everything you experience, except for me. (I kind of have to assume that we can experience each other, or else you wouldn't really be reading this and then what would be the point? -- More on that sort of thing later).

If there's not one single universe, then it's not necessary that there be one single thing distinguishing between what's real and what's not. There could be one for each universe. But since we're taking it as an axiom that if I see a brown couch, you see a brown couch, and so on for everything else in the universe, it must follow that there is one single thing distinguishing between what's real and what's not.

(Hence, "Hear, O Israel: The LORD our God, the LORD is One." -- And more. It's very very important that God is One.)

So: If you believe that A) You can be surprised and B) We are part of one single universe, then you believe in an omniscient creator God.

And I think if I combine this argument with some thoughts I have on consciousness, which I think I'll save for later, I can work my way from the ground up to a serious actual epistemology. Stay tuned.

Politics Journal, November 11, 2008

2008-11-11T17:39:00.001-08:00

I read a couple of days ago about a black lady who slapped a white cop on November 5th. Apparently, the Obama victory celebration in Chicago was pretty rowdy, with 5 or 6 people getting charged with 'mayhem' for shooting handguns in celebration.

Apparently, this lady thought that because Obama had been elected, white police officers could no longer do anything to black people. She thought she had carte blanche to strike back at the racist power system.

She got arrested.

I want to remember these things so that in ten years when somebody is offering up a panegyric on the courage, dignity, and intelligence of Obama's supporters in 2008, I'll remember how they actually were. I'll remember about ACORN. I remember that I got asked whether or not I was registered to vote 3 times in October. One of those times the young man pronounced the name of the Republican presidential candidate, 'McClain'.

Yeah. McClain. He also assured me that my last vote didn't count in this election, that I had to vote again. I thought at the time that he was assuming that I had voted for Obama in the democratic presidential primaries, and he wanted to tell me that my vote in the primaries didn't count towards the general election.

But thinking back on the encounter now, knowing what we know now about ACORN and their policies, the phrase, 'vote again' rings chillingly in my ears.

I watched a YouTube video just now where Howard Stern went out onto the streets of Harlem and asked African American's who they supported for President. He then asked them about certain particular positions held by Obama, except that he lied about what Obama's positions really were, and told the interviewee McCain's position instead. Here's the list of issues where the Obama supporters were unable to identify their own position:

He's Pro-Life
He thinks our troops should stay in Iraq and finish this war
He's anti-stem cell research
If Obama wins, do you mind having Sarah Palin as vice president?

It was particularly awful when the last lady said that the reason she supported Obama was that he had 'facts and information when he was speaking'.

Now, I know you can't judge a politician by his supporters - But he could have at least told these people what they were voting for!

I am not going to forget these incidents. When he runs for re-election, these YouTube clips and newspaper articles are going to come right back around and become campaign issues.

Politics Journal, November 6, 2008

2008-11-06T22:40:00.000-08:00

Election day was November 4, two days ago. I was at work when they started releasing the first exit poll data, at about 5:30 or so. It was dark and rainy. Over the buzzing of the flourescent lights and the muffled roar of cars outside the store's thick glass windows, I heard the sound of drums, and a crowd of people shouting in unison, "Obama! Obama! Obama!"

For some reason I was fixated on the little bullet-hole in the window, which my co-worker had told me had been there since the seventies.

The whole scene reminds me, thinking back on it now, of the French Revolution.

After work, I went over to my friend's house to watch the network coverage of the election. A few other friends came over, and I brought some pizza and soda. It was a fun little party, even though we all knew what was going to happen.

What I remember the most is how angry we were over abortion. I'm not worried about that anger, though. I think it'll be time to worry when the conservative Christians aren't angry over abortion anymore - Because we're only angry to the extent that we still feel ourselves to be part of the country. When we start saying to ourselves, "This is not my country. That's not my president. These people are not my people." - That's when abortion won't make us angry anymore. Then we'll just feel, I think, a kind of cold pity.

But the fact that we're angry testifies that we still care about our fellow-citizens. We're not willing to abandon our neighbor's children. We don't want them to die. We'll get angry on their behalf, with an defensive anger, which is an anger born of love. I think that's good.

It's not the same as our anger over homosexuality, which does worry me. Abortionists are fools who don't know that they do murder - Homosexual apologists are clever people trying to deceive us about human nature. I think it's entirely appropriate to be angry on behalf of murdered innocents, but I don't think we ought to be angry when our world-view is attacked (which is not to say that we shouldn't defend it). Our world-view can take care of itself, unlike unborn babies.

Anyway.

The fact that I voted legitimizes the political structure of this country and cements my involvement with the laws and the elected officials. I cannot say, before God, that I had nothing to do with how the laws of the United States of America came to be. We are all responsible for the laws, and we have elected a man who supports abortion - And our hands have blood on them for that, and my hands do too. 'Government by the people' means that we are all just as responsible for making the laws as we are for upholding them.

I think another part of our anger about abortion is because of the guilt we feel about it.

My one friend is always full of facts and arguments. He mentioned two things that I didn't know or hadn't thought of, that changed my thinking slightly:

1) There are plenty of people waiting eagerly to adopt unwanted children. Unwanted babies who are not aborted need not go unloved.

2) Nobody ever had an abortion because of their economic conditions. A poor pregnant lady can give up her baby for adoption. This is legal, and possible, and nobody dies. The reason a poor pregnant lady would have an abortion is because she doesn't want to be pregnant - Not because she doesn't want to raise a child. She doesn't have to raise a child.

Anyway, I guess Obama can't make the abortion situation much worse.

Dialectics

2008-03-27T22:19:00.000-07:00

When you care what people think, you exit the realm of logic and you enter the realm of dialectic - Which sucks. I'm starting to think more and more that women are natural, instinctive dialecticians whereas men suck at it.

Logic is one thing - Dialectics is another. In the realm of logic, if 'A' is true, and 'A implies B' is true, then 'B' is true. If 'B' is false, we have a contradiction, and we know that one of our three statements is false. In the realm of dialectics, let's say 'A implies not-B', and both 'A' and 'B' are true. This is a dialectic between A and B. Dialectics is an extension of logic.

Let me give an example:

Two women and two or three men are standing around a snack table. If you're reading this, you know who you are. One of the women asks about one of the snacks. One of the men suggests that they were purchased at the store. I think that to say this is a compliment. Both women present immediately know that it's an insult. Here's the dialectic:

1) Baked goods acquired from the store are of higher quality than those I make myself.
1a) Other people are just like me.
1b) Therefore, it is complimentary to hold that the snacks were acquired from the store.

2) Buying snacks from the store takes less time than making them by hand.
2a) Therefore, one who buys snacks is lazier or less caring than one who makes them.
2b) Hence it is insulting to hold that the snacks were acquired from the store.

1b and 2b cannot both be true. Both are present as known facts in my mind. I am not willing to abandon either, since I would be happy to be told either "Wow, these snacks are as good as though they came from the store!" or "Wow, these must have taken you a really long time to make".

Now comes the part that's essential for any dialectic (I think) to hold: Epistemology and Context. I don't know whether 1b or 2b was the context for the man's statement about the cookies and the store, and so, epistemologically, I cannot evaluate logically whether it's an insult or a compliment. It may be both, if the man was being especially subtle. It probably was neither.

So I didn't come to a conclusion about the meaning of the statement.

But both women knew immediately it was an insult. Immediately, they resolved the logical contradiction, immediately they navigated the perilous dialectic and resolved it in a higher synthesis.

My point is that as soon as you start talking to people, dialectics replaces logic, because epistemology steals away 99 percent of the context you need to evaluate what they're saying, and you're left with twenty statements each with a hundred possible contradicting interpretations, and every new statement provides some context to the previous ones, invalidating previous possible interpretations and sprouting new ones like heads on a hydra, leaving everybody nauseatingly many-minded, like a cloud without rain. And those are just some of the problems with communication between people who trust each other - Wait'll I describe the raging paradoxes that open beneath your feet when you don't trust somebody.

It's insanity, and women seem to navigate it without breaking a sweat. Or at least, those two girls at the snack table did.

Yeah

2007-11-22T08:07:00.000-08:00

So I haven't paid any attention to this site for a really long time. Sorry if I disapointed anybody. Here, go to this website:

www.vectorflash.com

Just thought I'd share

2007-06-21T15:35:00.000-07:00

http://www.overcompensating.com/posts/20070621.html

Note, if you will, the following quotation, taken directly from the post associated with this comic:

"How is a less costly, government-run health care system somehow inferior to this profit-driven, more expensive model?"

I think Mr. Rowland's comics are funny, but I don't think he has the first clue about economics.

Everything the government does, it has a monopoly on doing (if it wants), because it can shoot you or put you in jail. That's what a government is. When there's a monopoly, what used to be a market turns into the feudal system.

That's why part of the job of the US government is to keep monopolies from forming - This keeps the market healthy.

One of the main problems in health care these days is that the government will pay the hospital exactly as much as it feels like and not a cent more, and the hospital has to accept that, and the insurance companies don't feel like they should have to pay more than the government does, so they don't, and the hospital has to make up the difference somewhere. I saw a presentation a couple years ago, given by a doctor, about how much hospitals are paid by the government for doing certain tests. There were a few of those tests where the hospital would actually lose money if they ordered that test run on a patient who was being paid for by the government.

Let me spell out the consequences of this for you: If the doctor doesn't order the test for you, and you happen to have the disease that the test would find - You're screwed.

This is what people mean when they say that socializing healthcare leads to decreased quality of healthcare.

I have to.

2007-06-05T22:35:00.000-07:00

Lone Wolf McQuaid is a great movie. You should watch it.

Also, you should check this out. Lightning struck just as Rudy Giuliani was explaining his views on abortion.

Heehee.

Seriously, I'm a one-issue voter. I am. I want a presidential candidate who'll ask Congress for one bill: Abortionists to be charged as murderers, both the doctors and the mothers - And who'll veto every single bill that hits his desk until he can sign that one into law. And if the courts won't prosecute, I want him to just start vetoing again until they do.

That's the guy I'll vote for. I want him to hold this country hostage until we stop the genocide. Seriously! It would be a standoff, a showdown between the Executive branch and the other two. I don't care if the federal government grinds to a halt and collapses into a giant steaming heap. I want the genocide to stop. People are losing their lives here. People are dying.

Hello presidential candidates! Here's how you can get my vote! Promise to use all of your political power to stop abortion! Whichever of you sounds off against abortion the loudest gets a +1 bonus to votecount from me.

I want a candidate who will speak for those who cannot speak for themselves. I want an anti-murder candidate.

I pray that God will forgive me for being part of a country that condones such atrocities.

Kool-Aid

2007-05-22T21:42:00.000-07:00

I just mixed myself up some Kool-Aid. It's pretty great. I like it. It's both cheaper and (reputedly) easier on the teeth than soda.

I just drank some, and experienced satisfaction.

And now down to business.

I call bull-crap on people who reject ideas on the basis of their unfalsifiability. I say that if somebody makes an argument, and their premises are correct, and each logical step is valid, and there's no possible experiment that can be done to prove the argument false, then you'd just better accept that argument.

For instance, let's say that I say: "I am able to make a statement." There is no way that this statement could ever be falsified. See, if it was false, I couldn't make the statement, so if I can make the statement, it's true. Nothing you can do experimentally could prove it false, and yet it is certainly true.

Also, all tautologies are unfalsifiable: "A = A". This is unfalsifiable, and yet true. A is equal to A.

Now, I'm not going to say that all unfalsifiable statements are true (although that might be the case) but certainly some unfalsifiable statements are true.

Also, some unfalsifiable statements are useful. It would be silly to disregard any statement as useless just because it's unfalsifiable - And I'll call my previous two examples as examples of this as well. The fact that I can make statements could very well be an important building block in a larger important argument, and the fact that any term is equal to itself is an important part of mathematics.

So there.

Actually, I think that most people who talk about unfalsifiability are really just throwing a tizzy about metaphysics. "I can't see it, so it must not be there!"

I'm in New York

2007-05-14T17:25:00.000-07:00

I'm in New York. My brother graduates tomorrow from Columbia.

I actually like the city. It's pretty cool - Everything is close together. Also, the buildings are awesome.

In further news, I acquired a volume of Augustine containing the Confessions, City of God, and some other book, from a street-corner book-seller, for five dollars - Hardcover. The translation is oldish, too - There are all sorts of delightfully peculiar archaic sentance constructions, which I find (I suppose I already said it) delightful. The previous owner only made it through book IX of the Confessions, as their underlinings and scribbled notes, suddenly ceasing, eloquently attest.

Ok. Now I'm going to read the third of Eighteen Upbuilding Discourses - It's about how love covers a multitude of sins. I think I've read this schpiel before, in Works of Love. It's supposed to pair nicely with Fear and Trembling, or maybe Repetition.

Eh

2007-04-17T10:48:00.000-07:00

So if there's an absolute telos, then you have to have an absolute relationship to it. Most of the things that we usually deal with have a relative telos, like when you want an ice cream cone so you go to the store - The cone, or your hunger, or your desire for pleasure is the telos for your action of going to the store. Whatever telos it is, it has an importance to you that's relative to the other telos's around, and so your relationship to it is relative. This is the situation that holds in finitude. You do something for the sake of something else.

But it doesn't hold for an absolute telos, such as a code of ethics would be. You're not doing that for the sake of something else. If you think that you follow your code of ethics for the sake of something else, then your action isn't really determined in the ethical sphere. You're acting aesthetically - The difference between a person who acts for the sake of short-term pleasure and the person who acts for the sake of, say, the well-being of the nation, is not an essential difference of telos. They're both aesthetically determined "for the sake of which"es. Neither are ethical.

If you're going to act ethically, the code of ethics has to hold no matter what happens in the finite world. If black were white and up were down and nothing was the same anymore, a code of ethics would still hold, or else it would be merely aesthetically determined and there would be no essential difference between acting ethically and deciding whether to go pick up your dry cleaning at 4:30 or 5:00.

However, there's a paradox if you wish to act ethically: Everything around you is finite. Nothing immediately presents itself to you as ethically determined. Nothing seems, on the face of it, to be infinitely important. What would something infinitely important look like? A burning bush? A voice? A man? Those are pretty normal. How, then, can you determine what choices to make, if the ethical is invisible? Answer: You can't. The paradox is that you must, but you can't.

But if the absolute telos has infinite importance, which it does, then to choose any relative, finite telos over it is ridiculous. The telos of infinite importance always overcomes the telos of finite importance - So you should always act according to the absolute telos, which, for some reason, never reveals itself immediately.

And this is why choice has essential significance for life. If the absolute telos revealed itself immediately the way relative teloses do, then you would automatically choose it, and would have no choice. If there were no absolute telos, then you would choose merely between relative teloses, and your choice would have only accidental significance.

So the only way for a human's choice to have essential, important, qualitative (instead of merely quantitative) significance in their life is if there is such a thing as the ethical, but it never reveals itself immediately in the finite world - Even though this is a paradox. Because it's a paradox.

That seems to be what Kierkegaard thinks about it, anyway. I haven't passed judgement yet, so don't hold me to it.

Thank you Kierkegaard

2007-04-05T10:17:00.000-07:00

Kierkegaard just cleared his name on one count, probably. See, a lot of people think that there's no such thing as right or wrong, and that you have to create your own meaning in life. Kierkegaard has been widely seen as supporting this position, and the book that I'm reading right now, called the Concluding Unscientific Postscript to Philosophical Fragments, is the text that people get that from. At one point he says that, "Truth is Subjectivity", and this is taken to mean that there's no such thing as truth and that the real truth is whatever you subjectively decide is true. Well, get a load of this quotation:

"However, the objective way deems itself to have a security which the subjective way does not have (and, of course, existence and existing cannot be thought in combination with objective security); it thinks to escape a danger which threatens the objective way, and this danger is at it's maximum: madness. In a merely subjective determination of the truth, madness and truth become in the last analysis indistinguishable, since they may both have inwardness."

The objective way he's talking about is the scientific desire to view all things disinterestedly. The subjective way is to view all things as though you are interested in the outcome of your deliberations. Kierkegaard thinks that it's fundamental to existence to be interested - And so complete objectivity is incompatible with existence - i.e. if you exist, you actually are interested, so you actually are not completely objective - And to try to become completely objective is the same as to try to stop yourself from existing.

The danger which the objective way seeks to escape, which he calls madness, is that when you view things totally subjectively, i.e. only with regard to your interest in them, you won't be able to distinguish truth from madness. He means madness in the Don Quixote sense.

So anybody who goes around saying that truth is subjectivity and that this means that you have to 'decide your own truth' is guilty of striving for complete subjectivity, which is indistinguishable from madness.

(P.S. I'm in the chapter entitled 'The Subjective Truth, Inwardness; Truth is Subjectivity'. I haven't gotten to the part yet where he makes the statement that truth is subjectivity - Maybe he'll contradict himself. I don't know. But so far he's pretty solidly Christian, if a tad eccentric.)

A Christian says: Without God, everything is meaningless. Get your meaning from God.
An Existentialist says: There is no God. Everything is meaningless. Create your own meaning.

The argument is the same. The premises are different.

Compulsory Public Whatever

2007-03-16T09:16:00.000-07:00

Okay, so let's say I told you about a new program that the state of Maryland was thinking of putting into place. The purpose of it is to combat childhood obesity, which I think we'll all agree is unpleasant. The state government will set up big huge mess halls, and government nutrition experts will supervise the cooking of healthy, nutritious (but not fattening) meals, and the meals will be free for all children! Sounds great, right? The fat kids can eat there and maybe slim down a bit, and poor children won't have to starve.

What if I told you that it was going to be compulsory that all children between the ages of 6 and 18 report to the government mess halls three times a day for meals, and that parents who didn't send their children to eat with the government could face fines and even jail time?

"What?" you say. "That's horrible! What about family values!"

Okay, okay, okay, let's take an easier example: Say that some city government wants to improve the quality of it's citizen's social lives. So they decide to throw a party every Saturday night. They set up a nice place with music, free food, free beer, dancing, etc. All the things that people like to have at parties. And it's free! No cover charge.

The only catch is that they make it compulsory for all unmarried adults between the ages of 20 and 30 to attend. I mean, the penalty for not attending would be minor, along the lines of a traffic violation, and if you had a good excuse or a doctor's note one Saturday you wouldn't have to go.

Would you want your city to do that? No! Of course not! You want to be able to choose where to go on a Saturday night! Maybe you want to stay home and do crossword puzzles because you had a tough week! - Oh, come on, it's free! It might even be a good time!

Do these things sound like morally upright things for a government to do to it's people?

I think the only reason that people don't realize that compulsory public education is horrible is that they're so used to it. To me it sounds like something the Nazis would do. I mean, it's great for a government to set up programs to meet people's needs for free: food, education, housing, entertainment, whatever - There are some people who can't provide these things for themselves. There's still the question of whether I would want my tax dollars going to such things, but that's an economic question and not necessarily moral - But once they make it compulsory for everybody to attend, it enters what I would term, politely, 'tricky moral ground'.

That's code for: It seems like something the Nazis would do.

Paradox

2007-03-05T09:09:00.000-08:00

Here's a Paradox:

1) If A, then B
2) If B, then A
3) Either A XOR B (XOR stands for exclusive or - it means NOT (A and B), so either ((Not A) and B) or (A and (Not B))) - You can't have both A and B at the same time.

Why do I bring this up? I thought of a thought experiment, which I'm sure somebody else has thought of before. But here it is: Suppose that you have two people, person 1 and person 2. Person 1 is always able to figure out the truth and always tells the truth, and person 2 has control over the situation, and is always trying to trick person 1. So let's say there are two possible situations, both of which cannot exist at the same time - A and B. Both person 1 and person 2 want to know the truth about what the current situation is, but person 2 is trying to trick person 1 into being wrong about it.

So: Every time person 1 discovers the truth and tells it to person 2, person 2 will change the situation, in order to trick person 1. If the situation is A, person 1 will discover it and tell it to person 2, who will then, in order to trick person 1, change the situation to B. Now the situation is B, which person 1 will discover, and, person 1 having told about it, person 2 will change the situation back to A. Now, the question is: What is the current situation? A or B? The answer is: Oscillation. It will flip back and forth between A and B as quickly as person 1 and person 2 can go.

All that's required for this state of affairs to hold true is for there to be one entity entirely defined as Truth, or Consciousness, and another entity entirely defined as Trickery, or Darkness, or Lies, or Ignorance.

Interestingly, an oscillation, no matter how fast it goes, is not a paradox. An oscillation is a tendancy toward paradox. The faster it goes, the closer it is to being a paradox. If it was able to act outside of time, or without having to take time to perform some action, then the state of affairs between 1 and 2 would perfectly express the logical paradox with which I opened this entry.

Let me explain to you that each person has within themselves a 1 and a 2. There is a part of you that is trying to trick the rest of you, and there is a part of you that knows the truth. The smarter you are, the faster your mind goes, the closer you come to being in the paradox. If you have such a thing as a soul, or a spirit, which exists outside of time, or which can perform actions that take no time at all, then it's possible for your soul to be in a true logical paradox. Since it's not actually possible to be in a logical paradox, then this means that your soul would not exist. It would be dead. As soon as there is both a part 1 and a part 2 in your soul, your soul is dead. If your soul was totally Tricksterish, without any Truthfullness, it could be alive (But it would exist as the Demonic), and if your soul was totally Truthfull, without any Tricksterness, it could be alive (It would be Godly). But to have both is to be dead.

Interesting, huh?

Vacuum

2007-02-24T16:06:00.000-08:00

I'd like to take a class entitled 'How To Tell the Difference Between Minor Carpet Discoloration and Dirt Which is to be Vacuumed Up 101 for Dudes'. Seriously, when I have to vaccuum a room, I always end up pushing the vacuum up and down like 5 times over the same small stain - Because sometimes the vacuum doesn't get a little piece of paper or fuzz or dirt the first time. Sometimes when a small area of discoloration in my field of vision actually does turn out to be something that should be vacuumed, it takes up to 3 passes to get it.

I wonder if moms keep an extensive internal encyclopedia of small carpet stains so that when they're vacuuming their carpets they can tell immediately...

There's this wierd thing where:

1) We should fill each other's needs.
2) Each person has different needs.
3) Therefore, sometimes you should fill somebody else's need that you yourself don't have at all.
4) Sometimes, somebody has a need for you to do something which, if they did it to you, would hurt you greatly.

Vacuuming is one of those things for me where I cannot conceive of why other people need it. It seems, to me, to come down to wanting the carpet to be a uniform color, to not have any discoloring dirt or fluff or anything. I don't care about the carpet being all the same color. I don't care at all.

I don't even notice.

And yet it's so important to some people that they'll be uncomfortable in a room without it.

So, I mean, I'm glad to vacuum for them - It's not hard, I don't mind. I'd just like it if everybody recognized that I'm not capable of doing it for my own sake, but only to please others, and that it's certainly not worth doing for it's own sake.

Books

2007-02-06T11:39:00.000-08:00

I finished 'Purity of Heart is to Will One Thing'. Now I'm reading 'The Concept of Anxiety'. I'm about 30 pages in. It's very interesting so far, but he hasn't said very much about anxiety. It's mostly been about original sin and Adam and the first sin. One of the most interesting things he's said is that every science has it's own mood, and every concept has a science in which it properly belongs. If you try to use the wrong science, it brings a mood with it that isn't appropriate to the concept - I think because of the relation between the person considering the concept and the concept. Also, each science brings along with it certain assumptions.

He has an interesting statement:

"Sin, however, is no subject for psychological concern, and only by submitting to the service of a misplaced brilliance could it be dealt with psychologically. Sin has it's specific place, or more correctly, it has no place, and that is its specific nature."

Sin has no place. That's exactly it. Sin is when the proper concepts of life are broken. Properly speaking, if we are to talk of life and true existence, we can't talk about sin. It has no place in life. How then do you deal with it?

I don't know. Maybe Kierkegaard will tell me how later on.

If It Weren't For the Holy Spirit, I Wouldn't Believe In Communication

2007-02-01T12:57:00.000-08:00

Any communication between two people. Ever.

Communication is when you have an idea in your mind, and you say something to somebody else, and because of what you say they get the same idea in their mind. If they get a different idea, it's miscommunication.

If I were designing a system of whatever kind to communicate some information from one machine to another machine, this is what I would try to do: I would have the first machine make a copy of the information, and then transfer it to the second machine, which would make a copy of the copy and store it in it's own memory.

But since I would want to be sure that the second machine would receive the same information that the first machine had (which would be miscommunication), I would make it so that when the first machine made it's copy, it would check that copy against the original. If they matched, then it could be sure that the process of copying didn't make any mistakes.

But I would want to be sure that the process of checking didn't make any mistakes. I mean, since I've already admitted that sometimes the processes that I'm designing can make mistakes, why should the process of checking the copies be any less prone to mistakes than the process of copying?

So I would have it make two copies, and check each of them, and then compare the checks. If the checks match up, then I can be sure that the message that the machine is sending is the right one.

But really I can't.

You see the parable, of course. People do this. You want to express your idea to somebody, so you compose a sentance to say to them. Then you have second thoughts. You check the sentance against the idea. Then you double-check the sentance against the idea.

But you can never be absolutely sure that either your sentance composition or your checking is working right. If there's a problem with the part of you that checks, such that it always checks wrong in the same way, how will you possibly catch it? You can't check for it.

So it's impossible to be sure that what you're saying is true. Every time you doubt, you reflect (reflection is when you see double, or you make a copy of something, or you think in two different ways), and every time you reflect, you can doubt the reflection as well.

Furthermore, you can't be sure that your understanding of whatever language you're using to communicate is the same as that of the person you're trying to communicate with. And how can you check that? What if you say 'love' and you mean 'the willingness to die for somebody' and they hear 'the desire to procreate'? You could say the same thing and mean totally different things. You could say totally different things that mean the same.

Nothing is certain.

Communication is when you have an idea in your mind, and you say something to somebody else, and because of what you say they get the same idea in their mind. If they get a different idea, it's miscommunication.

Nothing is possible except for miscommunication.

Except if some sort of God, or some sort of Spirit, could be in both of us at the same time. Especially if it was a Spirit of light. A Spirit that delighted in the truth. A Spirit that lived in both of the people involved and knew them both intimately, and was also One with itself. It would be as though those people were really one person, and they could communicate just like a person talking to himself. Sure, the possibility of miscommunication would still be there - But the possibility of communication would be there too.

Anybody without that Spirit wouldn't be able to understand it, since it would be the Spirit through which true understanding is alone possible.

I believe that such a Spirit exists, and so I believe that communication is possible. But if I didn't have that Spirit, boy, I would be a hopeless mess.

Hi (also something about POHITWOT)

2007-01-30T21:38:00.000-08:00

It's been a while.

I'm having a great time in North Carolina, trying to find a job and stuff.

I went to a job fair this morning. There were a lot of people in suits with expensive briefcases waiting in a line that seemed to have no beginning. I don't mean the line was long, although it was pretty long - It's just that the first guy in line was standing a couple of feet in front of a door that everybody else was passing through quite freely. I didn't understand.

Also, there weren't any jobs there that would have been good for me. They were all management or sales positions. Ugh.

I've been reading Kierkegaard. I'm on Purity of Heart is to Will One Thing, which is a totally excellent book. I'm reading it really slowly to drag it out. It's one of those things that's hard to describe, but I think that everybody knows that it's good to will one thing. Everybody wants to be 'purpose-driven' or 'go-get-em', or 'passionate' or to 'Just Do It', or to 'go for it', or whatever - But nobody really is. At least, I'm not. Kierkegaard calls the cause of this deficiency 'double-mindedness'. There's a bible verse that goes something like, "purify your hearts, you double-minded", and that's what he bases it on.

Anyway, he's pretty much right. You should will one thing. Simplify, simplify. Who wants to be attacked by a swarm of bees? (or a swarm of passions?). That last was a deliberate Republic reference, but I don't actually remember who said 'simplify, simplify', and I don't care. You know what I mean.

If you will two things, how will you decide what to do? You'll be torn between them. That's not good. Will one thing. Oh, wait, it turns out that there's only really one thing that's only one thing, and everything else is many things. The Good. (Christians may recognize this as 'God's Will', and Platonists may recognize it as 'The Form of The Good'.)

It's a pretty good book.

Ok

2007-01-05T14:24:00.000-08:00

So I haven't posted in a while. I haven't been very busy, but my Internet access and general living conditions have been unpredictable for a while. I should be starting to get into a groove/schedule/time pattern ceremony continuous operation.

Other than that, I've been reading a lot of Kierkegaard.

Moving Day!

2006-12-09T23:48:00.000-08:00

I'm driving across this great land of ours, to the state of North Carolina, there to live in peace and prosperity evermore, or something. It's gonna take 4 days.

Pray for good driving and weather and such.

Miscellaneous

2006-11-27T17:27:00.000-08:00

Here are a few miscellaneous comments:

1) This is exactly how I feel about the dentist. (Until I met my new San Diego oral hygenist, who told me that my teeth would fall out if I didn't floss - She's of an entirely different character.)

2) I just saw a bunch of contemporary art. I hear that post-modern, contemporary art is supposed to defy classification - But this is not so! Henceforth let it never be said in the realms of men that post-modern art defies classification, for Lo! I have classified it: It's political. Everything I saw at this gallery was political. They should just rename it 'Political Art'.

3) Phantom Brave is an awesome game.

4) I found a box set of The Chronicles of Narnia for $2 at a thrift store the other day! SCORE! And it's the same edition from like 1970 that my parents read to me as a little boy! (The books aren't exactly the same - The covers are slightly different. The insides are the same though!) I've already read 2 of them. These books are amazing. This is a book review: C. S. Lewis was sent by God to write these books as a gift that the world could not possibly have deserved. Every chapter is like a jewel. It is impossible to describe in English how good these books are, so I have been forced to invent a new word: 'Scrumtrilescent'. The Chronicles of Narnia is a scrumtrilescent work.

Life is so beautiful.

Traffic

2006-11-19T19:05:00.000-08:00

Freakin' check this out.

I want to refer you to one particular paragraph that sums up the entire mindset here very nicely:

"The result is that drivers find themselves enclosed by a corset of prescriptions, so that they develop a kind of tunnel vision: They're constantly in search of their own advantage, and their good manners go out the window."

They think that being self-centered is caused by having rules. Let me rephrase that for emphasis: They think that rules cause self-centeredness.

They think that if they take the rules away, they'll also get rid of the self-centeredness.

Good luck.

If this works at all, for any amount of time, it'll be because drivers remember how the old rules used to go: Drive on the right side of the road, yield to faster-moving traffic, don't park in such a way that you block the path of other drivers, etc.

I remember a time when the St. John's fencing team were all in the van, going to a meet. We were super hungry, so we drove to a mall. After going through one parking lot, we hadn't found a place to park, so we were trying to drive to another one. We came across a crosswalk. I suppose a movie had just let out, or something, because for 10 minutes there was a never-ending stream of people walking both ways across this crosswalk. We waited for a gap in the human traffic... And waited... And waited. None came.

There were no traffic laws that gave us the right to go forward, ever, as long as those people were there. None of the people walking knew that we had been waiting for 10 minutes - And they weren't going to try to make 50 other pedestrians stop so that we could pass. We sat there, hungry and tired from a long drive. Extremely frustrated.

Eventually, the driver boldly leaned on the horn and started inching forward. People were nudged roughly out of the way by the fender. Somebody hit the outside of the car in anger, but we did get through. Looking out the window, there was no respite in sight from the hordes of people.

I wished that there had been a traffic light at that little parking lot crosswalk so that we wouldn't have been inconvenienced like that. It was pretty bad.

I predict many such inconveniences for the residents of these unfortunate European cities.

(Just in case you hadn't noticed, the psychological movement they're making here is the same one as is made in Communism when it tries to get rid of the idea of property. It sees two forces in a kind of mutually parasitic conflict - In this case, self-centeredness vs. traffic law or (for Communism) greed vs. property - And thinks that they depend completely on each other and not on any external circumstances. Actually, the one (self-centeredness or greed) depends mostly on external circumstances (scarcity in both cases), and the other one is a reaction to the negative effects of the first. They can only get rid of the one force (law or property), and they think that by getting rid of that force they'll get rid of both. They will get rid of the first force (self-centeredness) in part, but only insofar as it depends on the reactionary force (law). Inasmuch as it depends on the external circumstance of scarcity, which, I note, Communism and this traffic-anarchy do nothing to ameliorate, self-centeredness or greed will continue. Only Jesus can get rid of scarcity.)

To sum up: Scarcity begets Greed which begets Law. After a time, Law gains a sort of self-perpetuating momentum, and begins to reinforce Greed. Greed also gains the same sort of momentum, and begins to reinforce Scarcity. So there's a backwards movement and a forwards movement. Extreme liberals only see the backwards movement - So they think that Law is the primary cause of Greed and Scarcity, when in fact it's exactly the opposite. When Jesus comes, He will remove all three at once, regardless of which begat which. Amen.

Wierd

2006-11-16T23:46:00.000-08:00

This actually happened to me, recently. This very night. I'm not making it up for the sake of illustrating a point, or anything. It actually happened.

Here's the scene:

I'm lying on my belly on my bed, upper body supported by elbows - This is standard Kierkegaard-reading posture. Kierkegaard is front and center, left hand holding the book open. Bag of pretzel sticks is at my right hand side on the corner of the bed. My glasses are sitting on the bedside table (actually more like bedside top-of-a-plastic-storage-box-next-to-the-bed). My right hand is holding a single pretzel stick.

I'm concentrating on the book. Suddenly, I experience an impulse to smash the pretzel stick, point first, against my glasses, which were on my face, in front of my eyes. (They weren't really, they were actually not on my face, but the impulse assured me that they were there, and they would protect my eyes from harm.) The impulse lied.

I didn't follow that impulse, thinking to myself, "Why should I do that?" But the impulse gave no answer to my query, having faded, as sudden impulses sometimes do.

Only afterwards did I realized that if I had followed that impulse, I would have poked myself in the eye with a pretzel stick.

Where in the world did that impulse come from? I mean, when something like that happens to you, you really have to doubt your capacity for rational decision-making. I can think of three sources for the impulse:

1) My subconscious. (i.e. The pretzel stick is a masculine symbol and my eye is a feminine symbol, and my urge to smash the one into the other represents my repressed sexual urges, or something ridiculous and farfetched like that. Ask Freud. Maybe my eye represents my mother.)

2) Demons.

3) Free will.

I think the only way for me to ever ever trust myself with a pretzel stick again is to choose option #2 and pray really hard. What if I had been playing absentmindedly with my knife, and I hadn't resisted the impulse? I could be dead now!

Do these sorts of things happen to anybody else? Am I insane?

Politics

2006-11-15T11:59:00.000-08:00

Okay, so I'm proud of the Republicans. I was expecting to be ashamed of them. Most of the major elections in the past 6 years or so have finished up with a ton of griping and whining over major news outlets about some kind of voting fraud.

Now, I only know about these things when the news talks about them, which is generally just The Drudge Report.

If the Republicans have been demanding recounts and suing people over the last election, at least I haven't heard about it on the news. So either they're not being sore losers or they're being quiet about being sore losers - Either option is preferable to what I've come to expect in the aftermath of elections, which is for the Democrats to be sore losers and crybabies about it.

So I'm proud of the Republicans for not stooping to their level, like they usually do. It seems like normally these things degenerate into painfully pathetic bickering, like two blind children trying to have a fistfight.

Congratulations, Republicans, on having some amount of dignity.

I'm so glad my citizenship is elsewhere.

Harmed?

2006-11-12T15:23:00.000-08:00

I don't normally like to repost articles that I saw on Dave Barry's blog, but this one is just too good to pass up. The event, by itself, isn't that funny...

Fire breaks out at Salt Lake crematorium

But I would like to direct your attention to the last paragraph of the article:

"The crematorium is back in business and the funeral director said they'll notify the family to assure them their loved one wasn't harmed."

And I would like to wonder publicly what their definition of 'harm' is...?

Back in Cali

2006-11-07T10:53:00.000-08:00

I'm back in California. Back at home base. Still wondering about if / when I'll move home base to North Carolina. I'd sure like to.

I really enjoyed my interminably long plane flight because it gave be a chance to really do a thorough reading of Kierkegaard's Philosophical Fragments - Well, actually, in the roughly 8 hours I was travelling I didn't get through the whole thing. I spent most of my time in Chapter III, entitled The Absolute Paradox (A Metaphysical Caprice), which is 12 pages long. It's 12 pages long but packed with meaty goodness.

Kierkegaard is amazing. Does anybody remember the particular Ancient Greek paradox that goes: How can you learn anything? If you already know it, there's no point in learning it - And if you don't know it, how can you know how to learn it? If you don't know it, how can you know how to find it? How can you know how to look for it if you don't know what it is?

On the surface this seems like mere semantic trickery. Socrates' answer to the paradox also seems like mere semantic trickery. I would answer the paradox by saying that even if I don't know the thing itself, I know some stuff about the thing, and I can use what I know about it to find out how to learn it, and then I can learn it. Easy. Socrates would answer the paradox by letting it stand and saying that no real learning ever takes place. Everybody already knows everything, and all that a teacher can do is get them to remember it. This is called 'recollection'.

Kierkegaard first of all made me realize that my answer to the paradox is just another way of stating the Socratic answer to the paradox. In my formulation of knowledge, I already have the knowledge within me - Just in a different form. When I say that "I know about it", what I'm really saying is that I actually already know it, and the knowledge just has to be recollected. The two are not fundamentally different. I'm really claiming to be omniscient but forgetful, and Socrates' answer serves to show me how ridiculous is my own.

Another way to say this is that the paradox asks the question, "How can you draw a line between the unknown and the unknowable?" This is my own way of thinking about the question. Think about this. It's like the Eleatic paradoxes of motion except with knowledge, and it's hard to get around.

(Actually, it's kind of difficult to see how this is the same question as the Greek paradox. I understand that it is, but to explain how would require yet another reading. It's tough. He says things like, "But the ultimate potentiation of every passion is always to will it's own downfall, and so it is also the ultimate passion of the understanding to will the collision, although in one way or another the collision must become it's downfall.")

There are a number of things that are unknown to you. Presumably, some of them are also unknowable. How do you know that all of the unknown things aren't also all unknowable? Answer: You don't. They're unknown. You don't know them. How do you know whether they're unknowable or not?

The paradox demands that you draw a line somewhere between the unknown and the unknowable. I can't draw that line. How do you know where to put it? You're dealing with the unknown itself - As soon as you draw that line, it becomes partly known - Which is to say that if you do discover where to draw the line, you'll find that what you drew the line on is no longer the unknown, since now you know something about it.

Socrates didn't draw the line, and he was forced into admitting that everybody is omniscient but forgetful. Kierkegaard doesn't draw the line either, and he's forced into admitting that everybody is totally ignorant.

And he finds that the only way to know anything is through faith.

In Jesus Christ.

(But that part's even more complicated and hard to understand. Read it for yourself. It's worth it. Philosophical Fragments, by Soren Kierkegaard.)

In my own everyday life, I just draw the line at random in any old stupid place. Let me repeat: The whole thing seems like mere semantic trickery, but there is a real problem there. It just expresses itself through these glib little 'proofs' that learning is impossible. I think it's fundamentally a battle between freedom and determinism that causes the real problem. Anyway.

NC

2006-10-16T12:57:00.000-07:00

Personal update: I'm in North Carolina for a couple weeks. Hanging out with my people. Reading Kierkegaard. Looking for a good job in Durham.

Fear and Trembling is pretty good. Kierkegaard is hard to get a handle on, though. I just finished Repetition, and I think I know a little bit of what it was about, but... It's definitely very deep. I think he hid a lot of juice in there, where it's hard to get at. I'm planning on reading it again - With a title like Repetition, how can you not?

I feel like I'll also need to read Either/Or before I'll have a good sense of what he's after.

Freedom vs. Life

2006-10-11T22:52:00.000-07:00

I was reading some Norse history today, and I was fascinated by a story about King Olav Tyrgvason. He went to this one area and called together a thing (that's like a big political meeting). Everybody came armed. He stood up and addressed everybody, exhorting them to embrace Christianity and be baptized. Now, these guys were hardy viking types, and they worshipped Thor. They told him that they wanted to continue to worship the way they always had, and things started to get a little tense with all the armed men around. So Olav said a bunch of nicey-nice things to get them to calm down, and then he said that they could all get together on midsummer's day and have a nice ecumenical sacrifice and discuss what form of worship would be best for everybody involved. They agreed on a temple for the ceremony, and everybody left happy.

When midsummer's day came around, Olav went to the temple with the rest of the people. Again, all armed. He and his men went into the temple first. Now I'll quote from Snorri,

"King Olav then heaved up a gold-chased spike-axe that he had in his hand and struck at Thor so that he fell from his place." ... (he means the idol of Thor, the graven image) ... "The king's men leaped up and thrust down all the gods from their places; and whilst the king was in the temple Iron-Skeggi was slain outside the temple door; the king's men did it." ... (Iron-Skeggi was the main leader of the pagans) ... "When the king came out to his men, he bade the bonders choose between two things: one was that they should all take up Christianity, and the other was that they should hold battle with him."

Now, I imagine myself arriving in heaven after the end of the world and meeting King Olav Tyrgvason, and telling him, "Now, would Jesus have done that? Would Jesus have threatened those pagans? That wasn't very nice of you, and you gave the rest of us Christians a very bad name! Don't you know this is a religion of peace?"

And Olav Tyrvason would look at me with a viking glint in his eye, and stroke his mighty beard, and point to a huge crowd of thousands of people in heaven, enjoying eternal bliss, and say, "Look! Those are a bunch of the men I conquered." And then he would point with his gold-chased spike-axe down to hell, at another huge crowd of thousands of people in torment, and say, "Those are a bunch of the men you didn't conquer."

And it reminds me of my cat Aeris. She loved the outdoors, but she was wrong about them. She thought that doing what she enjoyed was good and safe. We tried to keep her safe indoors for her first year of life... But she always tried to escape, so insistently, that we finally just let her out. Made her an outside cat. We gave her her freedom.

She died. We were right about the outdoors being dangerous. She died because she was wrong. If we had forced her to stay inside, if we had taken away her freedom, she would have been alive now.

We gave her her freedom in exchange for her life.

Olav Tyrgvason, as violent as he was, gave people their lives in exchange for their freedom.

How, then, should I treat people? I know, I know, I know, it's best to give people BOTH life AND freedom. Be like Billy Graham. He'll point to a lot more people in heaven than Olav Tyrgvason and myself taken together, I'm sure. But situations come up where you have to choose. Situations come up where you have to choose FOR OTHER PEOPLE.

(Especially in a democracy, when you're part of the demos. As a voting citizen, I'm part of the ruling class. I wield the sword. (Or at least that's the rhetoric) When Jesus said, "Give to Caesar what is Caesar's," He was talking about me. I'm Caesar in the USA. I make choices that deny other people freedom every time I vote.)

Let's take a vote, Blog-O-People! Freedom or life? William Wallace or Richard Lion-Heart? Comment!

The Ganymede Takeover

2006-10-04T14:18:00.000-07:00

I just finished reading The Ganymede Takeover, by Philip K. Dick. It was pretty great. It's not in print anymore (I think) so I got an old copy of it from way back in the day through Amazon.com. The pages are yellow and smell wonderful - And there's even an old cigarette advertisement between pages 120 and 121.

Old School!

(Spoiler Alert) So at the end of the book, an association of psychiatrists ends up ruling the world, which seems to me basically the same as Plato's idea of a philosopher king. Wanting to rule something shows that you think you know what it's for - You have an idea of it's proper function, and you want to make it perform that function. And the psychiatrists (In PKD's future world) are the ones with the best idea of what a person is and what a person is for - And so they're the ones to control people.

Anyway, it also occurred to me lately that if things keep going the way they are, eventually all human beings will be robots. FOR INSTANCE - My teeth aren't quite perfect. The mechanism of my teeth is not fulfilling it's function adequately. So I've seen fit to introduce other mechanisms to make sure that the function gets fulfilled. It doesn't have to be my original teeth that do it, just so long as the function gets performed. So I have a gold tooth, and I brush my teeth (the toothbrush is a machine) and floss as well.

If I had to, I would replace my entire jaw with mechanical parts, as long as they worked. It's the same thing with hearts, legs, ears, and even (gasp!) feelings. A chemical imbalance can lead to depression and (I guess) other mental disorders. In these disorders, the person's emotions are not fulfilling their function, so we correct the chemical balance by inserting chemicals into the person's body via pills (which are mechanical - chemical is the same as mechanical, just on a smaller scale). We replace the malfunctioning chemicals, and the feelings are fixed (Maybe not totally fixed with current medical technology, but the principle is the same).

Everybody dies. Eventually, nobody's body can fulfill it's function. The only reason why we don't replace a person's entire body with artificial mechanical parts is that we don't have the expertise yet.

Theoretically, any part of the human body can be replaced. So let's do a thought experiment where we do it. I replace each part of my body, including my entire brain, with artificial parts that perform exactly the same function as the original parts they're replacing would ideally perform. Two possibilities:

1) I still have a soul. This means that the soul is somehow attached to or part of the totally artificial body that I constructed - Which means that we could construct a totally artificial thing that would either already have a soul or would be capable of having a soul.

2) I don't have a soul anymore. This means that somewhere along the line, when I removed some part of my body, my soul got cut out with it. Nothing can be removed from the body by mechanical means that isn't itself mechanical. So the soul was attached to or part of some totally mechanical body part of mine.

I'm out of brain-juice just now. Time to play Disgaea 2 or sleep.

Plantinga

2006-10-01T20:23:00.000-07:00

I recently heard of this dude named Plantinga. He's a Christian Philosopher. Very very interesting to me. I read this great argument of his on this web site (I can't find the thing I read just now, but it's there somewhere). It goes something like this (translated into Matt-thought, of course):

Every philosophical system needs to forge some connection between reality and knowledge. There has to be some way for reality to influence your beliefs such that your beliefs will correspond to reality - If you don't have that, you can't trust your own beliefs. If your philosophical system can't convince you that your beliefs correspond to reality, then you can't believe anything, much less that philosophical system.

In the (admitedly divergent and uncodified) philosophical system formed by Naturalism and the Theory of Evolution, the link between reality and knowledge is the nervous system. The brain. According to the theory of evolution, the purpose of the brain is to make the animal survive - That's the purpose of the whole body except for the reproductive system, the purpose of which is the make the species survive. Survival is the big key.

The brain is going to do whatever it can to make the animal survive. Brains that don't do that get selected out of the gene pool.

So, if an animal has a belief that corresponds to reality, it's only because that's the best way to survive. There may be situations in which the best way to survive is to have a belief that's flatly opposed to reality - And you'll have no way of knowing you're in a situation like that, because it's your belief.

So if you're an evolutionist, and there's some fact that's true, some part of reality that actually is, but if you believe it means that you won't survive - You can pretty much reliably expect your brain not to believe that fact. In this situation, your brain would be best served to come up with whatever crazy false idea it can to get you to display whatever behavior will make you survive.

And you don't know which ideas are which. Which beliefs are true and which ones are just there to keep you living day-to-day? You can't tell the difference - Any animal that learned how to tell the difference wouldn't survive.

Anyway, Naturalism and Evolution, as a philosophical system, doesn't provide a good link between reality and knowledge. There is a link there, but it doesn't work reliably.

I think it's all very interesting. I don't know for absolute sure if I agree with him - I haven't heard both sides of the argument yet. But it sounds good.

Problems

2006-09-27T13:38:00.000-07:00

So I've had this growing idea for probably about 5 or 6 years. It's nothing that I can prove - By it's nature. It can never be anything but a strong suspicion. I'll try to liberally sprinkle this idea with wikipedia articles.

You know how, if you take a self-consistent axiomatic system (like geometry - Guess these are actually called formal systems) and change some of the axioms around, you're liable to end up with a system full of contradictions and plain nonsense? That's why the Law of Non-Contradiction is one of the axioms of most self-consistent axiomatic systems (or at least assumed) - To prevent the Principle of Explosion. See, if something can be both true and false, the number of theorems in the system 'explodes'.

This is what I'm not sure of, but I suspect: That there are possible systems in which contradictions, nonsenses, and foolishnesses arise, but which do not run afoul of the Principle of Explosion.

My idea is that our universe is one such. It's broken. If it was a formal system, it would be a poorly contstructed one. Because it seems to me that there are huge problems with mathematics, music, metaphysics, and language. Now, it's likely that my problem with these things is that I just don't understand them. In that case, further study should aleviate my difficulty. Anyway, here are the problems.

Mathematics / Music:

Pythagoras made an awesome discovery: That if you cut a string in half, you get the octave - Which sounds good. He found that cutting it in 2/3 and 3/4 and 4/5 sounds good as well. That makes perfect sense, because the length of the string corresponds to the frequency of the sound - And with the octave, therefore, every other wave hits at the same time. With the fifth (2/3) it's every third wave hits at the same time.

But try to construct a scale from these perfect low-number-ratio intervals, and you'll find that you simply can't. This is insane and wrong. It's bothered me for years. In a real scale, if you cut the string at 2/3 to play a fifth, and then make a cut 1/4 of the original string above that to play the fourth above your original fifth, that SHOULD take you to the octave. A tone plus a fifth, plus a fourth, gives you an octave, right? WRONG. (2/3 = .6666) + (1/4 = .25) = .9166666, which is not 1, and you don't want to have a .0833333 note in your scale, since that sounds bad because it doesn't even work out to a whole number ratio!!!!

What this means is that you can NEVER EVER EVER make a tuning system that will be in tune in every key. Ever.

This has given rise to all sorts of different tuning systems to compensate.

I'm feeling more and more strongly that in a real universe, you wouldn't have to compensate.

Metaphysics:

Every thing must have a cause, right? That's a true metaphysical statment.

The universe is the sum of all things. It must follow the same rules as the things that make it up.

So what caused the universe? Answer the question and you'll be referring to a thing, which must then be part of the universe, so it can't count as the cause of the universe.

So the obvious metaphysical rule that says that every thing must have a cause is total bunk. It can't possibly hold. It has to give somewhere - Whether it's the Big Bang or God or 'I don't care', SOMETHING doesn't follow the rule. But the rule is obvious - And it's necessary for acheiving any understanding at all of anything.

Or so it seems to me. In a real universe there wouldn't be such rules.

Language:

This is the simplest problem of all. "This statement is false". If it's true, it's false. If it's false, it's true. That statement would not be possible in a real language. Any language in which that statement is grammatically legal is total bunk, and that statement can be made in all languages, including all formal systems!

So, in sum, either the universe is riddled with such contradictions that it can't possibly exist, or I don't understand it well enough. The other possibility, of course, is that my own faculties of reason are riddled with such contradictions that they can't possibly work right.

I need to finish my second reading of the Critique of Pure Reason.

Analogy

2006-09-25T15:26:00.000-07:00

This is one of the analogy questions in my GRE preparation book:

LAST : SHOE ::

A) cuff : trousers
B) finale : curtain
C) pattern : glove
D) buckle : belt
E) strap : slip

Are they serious? What in the world does the word 'last' have to do with the word 'shoe'? Are we thinking of the shoe most recently referred to? The final shoe, perhaps? The shoe that Thor steps on Jormungandr's mouth with? Maybe there's some expression I don't know, like, "When the last shoe drops, you'd better'd kick your pops." What's going on here? Am I losing it?

I just looked it up, and apparently "last" is a word that can also mean "a wooden or metal form in the shape of the human foot on which boots or shoes are shaped or repaired.

I mean, come on.

Apparently "last" can also refer to any of various large units of weight or capacity, varying in amount in different localities and for different commodities, often equivalent to 4000 pounds.

And now everybody's going to say, "What? You don't know what a last is? I thought everybody knew that!" And I'm going to say, "Eh. I'm not a cobbler, okay?"

I mean, seriously, this is like the fourth definition of the word. It's like a usage that some yokel poet uses to talk about Paul Bunyan's shoes - He rhymes it with 'vast'. And then 'fast'. It's like the last* time this usage came up was in a fawning poem about Communism picturing the noble proletarian cobbler toiling nobly over his last. I imagine this poet a little smarter - He rhymes it with 'unsurpassed'.

*No, I didn't mean that but it works anyway.

Oh! I remember...

2006-09-24T16:52:00.000-07:00

...The blogosphere is for more than just arguing with Atheists.

Our cat Aeris suffered a violent death recently, so I'm kind of sad about that. She was a beautiful little animal. Her coat was nice and soft. She was 3 years old - They're supposed to live for 20 years. I found out how I react to finding something dear to me gruesomely eviscerated. I found out what it's like to dig a grave. We used an old suitcase as a casket, like we were going to take her with us on some sort of underground trip. It was an educational experience.

I guess much, much worse things have happened to other people - But I still have 3 ladies I call 'grandma' and 2 dudes I call 'grandpa' alive. I don't have much experience in these things. Finding an animal that I had a relationship with suddenly dead was somewhat upsetting.

This is what she looked like. (While she was alive.) I kind of miss her.

I feel an impulse to say, "Enjoy things while you have them, because you don't know when you're going to lose them." And of course it's good to enjoy things - But for me to say that would be to pretend that that's important. What's important is to come to an understanding of death. Because everything eventually will be killed.

"Oh, it's part of the Circle of Life that she died." BUZZZZ wrong answer. (Actually, it was just part of the food chain. In a most disgusting way.)

It's wrong. It is simply wrong that my cat is dead. Not correct. Not according to plan. Not good. Wrong.

Now, I don't profess any doctrine on whether animals go to heaven. But I know that He will right every wrong. And I know that if I die, that's wrong, and that if my cat dies, that's wrong too. Finally, I know that the particular way He'll right the wrong of my death is to bring me back to life. What will He do for my cat? I don't know, decide for yourself. But it'll be wonderful whatever it is.

If you don't read Penny-Arcade, they recently linked to this wonderful thing. Check it out.

Word

2006-09-20T12:02:00.000-07:00

Today's word that sounds totally different than what it means:

Pulchritude

Go English language! I love you!

Omnipotent v2 (new and improved - With teeth-cleaning rigor!)

2006-08-31T16:45:00.000-07:00

Here's a longer and more rigorous version of my argument from the last post:

This is an Atheistic argument, which it is my intention to respond to and refute:

A1) An omnipotent God can perform any action.
A2) An omnipotent God has unlimited power.
A3) Limiting one's own power is an action which can be performed.
A4) Therefore, God can limit His own power.
A5) But according to #A2, God's power cannot be limited.
A6) Which is absurd. (This means that #A5 and #A6 together violate the principle of non-contradiction)
A7) Therefore, #A1 and #A2 must be untrue.
Conclusion: Nothing can exist which is omnipotent, including God.

My argument against it goes like this:

R1) When an author writes a book, the author exists. A book cannot exist without an author, which is another way of saying that nonexistent authors cannot write books.
R2) When an author writes a book, whatever he writes is reality for the characters in that book.
R3) Therefore, the author's power over the characters in a book is the same as God's power of omnipotency over the universe.
R4) In the Atheistic argument above, replace the term, "God" with the term "the author of a book, from the perspective of a character in the book". The argument should be equally valid for either term because of #R3.
R5) The Conclusion of the Atheistic argument then reads: "From the perspective of a character in a book, nothing can exist which is omnipotent, including the author."
R6) But according to #R1, the author does exist.
R7) Which is absurd.
R8) Therefore, the Atheistic argument is not valid either for the term "God" or for the term "the author of a book, from the perspective of a character in the book".

This argument does not mention at all the reason why the Atheistic argument fails. It simply says that because the argument would prove something wrong when applied to authors and books, it also proves something wrong when applied to God.

What would be needed to refute my responding argument would be either:
1) A reason that God's power of omnipotency is different than an author's power of writing, such that the terms cannot be exchanged equivalently.
2) A redefinition of the term 'reality' such that a book can be written by an author who, from the perspective of the characters in the book, is not real.

Or something else like that. Those are the two best ones that I can think of.

Omnipotence

2006-08-31T09:11:00.000-07:00

"Can God make a rock so big that He can't lift it?"

Many people seem to think that this question encodes an objection to God's omnipotence, as in, "He can't possibly be omnipotent! The question shows that either He can't lift anything He wants or He can't make anything He wants - and either way He's not omnipotent."

I seem to be the only person in the world who thinks I know the answer to this question: He won't, but yes, He can make such a rock. And He can also lift it. Here's why:

Everybody knows what a book is, right? They have authors. Whatever the author writes in the book is reality for the characters in the book. The author can write anything he wants - Even things that are impossible. If the author writes something that's impossible, the characters in the story won't be able to understand it at all - But it's still part of reality for them. I'll test everybody's reading comprehension by telling a little story and then asking some questions afterwards:

"The gallant knight gallantly galloped through the woods. Now, in the center of these woods was a rock that was so big that even I, Matt the author, with all of my omnipotent power, would be unable to lift it. That's how big it was. He galloped along until he came to this very rock. When he got there, he saw that he was totally unable to go around it, so he prayed to me, saying, "Dear Matt, please lift this rock so that I might progress through these woods on my quest." So I lifted the rock for him, and he galloped under it. After he was through, I put it back down."

To that knight, do I, Matt the author, exist?
Yes, obviously.
What, to that knight, constitutes reality?
Whatever I the author write is reality for that knight.
What does that knight think about that rock?
He's probably very confused by it, since something that cannot possibly happen has happened, and it happened right near him.

I'm not saying that to God we're nothing more than characters in a book, but the thought experiment does make sense, doesn't it? Authors are omnipotent over the characters, things, and events in their stories, so it's a good analogy for God. I remember reading that Alexandre Dumas made all sorts of mistakes in the book The Three Musketeers. He wrote all sorts of accidental logical impossibilities - Like once D'Artagnan got introduced to some lady for the first time, twice in two different chapters - And it doesn't prove anything about who wrote The Three Musketeers.

All I'm saying, really, is that to accept God's omnipotence is to deny the absolute authority of the law of non-contradiction over the things themselves^*. To say that God is omnipotent is to say that He can do things that are logically impossible. He can make the statement "BOTH A AND NOT-A" be a true statement, if He's omnipotent. The rock that God can't lift is logically impossible. If it exists, then God can lift it AND God can't lift it.

Since it seems to me that logic is not an attribute of the things themselves, but rather an attribute only of my mind, this is not a problem to me. I agree with Kant on the matter, and I don't have space here to explain it. It just means that if God exists, He can do things that, even though there's no way I can understand how they happen, happen anyway. I might even be able to prove logically that they didn't happen, but they happened anyway. That's what's called a 'miracle'. Like, as in, "I know there was water in this jug, but now it seems to be wine. I watched it the whole time. This proves that either I was wrong about it being water then or I'm wrong about it being wine now."

^* The term 'the things themselves' is a philosophical term. Kant uses it. The idea is that when you see something, the actual thing doesn't go into your mind - Light bounces off of it and into your eye, your eye sends nerve impulses to your brain, and then your brain interprets them and produces your idea about the thing. So you're at least two processes removed from the actual thing that you're seeing, which is called 'the thing itself' as distinguished from 'the thing as I see it'. Kant's claim is that many things, such as time, space, logic, and cause and effect are added by our minds after the fact, and aren't necessarily part of the things themselves. I think he does a good job defending that claim. If you want to check for yourself, the book to read is The Critique of Pure Reason.

FFT (Speaking of video games)

2006-08-28T20:04:00.000-07:00

Intellectually, I function mainly in terms of thought experiments (or what we sometimes call parables). Here's my most recent one (from like 10 minutes ago)(It has bearing on what we've been talking about in the comments to the last post):

I've been playing this video game called Final Fantasy Tactics. If you're already familiar with this game (or with any Final Fantasy, really), you can skip the next paragraph.

It's a game that takes place in a sort of fantasy medieval world with dragons, wizards, knights, monsters and demons to kill, giant birds to ride on, etc. You know the drill. Every character has a certain number of hit points - Attacks take away hit points, and when a character's hit points are reduced to zero, they die. During battle, if one of your characters gets killed, they can be brought back to life by casting a spell called Raise on them. If a character is alive, a different spell can be cast on them to impart a particular effect called Reraise. If a character has Reraise and they die, they'll automatically come back to life after one turn. Also, characters can wear items that impart certain effects such as Reraise, Regen, Haste, Shell, etc.

Now, there's one item you can wear called an Angel Ring - It imparts Reraise, but once the character dies and is brought back the first time, the Reraise effect disapears like normal. The Angel Ring only does Reraise once. However, there's another item called the Chantage, which makes it so that your character always has Reraise. Every time they die, they come right back.

So the parable is this: I recently discovered that when a character is wearing the Chantage, you don't have to worry about their hit points! It barely matters at all how many hit points they have, since the only reason hit points are important is that they cause death, and the only reason death is important is that your character won't get their next turn. A character wearing the Chantage doesn't worry about death, because they'll get their next turn no matter what. However, since I don't worry about their hit points, those characters spend most of their time dead - They wake up, hit a bad guy, and straight away get killed again.

He who has ears, let him hear.

Here's the interpretation of my parable: Political power, financial power, and any other sort of power are like hit points (lose them all and you die, have them and you can work your will on others). In the U.S., we're trying to make everybody Knights (Knights can wear armor, which gives them a lot more hit points than other classes). But Christianity is trying to give everybody the Chantage! If a character has the Chantage, it's safe for them to be an Archer or a Wizard (These classes have few hit points), since hit points aren't necessary anymore.

And some people say, "Wait, how could you make some of your characters Wizards? Don't you know they have less hit points? They might die!" And we Christians respond, "Don't you know that you'll die eventually no matter whether you're a Knight or a Wizard? Here, take this Chantage! Then you won't have to worry about hit points anymore!" And they respond, "We've seen how you Chantagians live! You spend most of your time dead! You have barely any hit points! Count us out. We don't believe in the Chantage anyway!"

I know the Chantage exists. It brought me back to life. If only I could figure out how to give it to everybody else.

(FFT isn't the same as real life, so the parable doesn't work on every level. And for you gamers - No, the Chantage doesn't mean an automatic win. If everybody in your party is killed at the same time, even if they all have Reraise you'll get a game over. I have figured out a way to prevent game overs in almost all circumstances, however, and with only two characters. One of them I make Transparent, and the other I give the Chantage to. The bad guys can't hit the Transparent guy (but he can't act or he loses his invisibility) and they can't stop the Chantage guy from killing them one by one. It's nice. It's kind of like Christ and the Church... Just kidding.)

3

2006-08-27T13:56:00.000-07:00

There are a couple of issues I'd like to address here now:

1) Death. I'm not going to die. I believe in a bodily ressurrection. That is to say, when Christ returns, He will give His people new and unblemished bodies. If every molecule in my body were to become seperated by any distance from every other molecule in my body, this would be to me nothing but a mere lack of consciousness for a time. It will be as though I was asleep. All that I am shall be restored better than it was before.

Jesus has saved me not only from spiritual death, but from physical death as well.

2) If I were to lose all of my power - financial power, political power, social power - I would have lost nothing. Money, fame, politics, intelligence - None of these can save me from death, and none of them will survive the eventual destruction of the world. They are of no importance. If God were to make me the ruler of the world, I would have gained nothing. If God were to make me the most low-ranked wage-slave in a big corporation, I would have lost nothing.

The only thing that is of any importance to me is the love of Christ, and the love of His body, the church.

If racism were true and some races really are better than others, it wouldn't worry me at all - That kind of 'better' I don't need. If sociological research finds out that all men are worse at life than any woman, it wouldn't bother me at all - I don't need to be good at life. If the USA is conquered by Mexanada and we're all enslaved, how would my lot be different in any real way? I don't need power.

Christianity offers a system completely opposite to the world's, where the only use for power, intelligence, authority, money, or fame is to spend it all in love to help people.

That's why Christianity is able to admit that women are less suited to positions of power than men are - Christian women don't need power. Christian men don't need power. If it's given to us we'll take it and try to use it for good, and we'll try to organize ourselves so that it will be used most effectively, but we don't need it.

3) I'm bored of people comparing Christianity to retarded mythologies, pointing out some similarity between them, and saying that we stole the idea. It's lazy - It allows them to avoid addressing the actual idea. Do they give the ancient world no credit? Maybe the ancient Christians and the ancient Egyptians and the ancient Greeks were all three looking at the same world around them when they all three said that the Son of God must not have had an earthly father. It seems pretty simple to me.

If you want your pharoah to be the son of God, you don't want people pointing to his dad and saying, "But his dad isn't very godly! How is he a god?" This is because everybody knows (or knew - we've forgotten) that stuff is passed down from father to son, including corruption and sin and curses. That's also why when God actually wanted to send His Son to earth, He made it so that He had no earthly father.

A wrong religion can be looking at the same world and the same people as the true religion. It's possible for two philosophies, one of which is right and later, and the other of which is wrong and previous, to have some similarities without the one having stolen the idea from the other. They are, after all, both trying to explain the same world.

Dream

2006-08-26T12:09:00.000-07:00

I saw A Midsummer Night's Dream last night. It was awesome. Shakespeare is amazing. If you don't like Shakespeare you're missing out.

I had never realized before last night the tension that exists between Hippolyta and Theseus - They're kind of minor characters. But the way the actress playing Hippolyta did it, I realized just how pissed off she would be when Theseus tells Hermia that she has to marry whoever her father wants because her father owns her... She's an Amazon!

Also, they had her wear an eye patch.

Fruits

2006-08-24T09:46:00.000-07:00

So I've been cruising the Atheist blogs and websites recently, looking for some intelligent conversation, perhaps some meaningful dialogue about important issues. I guess that was a bad idea. They claimed to care about logic and reason... I must say, such things are much easier to find at St. John's than they are on the Internet. I was just searching for the cool, refreshing taste of philosophical discussion.

One thing has bugged me though. There's one thing that Atheists like to say that I just don't get. I'll go fishing for quotes. ... Ah! Here's one:

"My claims of the irrationality and destructive nature of religion are quite substatiated (see Holocaust, YEC, Inquisition, Osama bin Laden, etc..)"

Religion (particularly monotheistic religions, and of them particularly Christianity) is said to be a source of violence. Historical examples are sometimes cited.

I think the idea is that 'You shall know them by their fruits' - That the behavior of the adherents to a creed tells you about whether that creed should be followed. They say, "I don't believe in God because people who believe in God do terrible things"

1) Those people are not following Christian doctrine. They're hypocrites. If you read the words of Jesus with any sort of open-mindedness, you don't get, "Kill non-believers". You get, "Love your enemies". 'Know them by their fruit' doesn't apply. You really ought to judge a doctrine by how true it is, not by the actions of it's adherents.

2) And even if you decide to judge a creed by it's fruit:

Does anybody remember Stalin? Some of the most recent and most terrible genocides in history have been committed by Atheist regimes. Russia killed millions of it's own citizens trying to exterminate the Russian Orthodox Church.

But most Atheists don't think that genocide is okay, or at least their creed doesn't say that genocide is okay.

I know we're not as guilty of this as the Atheists are, but us Christians should set a good example and not blame Atheism for the crimes committed by those who claim to be Atheists, the way that we don't want Christ blamed for the crimes committed by those who claim to be Christians (Even when it's really easy to tell that they're not).

Let's judge doctrines just by trying to find out whether they're true or false.

Airplanes

2006-08-20T20:38:00.000-07:00

So I just got back from my cousin Brian's wedding in Virginia. It was great! Congratulations to them!

The airplane flight (along with this most recent incoherent Ann Coulter column) got me to thinking.

Here's how it seems to have gone, historically speaking: 9/11 happened, and it sucked. Restrictions on airplane travel were increased for security's sake. Then some dude hid explosives in his shoe to blow up a plane, so now they make sure to check everybody's shoes. Some people were planning on hiding explosives in liquids and gels, so now liquids and gels aren't allowed on planes. A challenge is met with a response. If somebody caught 20 Arabs scheming to blow up a plane using explosives smuggled in inside of cell phones, they'd start checking cell phones more thoroughly. You know how it goes.

Let me put my point this way: I thought of a way to get a weapon onto an airplane. I'm not going to say what it is - But I think I could only get away with using this technique once. After my first attempt, they'd start checking for it, and that would suck for all other airplane passengers everywhere. If I was a crazy fanatic, though, I don't think I'd care.

No security procedure short of rendering all passengers completely powerless could possibly keep an airplane from being destroyed by it's passengers.

The airplane scenario seems to me like a microcosm of politics in general. Any power that people have can be used as a weapon to hurt other people. That means that there are only two general ways to keep people from hurting each other. You can take away their power to hurt people (and every power is a power to hurt people) or you can convince them not to hurt people.

The reason that I'm not going to blow up any planes is not that I don't have the power to do so (I'm pretty sure I could). It's that I don't want to. I'm a Christian - Blowing up a plane would hurt people I love (or at least people I ought to love).

It's offensive and insulting to me that my power to do good is taken away to prevent me from doing something that I wouldn't do if I could, and that actually, I could do. I mean, I'm not offended or insulted, but I would have good cause to be.

Shout

2006-08-06T22:31:00.000-07:00

I was listening to a CD called Vheissu by a band called Thrice this morning. They scream a lot and it's really good music. They also use odd time signatures without it being gimmicky (which is almost impossible for most bands to pull off).

My liking for heavy metal music has been on my mind since Genevieve asked me about it. Her question was basically, "They sound angry. Is anger appropriate for a Christian?" Good question. If you're talking about Rage Against the Machine or Linkin Park, they are angry. They're not good bands, either. (Well, musically they're actually both pretty good, but their lyrics suck.)

And I had three happenings recently that helped me understand how to answer this question:
1) I mentioned casually that heavy metal music sounds angry, and my brother Philip said, "I don't think they sound angry." He listens almost exclusively to music with screaming in it.
2) I listened to Thrice today, as I mentioned above.
3) I went to a church service tonight where Matt Redman was playing. A lot of his songs talked about shouting to the LORD. He was always encouraging people to shout.

So I thought: Hmmm. The Bible encourages us many times to shout to the LORD. It encourages us to make loud music to him. I don't know exactly what Hebrew word is used for 'shout' in the Old Testament, but it probably means something like 'to vocalize loudly'. The heavy metal singer, when he screams, is attempting to make the loudest vocalization possible - This is why it has such strong emotional force for the listeners.

There's a song in Vheissu about Jonah. It tells the story from when he's awoken in the ship during the storm to when he finally repents in the belly of the whale. I find this passage particularly moving. It's between when the sailors cast lots to see who's fault the terrible storm is and when Jonah gets thrown into the sea:

White death wakes in black skies - Mark your Maker's wrath
Fear and flames of azure climb the crooked mast
You will yet be baptized - Steeped in shattered glass
Sink and sing your answer - And hold fast hope

I'm moved when I hear it. If you get the chance, you should listen to it, it's called Hold Fast Hope. (For you programmers, that's Music.HeavyMetal.Thrice.Vheissu.HoldFastHope.)

I think that the song is entirely appropriate and good because:
The subject matter is directly from the Bible.
The screaming is appropriate to the subject matter. It expresses a proper attitude we should take towards the text.
I am moved emotionally by the screaming towards repentance and obedience and fear of God. This song helps set my heart and mind right.

Genetic Engineering II

2006-08-02T14:26:00.000-07:00

I love these conversations.

Keep in mind that we've been affecting human genetics for thousands of years. That's what breeding is. Whenever a society decides that a certain type of nose is attractive, and women with that nose are more likely to reproduce, that type of nose is eventually bred into the population. We do this to animals on purpose, and we do it to ourselves by accident. What we call 'genetic engineering' is just a set of new techniques for doing that same thing more effectively.

It's not substantially different from choosing a wife. When you choose a wife, you're choosing how your children will look - They'll have half of their genetic material from her. Does God object to this? I could choose for my child to be half-Chinese or half-African or half-German simply by marrying a girl of one of these races. Does God the Potter not like it that I'm choosing my child's race? If he's okay with that and not okay with genetic engineering, somebody needs to point out to me a substantial, essential difference between the two, a difference of kind rather than of degree.

Also: I would like it if somebody told me why diversity is good and uniformity is evil. Diversity of language is clearly a hindrance to communication, so diversity in itself must not be necessarily good and uniformity must not be necessarily evil.

In the absence of a good reason why diversity of physical form is necessarily a good thing, I would say this:

I'm trying to speak for freedom. I'm not in favor of enforced uniformity, and neither am I in favor of enforced diversity. Would you force diversity on a population that doesn't want it? I want people to be free to choose uniformity if they want to, and to choose diversity if they want to.

Also: Personally, if I were able to choose my own bodily form, I wouldn't choose the most beautiful form. In my experience, beautiful things tend to be less effective and easy to use than ugly things. I would choose a body that's comfortable, strong, healthy, and has wings or extra arms or cat eyes or warm fur or a prehensile tail. It would probably be pretty ugly, but I tell you, I would have an absolute blast with it.

That's why I don't think that uniformity would inevitably follow widespread genetic engineering. People already have very diverse ideas about what's good in a body. I'm sure there would be a large contingent of people with long blonde hair and blue eyes and chiseled features, but I don't think you could avoid seeing the blue hair and cat eyes and wings. It would basically fall out the same way people dress nowadays: There would be the conformists, and there would be the nonconformists. Jocks and goths and nerds. It wouldn't be that different.

Colors

2006-07-31T10:14:00.000-07:00

Yesterday we went to the end of the pier to watch the sunset. A young man down there asked his girlfriend to marry him right at sunset. My mom cried.

Two days ago we went to a concert. The lady who did the voice for Ariel from The Little Mermaid sang a couple of Disney songs. I laughed at the song "Colors of the Wind" - I was going to post a full account here of how Disney rotted the minds of my generation - But I think I'll just post the lyrics to this song. Maybe I'll make one comment. It should be evident.

"You think you own whatever land you land on
Earth is just a dead thing you can claim
But I know every rock and tree and creature
Has a life, has a spirit, has a name

You think the only people who are people
Are the people who look and think like you
But if you walk the footsteps of a stranger
You learn things you never knew
You never knew

Have you ever heard the wolf cry to the blue corn moon?
Or ask the grinning bobcat why he grinned
Can you sing with all the voices of the mountains?
Can you paint with all the colors of the wind?
Can you paint with all the colors of the wind?

Come run the hidden pine trails of the forest
Come taste the sun-sweet berries of the earth
Come roll in all the riches all around you
And for once never wonder what they're worth

The rainstorm and the river are my brothers
And the heron and the otter are my friends
And we are all connected to each other
In a circle in a hoop that never ends

Have you ever heard the wolf cry to the blue corn moon?
or let the eagle tell you where hes been
can you sing with all the voices of the mountain
can you paint with all the colors of the wind
can you paint with all the colors of the wind

How high does the sycamore grow
If you cut it down, then you'll never know

And you'll never hear the wolf cry to the blue corn moon
For whether we are white or copper - skinned
We just sing with all the voices of the mountain
Need to paint with all the colors of the wind

You can own the earth and still
All you'll own is earth until
You can paint with all colors of the wind."

There you go. That was it. Here's my comment:

Pocohantas thinks that rocks are alive.

Genetic Engineering

2006-07-28T10:11:00.000-07:00

So for years I've understood (Intuitively, and I think correctly) that there's no fundamental problem with genetic engineering. It ought not to be forbidden.

Here's why:

To forbid genetic engineering is racism.

Race is genetically defined. When a genetic engineer changes the genes of an animal, they are creating a new race. Sometimes a whole new species. To say that this should not be done to humans is to say that the new race that would be created should not exist. To say that a race ought not to exist is the worst form of racism.

I have no need to preserve the purity of the Aryan race - Why should I care if a white couple wants to have a black baby through genetic engineering? Let them. What, are you racist against blacks? What if they want to have a green baby? Let them. What if they want to have a baby with three arms, polka dot skin and wings? Are you going to discriminate against that baby because of his number of arms? Because of his skin color?

But, "If God had meant us to genetically engineer our own children He would have given us laboratories", "It's not natural". I have a challenge for anybody who disagrees with genetic engineering on these principles: Come up with a strict definition of the term 'natural' and then never do anything that isn't. (A strict definition is a definition by which one can distinguish in all cases between natural and unnatural. Only use what God gave you naked from the womb.

Now, if there are practical reasons against genetic engineering, I'm willing to hear them. That's why I'm against embryonic stem cell research: There's nothing theoretically wrong with using stem cells to cure diseases - But I have a practical problem with using dead baby brains in any scientific procedure, or, in fact, in any way whatsoever. Don't kill babies. If you had to kill babies to do genetic engineering, I would be against it.

Now, the Cauliflower Mosaic Virus might be a good reason - But I don't know enough about it to say one way or another. Have you ever heard of anybody catching Cauliflower Mosaic Virus? No? Neither have I. So it's probably not a problem... But again, I can't be sure.

(Skippable Tangent:

Here's what a virus does to reproduce: It replaces the genetic material of a cell in the host organism with it's own genetic material, so the cell starts spitting out new virii instead of the good healthy stuff it should. What the clever genetic engineers do is take the genetic material from one animal, and stick it in a virus, and then stick the virus in another animal. The virus then goes from cell to cell injecting the other animal's genetic material into the subject animal. One virus that is used to do this on plants is called the Cauliflower Mosaic Virus. The fear is that it might stay in the vegetable, and us good Americans might eat a genetically engineered carrot that's still infected with this virus. End of Tangent.)

The other argument is that if you could genetically engineer your children, everybody would have beautiful babies that would all look the same. And then you would have an entire generation that would all look the same.

But you would also have an entire generation of beautiful people. Do you have a problem with beauty? Why don't you volunteer to have the ugly child? Are you going to tell somebody that they aren't allowed to make their child beautiful? Why? You really want their child to be ugly so that their ugly child will look different from the other ugly children?

There are different kinds of beauty, you know. Diversity and genetic engineering can coexist. Some people would like blue hair because they think that's beautiful - Some would prefer platinum blonde. Others may prefer that their skin be covered with gleaming silver scales and no hair - Wouldn't that be beautiful?

God didn't make a world full of ugly people. He loves beauty. I believe that ugliness came into the world with sin, and that when Jesus fixes us and gives us our new bodies, those bodies will be beautiful. Genetic engineering presents us with the opportunity to fix, in some small part, what we ourselves broke. To leave the world a little better, more beautiful, more interesting, than we found it.

Is it worth it to miss out on all that, just for the sake of racial purity?

Sad

2006-07-21T21:26:00.000-07:00

I would like to address all you sad Christians out there. I have a few questions for you:

1) What does the passage, "Take heart! I have overcome the world." mean? Does it count as a command?

2) What is there that Jesus didn't make right through His death on the cross (for you to be sad about)?

3) Do you realize that your feelings were made for you, and not you for your feelings?

4) Do you think that God made the world so that you could be sad in it?

5) Are you helping anything by being sad about it? Are you helping anybody by being sad about them?

So I don't mean to be harsh on you all. I mean to encourage you.

Don't say to yourself, "Matt yelled at me. I guess I'll put this on my list of things to be sad about."

One of the very good things which we as christians absolutely need to have is self-control. That means that you control your emotions. If it's good and right and helpful to somebody for you to be sad, by all means be sad for them. If you need to be sad to be 'all things to all men' then do it. But you should know if you do that that you're bending the rules of time and space -- You possess an infinitely good thing, a thing so good that it outweighs anything that could possibly be bad. You possess treasure in heaven and eternal life. You took Pascal's wager and you won!!!

Chin up.

(P.S. Not that I'm perfect or anything.)

Flickr

2006-07-16T21:17:00.000-07:00

I just put up a bunch of pictures at flickr. Some from LT and MJ's wedding can be seen at http://www.flickr.com/groups/lt-mj/

Maybe later I'll put up some pictures from our move to San Diego. I have about 2.5 gigs of pictures from that, which means that there may be 2 or 3 good pictures in the bunch. I'll try to find them and put them up where you can see them.

I mean, we did drive all the way across the country. I mean, come on.

23

2006-07-14T09:47:00.000-07:00

Hello everybody!

Congratulations to LT and Mary Jo on their wedding! It was great.

Thank you to the Nisch family for letting us stay at their house, and thank you to my North Carolina friends for letting me hang out with them afterwards! It was also great. When I either pay flickr money or figure out another photo hosting solution I'll post pictures.

I am 23 years old today. As far as I can tell, the only real signifigance to this is that the planet is, cosmically speaking, in about the same place it was in when I took my first breath of air. It's wierd to place so much signifigance on the moment of birth - It seems to me like it's just another step in the extremely long series of steps in the development of a fully-grown human body. I guess it's a big step though. It's also wierd that we basically use the ENTIRE earth as one hand of a gigantic cosmic clock to tell time with.

Despite the wierdness - Thank You God for letting me live on Your truly excellent planet for 23 years! It's been great!

I am living in a futuristic fantasy world

2006-06-24T19:56:00.000-07:00

The pool is heated by solar panels on the ceiling. The security system shows whether EVERY window is open or closed. My bathroom has a skylight. I go for a quick swim in our pool to cool off. The cats HAVE THEIR OWN DOOR (a cat door) set into another door, for goodness sake! Is that amazing to anybody else, or just me? It's exactly their size. You can watch whales and dolphins swim. The sea lions lounge around the beaches with the children. Otters watch you with curiosity as you kayak over massive tangles of kelp. It's paradise.

If only I had Internet in my room.

"Don't follow your heart - Follow God."

San Diego

2006-06-17T15:35:00.000-07:00

It can be interesting to talk about the funny point where sociology and theology intersect - But not always fruitful. On to less heavy matter!

My famiy has finally arrived in San Diego after an awesome 3000 mile road trip across the USA. Here's the directions we followed: Get on Route 70 West. Merge into Route 50 West. Welcome to California.

We enjoyed the rolling hills of Virginia. We drove through a thunder storm on the massive pancake-flat plains of Kansas. We hit some city called the "Gateway to the West" whose name I don't remember. I do remember a massive arch they have near the banks of the Mississippi. My favorite day of the trip was the day we drove through Colorado. After that, we boldly drove across miles and miles of desert. It seems that this is what most of the west is made of. Desert. Deserted desert. We drove by some great big salt flats.

I have to say that the least pleasant state we drove through was Nevada, and the nicest state we drove through was Colorado. Colorful Colorado, as the signs say.

Now I'm here in San Diego, California. There are flowers everywhere. The sun is bright and the air is a pleasent 70 to 80 degrees. At night it'll go down to 65. We have a swimming pool and a hot tub. I have a big room with my own bathroom.

My bathroom has a skylight.

This house does not have air conditioning. None of the houses here do, because it never gets so hot that you need it. Our swimming pool is heated by running the water through solar panels on the roof. People surf at the beaches.

This is paradise.

Hard to imagine that this isn't a long family vacation, that we're actually living here.

Anyway, this is Matt Talamini in San Diego, signing off. My city is better than yours. Sucka.

GAW2

2006-06-15T17:50:00.000-07:00

Here's the ideal relationship (any kind of relationship):

You freely do nice things for the other person, sacrificing your own time and money and energy, because you love them and you want them to be happy. For them to be happy is for you to be happy.

When they hurt you, you forgive them in a Christlike way, not punishing them in any way. (I don't believe in "I forgive you but I still have to punish you" - If Jesus said that where would we be? - But that's for later). "Love keeps no record of wrongs" after all.

When they hurt themselves, you patiently, kindly, gently teach them to live well.

This is what we would call agape, and according to our doctrine it should govern all of our relationships. (It seems like the Bible doesn't encourage us to live according to agape love at all times and to all people - In the NT some people are expelled from the church, which means that the church [obviously] is keeping some record of wrongs, and is not being completely patient. There is some cheek that the NT church will not turn, some coat that they will not give away. More on that later.)

In forgiveness, there is no punishment for sin. It's been forgiven. Wrong actions do not precede their natural consequences. If you are agape loving somebody, and they do something wrong, you forgive them and protect them from the natural consequences of their sin. That's what Christ did.

Anyway, that's what bothers me about dating. It seems wrong to allow for the possibility of breaking up with someone you're dating. Dating people say to each other, "I'm only patient to a certain extent. I am keeping a record of the wrongs that you do. Once we're married, I'll forgive everything and be infinitely patient, but until then, if you mess up enough I'll dump you."

If you're in a relationship, and you're really striving to practice agape love, you won't dump your significant other or consider dumping them.

That's all I'm saying. It seems obvious. I think that the church is hypocritical to encourage us to practice agape love in every aspect of our life and then also encourage all sorts of non-agape behaviors (Like dumping bad boyfriends or disciplining children.)

P.S. - I do have the same issue with child-rearing. Parents are not encouraged to show agape love to their children, and with good reason. If you forgave every wrong they committed, they would grow up spoiled. Spare the rod and spoil the child. I mean, it's an amazingly good thing that Jesus made the way for us to be spared the rod - Otherwise we would all be dead. But parents should not be forgiving to their children when they misbehave.

Girls Are Wierd

2006-06-08T19:57:00.000-07:00

I was talking about this with some friends a day or so ago. It started out with a simple question: Why do girlfriends appreciate a meal that you've cooked homemade for them so much more than dinner out at a restaraunt? (By the way, I don't have a girlfriend, so it's an academic point. Anyway.) The collective wisdom of the assembled dudes decided that it's because they want to feel like you're willing to sacrifice your time and energy to show them you care.

The idea is sort of Christian. Greater love has no man than this, that he lay down his life for his friend. The way that you show love to somebody is to sacrifice your time, energy, money, talent, and life for their sake. Let me give three examples of self-inflicted pain (All might not be called sacrifices). Numbers 1 and 3 are extremes. Number 2 is somewhere on the continuum between the two.

1) Christ dies on the cross. Sacrificer loses everything (life) - Recipient gains everything (life).

2) Dude cooks his girlfriend dinner. Sacrificer loses some (time, energy, bother) - Recipient gains little (dinner).

3) Self-flagellation. Sacrificer loses much (pain, scars on back) - Recipient gains nothing (nothing).

(#3 isn't that farfetched. I hear that members of the Yakuza [Japanese mafia] have been known to cut off their own fingers to demonstrate loyalty.) Here's the meaning of the continuum: In #1, the recipient gains 100% of what the sacrificer sacrificed (A life for a life). In #2, say, 50% (the food's not that good). In #3, 0%.

Christ's sacrifice was worth it. Self-flagellation is evil, stupid, and not worth it. Is cooking dinner for your girlfriend worth it?

The idea is that it doesn't matter whether a dude's sacrifice is worth it to his girlfriend. It matters that he's willing to sacrifice at all, and how much he's willing to sacrifice. The idea is that she wants to feel loved by him, and the more that he's willing to give up to please her, the more love for her he must have. She doesn't mind that the thing he gives up goes to waste.

This turns ugly when you consider the constant threat of break-up. If you don't please your significant other, they'll break up with you. Whoever is willing to accept less, willing to put up with more, willing to sacrifice more for the other, is at a disadvantage. The girl who needs one compliment a day to feel loved isn't going to break off a relationship if she gets two compliments a day. She's humble. The girl who needs 20 compliments a day will. The demanding partner requires much sacrifice and gives back little, while the humble partner requires little sacrifice and gives back much - The humble partner obviously values the relationship more than the demanding partner, and will sacrifice more to keep the relationship going. The humble partner is in the power of the demanding partner.

I'm merely describing an economic relationship where the currency is time, energy, gifts, acts of love, mushy poems, and all the things that make girls like boys and boys like girls. Each partner performs a cost/benefit analysis of the situation and acts accordingly. Each partner is trying to get the best deal they can.

I say that whole system is evil. It is a thing of slavery, not freedom. If you're in a relationship where your partner needs you to make them feel a certain way or they'll break up with you, it's no better than prostitution. You can buy things with things other than money, you know. Many girls (boys too I guess) will accept excitement or drama or fluttery feelings as payment for their love.

My personal life goal is to sacrifice as much as I can (to show Jesus' love), and require as little as I can (to rely on God), from anybody, regardless of what threat they might hold over me (to not fear death or pain). I'm not very good at it yet, but I'm trying. Got that? Give up much, demand little, ignore threats.

Give up much. Demand little. Ignore threats.

I won't accept love that isn't freely given. If it isn't freely given, the whole foundation of the relationship is an economic one, and it's sand. It'll crumble. I won't accept love that isn't freely given, even if the price is as low as cooking dinner. I'm willing to cook dinner. I'm willing to cook a thousand dinners as long as I can do it freely out of the love I have for the girl, and not in order to buy love from the girl.

(sigh) I'll probably never find a girl willing to marry me.

(P.S. - Ladies, don't get too mad. I know dudes have a similar problem - they sell their love for beauty or sex, and become enslaved to those things. I'm fighting that slavery in my own life [we all are], so believe me, I know it's there. But...

The problems that ladies have have bitten me hard.)

Moving Bimonth is Here

2006-06-05T07:40:00.000-07:00

Forget wussy little 'moving day'. When my family moves, it takes two weeks.

And moving bimonth has just started.

Keep us in your prayers as we travel all the way accross the country.

Knowledge and Zen

2006-05-31T07:48:00.000-07:00

A little while ago (after Joe and Sarah's wedding) I was talking to Denea, Sam Grammar, somebody else, LT, and a midshipman physics major. This was in the BSU house, and it may be my last fond memory from Annapolis. As a Johnny, I love talking to real live physics majors because they know so much actual stuff.

Anyway, the physics major asked this excellent question: Do you guys think there's any knowledge that shouldn't be known? Everybody else gave pious and correct answers based on Christian doctrine. Yes, because of the way God made us, there are certain kinds of knowledge that ought to be off-limits. Corrupting knowledge. Perhaps even 'The Knowledge of Good and Evil'.

These taboos are based on the nature of man, and they are correct and good and right. But I thought of one that's based on the nature of knowledge. (I read about half of the GEB a few months ago and it's been percolating in my brain since then.)

Here's my taboo: Using quotation marks ("") improperly. I'll explain.

A computer uses sequences of characters to manipulate sequences of characters. The sequences of characters that are used to manipulate are called 'code' and the sequences of characters that get manipulated are called 'data'. In any computer language there must be some sequence of characters that tells the computer which is which. For instance, in this post I wouldn't want to type a bunch of angle brackets, since your browser would interpret anything inside of them as code and try to run it. This sort of sequence of characters is called 'escape characters'.

There are all sorts of ways to do bad things in the computer world that are based on clever uses of escape characters. The escape character in English is the quotation mark. It tells you when a thought or speech is beginning or ending. The beginning quotation mark signals that you're going down into a thought, and the ending quotation mark signals that you're coming up out of a thought. So here's the illegal thought:

"I'm thinking, "I'm thinking, "I'm thinking, "I'm thinking ....

(Another way to put this is, less exactly: "I ought to keep on thinking that I ought to keep on thinking that I ought to keep on thinking that I ought to keep on thinking that I ought...")

See what I mean? This is trying to think about your own thought. If you do it too much, you stop thinking altogether. It's the knowledge that destroys itself. Here's the other one. It's a little harder to understand than the first:

I decided!" I decided!" I decided!" I decided!" I decided!" ....

The key is to think about things, not just thoughts. It's okay to think about thoughts, as long as you don't let the thought that you're thinking about start thinking itself. Don't let the data start running as code.

If you're writing a program on a computer, and you make this mistake, your computer freezes and you have to reboot it. I think if you manage to do the same thing with your mind, it's called No-Mind and you're a master Zen monk.

No, I don't really know too much about Zen Buddhism - But I am opposed to anything that discourages thought.

V.A.L.I.S.

2006-05-28T09:44:00.000-07:00

This is why I love the book VALIS by Philip K. Dick. I just read the first, say, 40 pages. Here is a selection of claims made by the narrator.

1) I am a professional writer. My name is Philip K. Dick.
2) My friend Horselover Fat had a friend named Gloria, who killed herself.
3) I am Horselover Fat. I am writing this book in the third person to gain some much needed objectivity.
4) I know koine greek, for instance, that -on is a neuter ending. This is because I (Philip K. Dick) am a professional writer, and I need to have a working knowledge of other languages.
5) Horselover Fat had a hallucination in which he spoke in a language he did not understand - He wrote some of it down, and his wife later discovered that it was koine greek. Horselover Fat did not know koine greek.
6) Horselover Fat is insane.

What a great book! Heeheehee!

Awesome

2006-05-25T13:28:00.000-07:00

This article is about something awesome.

Also, some may not like to hear this, but usually - usually - Ann Coulter is making fun of somebody who needs to be made fun of. She's just mean about it.

And if anybody cares, I'm moving to San Diego pretty soon.

Thanks!

2006-05-22T13:50:00.000-07:00

I have a coworker (Actually maybe he's my boss - But everybody in the company except one is [I think] my boss) who always puts the word 'Thanks' at the end of every e-mail. Even when it doesn't make any sense at all and he doesn't really have anything to thank you for, that word shows up there. When he's telling me what to do, he says thanks. When he's asking me about something, he says thanks. When he's merely passing along some information, he says thanks.

His mother taught him well.

It's funny - I think that 'Thanks' really is a magic word. I don't know what it actually means (do you?) but when I see it at the end of those e-mails, no matter what's in the e-mail, I always feel a little bit better about it. "Oh", I think, "He's thanking me."

It's wierd to find myself having a particular, specific, predictable emotional response to a word that I don't even think has a meaning. It's not like "Dog = animal that walks on four legs with a tail; barks." or "Arithmetic = the process of producing correct answers to questions involving numbers".

It's like an expletive in that way: "Crap = fecal matter (this word is used as an expletive)" or "Darn it = may it be punished severely (this word is used as an expletive)"

"Thank you = (this word is used when somebody has done something nice for you [It makes you feel good])"

Odd. It does make you feel good just to hear or read it.

Thanks!

((( By the way, Sir Robert and Johanna Burbridge had a baby boy yesterday!!!! Praise God Halleluia! His name is Jacob Alton Burbridge, and I'm sure he rocks hardcore. )))

Cathy

2006-05-19T09:58:00.000-07:00

You know the comic strip 'Cathy'?

I do believe that fully 50% of the jokes are, "I'm a woman, so I'm vain. I try to diet, but I'm also a glutton (because I'm a woman), so I eat a lot! ACK!!! Isn't that funny? I have no willpower, because I'm a woman!"

No it's not. It's disgusting.

"But that's what it's like to be a woman in today's world, and to have to deal with the many pressures that society puts on women."

Women should be insulted.

Pulled one way and then another by gluttony and vanity - That's a bad situation. It's not good, and I don't find it attractive.

Let me explain something: If you're a free human being (as all Christians are) you don't have to respond to or deal with any pressures. Christ has overcome the world. He is stronger than anything - Societal pressures included. Pin 'em to the cross. That's what it's there for.

("Food is for the body and not the body for food", "Man does not live by bread alone", "Christ died for and loves everybody regardless of how they look" - 'Pin it to the cross' is code for 'No matter what the problem is, Christ's sacrifice provides a real solution to it, as in the phrases mentioned above')

In short, ladies should not be like Cathy, and dudes should encourage ladies not to be like Cathy.

Concert

2006-05-09T21:31:00.000-07:00

So recently I've been to three concerts.

1) Around Easter I went to hear the St. Matthew Passion, which is a wonderful opera-type thing in German by Bach.

2) A little while later I heard Primum Mobile (a group at St. John's) perform the Missa Pange Lingua by Josquin Des Pres. It's a Mass in four voices, but they sang it with 8 people.

3) Not too long ago I was at an Underoath concert. The four bands that played were all crazy death metal. There was a mosh pit and crowd surfing. The lead singers sprayed large volumes of water out of their mouths onto the crowd, much to everyone's delight.

I dare you to classify my musical taste! Fit me in a box! Try it! I greatly and genuinely enjoyed all three of these performances.

The scope of my taste, as wide as it may be, does not, however, extend to Country music.

This is funny to me: I was underdressed at the Bach, but overdressed at the Underoath. Rock on.

PKD

2006-05-09T21:10:00.000-07:00

I was reading an essay by Philip K. Dick in which he defines the term 'Science Fiction'. According to him, an SF story must involve a world significantly different from our own in at least one respect, such that things happen in that world that do not happen in our own. It can be in the future, or in the present but with something significant different, or in the past in a far distant galaxy where they all speak English.

I was pleased, since his definition of SF matches up with my definition of 'something I would like to read'. I've always held that if nothing happens in a book or movie that doesn't happen in real life it's boring. So mark me down as a Science Fiction fan.

He also wrote an essay in which he claims that SF has a sort of duty to predict future events as a warning to people, as in Farenheit 451. A lot of his books feature a post-Apocalyptic America, after the big WWIII, with barren radioactive deserts and scorched broken-down cities and such. He kept talking in the essay about how anybody who didn't foresee Doomsday within 50 years was living in a fantasy world, with his head in the sand.

I'm happy to report that he wrote this essay in 1955 - It's been 51 years and no WWIII yet. Apparently somebody somewhere managed somehow to keep the Communists and us from blowing each other to smithereens, and I think it was probably Reagan.

This is an odd sign.

2006-05-05T21:16:00.000-07:00

I encountered this sign on my way to BWI airport. It's very close to the terminal. And it's very odd.

Who is this sign addressed to? All we get to ponder is the word "Your". I suppose it must be addressed to anybody who's seeing the sign.

But I know those are my signals. They're right in front of me.

How could this sign possibly give me more information about those signals than I already have?

Public School Becomes A Little More Like Prison

2006-05-03T11:13:00.000-07:00

Trust Bill Clinton to convince beverage distributors not to sell soda in public schools anymore.

Children are quite the repressed demographic. No suffrage. Forced labor (Not manual labor, but you can get paid to do the same thing in the real workforce so it counts as labor to me). Forced memorization of federally-mandated doctrine. And now they can't buy soda from the vending machines. That's not that bad - except that it's government regulation of citizen's diet. But it's not really even that. They aren't forcing the kids not to drink soda - They're just not selling it at schools. I still don't like it. It reeks of un-freedom. Most schools will probably take it as a cue to put soda on the forbidden items list, along with chewing gum, Yu-Gi-Oh! cards, and baseball caps.

In completely unrelated other news, I made up another line to a popular saying. You want to hear it?

Give a man a fish and he eats for a day.
Teach a man to fish and he eats for his whole life.
Force a man to fish and you're an evil rotten lowlife slavedriving dictator.

School is very un-free. I do not support it.

I Guess that was a Little Mean

2006-05-02T13:30:00.000-07:00

I'm just peeved by the seeming demand for respect, empowerment, and entitlement by a group which is not legally entitled.

But I don't really respect the laws of the United States of America that much anyway. None of us do. Who am I to talk? I download music. I often will pilot a motor vehicle at a velocity exceeding the posted speed limit.

So I'm sorry to any illegal immigrants out there for that last post. I shouldn't dis you. We're all criminals.

But I think that the speed limit should be higher, and I think that the border should be better protected. I guess you guys think that the border shouldn't be better protected.

We can agree to peacefully disagree, and when election time rolls around we can put our money where our mouths are and vote on it.

No Human is Illegal

2006-05-01T18:24:00.000-07:00

Apparently many illegal immigrants have gathered in the streets to protest something. They're showing America how much we need them by not working for a day.

It's hard for me to figure out exactly what they actually want, though. Illegal immigrants aren't granted any rights in the Constitution, so they can't be asking for their rights. If my understanding is correct, legally they have no civil rights in the USA beyond the basic human rights that the UN and company try to enforce. Being that they committed a criminal act by entering the USA illegally, they have the right to be deported. I don't even think they have the right to trial by jury or the right to remain silent - They're not citizens of the USA.

Do they not understand?

Basically, they're breaking the law of the land by living in our country without our permission (In fact with our explicit denial of permission), and I would like them to please leave. Somehow they came here, and somehow they got jobs and such, and somehow nobody has made them leave yet. They use the roads and police that my taxes help pay for, and they don't pay taxes themselves. This is criminal, and this is bad.

In fact, there's actually a bigger problem with illegal immigration than that.

You see, we in the USA do have a problem with unemployment already. We have a ton of people living in the inner cities (and I mean African-Americans) who are suffering with unemployment. I am paying for them to be on welfare because they can't get a job. Now, we're all working very hard (By which I mean the citizens of the USA), making a lot of money, and the economy is growing and flourishing. Check out This article and this article. There are plenty of jobs out there for unskilled laborers.

I think that it's a terrible tragedy that the perfectly good jobs that our legitimate fellow-citizens desperately need are being taken by people who aren't even allowed to be in the country.

Somehow, (And I don't know why) a whole ton of Mexicans are willing to cross deserts and risk injury, death, and imprisonment illegally for the jobs that our inner city African-Americans aren't taking.

I don't understand it at all. And I have a hint for the illegal immigrants: If you want to become a US citizen, don't stage protests that close down whole cities while waving Mexican flags.

Fortune Cookie

2006-04-25T19:57:00.000-07:00

So today I got this fortune cookie at The Bamboo House:

Who wrote this? What kind of a person wrote this? Note the incorrect grammar - "an mission". That's not a mistake that a native English speaker would make. But note also the joke - The pun between "mission" and "intermission". How would a Chinese-speaker make that pun? It seems to me that the ability to make puns in a language is pretty advanced. A lot of native English speakers are terrible at it.

Contradictions abound.

Who wrote this? They speak English well enough to make valid (although not good) puns, but they don't speak it well enough to avoid saying "an mission". Maybe it's a Chinese high school English teacher.

Anyway, at the lunch where I received this fortune cookie, somebody made the joke, "That's not a fortune!". I've made this joke many many times myself, but as soon as somebody else made it (Ain't it the truth?) I realized that it's not the greatest joke, and that I actually do understand why they call something like that a 'fortune'.

In China when you go to predict the future, you do something weird with like bamboo sticks or something, and that points you to a little saying from the I Ching. Our word for this in English is 'bibliomancy'. But who wants to get a 'bibliomancy cookie'? To the Chinese, the future is told in short, cryptic, sometimes seemingly commonplace sayings, like, "Thus the superior man consolidates his fate by making his position correct."

In my culture, when you have your fortune told, somebody just tells you about the future. In China, you receive a random little saying, like in a fortune cookie. It is a fortune. It just takes a little bit of study.

Ewww...

2006-04-24T18:13:00.000-07:00

To be able to ignore your feelings is a good skill, and one that should be used often. What if somebody uses this on you? You had better be able to deal with your feelings then.

It's a spray! They wouldn't even have to get you to drink something - Just breathe it! Ugh.

Speaking of things that are gross:

Riggs

2006-04-21T09:01:00.000-07:00

Riggs (our dog) had his operation on Tuesday, and he seems to be recovering very well.

The vet said that she didn't find anything that looked like cancer! This means that my doggy will probably be with us for another couple of years. She did take out his spleen, which had a big huge hematoma on it the size of an orange.

This is him in the snow last winter:

What a great dog!

In other news, it's Friday!

I can do level 13 in 16 minutes at www.planarity.net. Try it.

It's because I have a mind like a steel trap. No, just kidding, actually I just let the puzzle know exactly how I felt about it in a long impassioned speech, and it solved itelf. You can solve all your problems that way, actually.

Politics V

2006-04-18T13:02:00.000-07:00

So I read this article. I'm not so concerned with the point of the article as with a single off-topic sentance, the point of which is to prove how stupid Bush is: "For instance, his insistence on abstinence as the preferred method of birth control would be laughable were it not so reckless."

I would just like to quickly comment on the mind of the man who made that statement. In order to make that statement, he must believe that people cannot help heedlessly impregnating each other, that there is no way to keep them from it, and that the U.S. government should treat them as incapable of avoiding it.

Excuse me! I am offended. I am a U.S. citizen, and I would like to be treated, please, as though I am an adult human being and not an animal. (By 'animal', I mean dog or rabbit, because they hump each other like crazy. Spay and neuter your pets.) I make choices, and if those choices have consequences, I understand that I am responsible for them.

I do not like it when a person assumes that I am incapable of reigning in my libido.

The fact is that abstinence always works to prevent pregnancy. No sex, no sperm, no baby. (Except for this one time - Read about it here.)

If kids are heedlessly impregnating each other, the problem is not that they don't have adequate access to birth control. Hello! Birth control is available to every living human being except in the cases of rape and immaculate conception. Simply abstain. Don't have sex. The problem is that the kids don't have responsibility, so they act like animals. 'Responsibility' is a grown-up word for 'not acting like an idiot'.

Instead of assuming that people will act like animals and then spending money on trying to stave off the consequences of their idiotic actions, the U.S. government should spend money on teaching people not to act like animals. Almost every problem that any country has ever had in all of history is the result of a bunch of people going buck wild and acting like animals.

Politics IV

2006-04-17T08:30:00.000-07:00

I have a few political observations to make. The first is that we in America are doing a really bad job of being a democracy. The point of a democracy is that political power be in the hands of the people ('demos' means people, 'cracy' means power). I can tell that power is not in the hands of the people by a very, very simple observation: Everybody speeds. I mean that seriously. I drive on the roads, and I can see that only maybe 15% of drivers travel at a speed less than or equal to the speed limit. If the people were really in charge of the laws, the people would set the speed limit higher.

By the way, the point, I say - the very fundamental principle of democracy, is to oppress minorities. (Observation 2). Think about it. When there's a difference of opinion, and you vote to decide it, the minority loses. That's the whole point. The more democracy you have, the less power minority interests will have, because the majority will defeat them in a vote.

The point of this sort of arangement is that the very small minority of murderers and rapists and pedophiles gets oppressed by the majority of people who think those people are doing evil.

Probably: Since good people don't want all minorities to be oppressed, the majority gives up some of it's power in various ways, to protect certain minorities from itself. This is probably why the speed limit is lower than we all like, but for the life of me I can't understand how it might have gotten to be that way.

A third: Here's something that anybody who has been a senior in high school knows: Colleges and Universities have lower acceptance standards for black kids than they do for white kids. Scholarships are even worse. Just do an online search for college scholarships, and this fact will become apparent to you. This is because they want 'diversity' on their campuses (campii?). Or something. Fine, but it's racial discrimination. I mean, it just is. Just because it's racial discrimination in the opposite direction from the traditional sort of racial discrimination doesn't make it not be what it is.

Anyway, last night my brother was filling out some sort of law school-related application (I think to take a test or something), and it asked him about his race. He told me, "I'm thinking about putting down African-American". (We're not black. Not even a little bit.) "I mean", he said, "How are they going to tell what race I am until I actually get there? And if they accept me because they think I'm black, are they going to kick me out when they find out I'm white?" I told him that somebody should do that just to see what would happen:

White boy says he's black on the application to try to get into a better school than his grades alone will permit.
School find out white boy is actually white.
School kicks white boy out (They've got plenty of smarter white boys than him there - they want black dudes.)
White boy sues school for racial discrimination.

What would happen? What precedents have been set in the courts on this issue? Generally speaking, the judicial precedent is against racial discrimination. What laws are on the books? Generally, the laws in the books are against racial discrimination.

I think what the school would really do is keep the white boy there, and try to hush up the fact that he got in by lying in his application about being black.

Actually, I'll bet there are a ton of white dudes who do this every year. It would take some guts to do - But you would be following in the footsteps of Martin Luther King Jr. and Rosa Parks. It's always difficult to fight institutionalized racism.

Lost

2006-04-13T10:23:00.000-07:00

I have the kind of mind where throughout the day I will discover arguments for things that I believe. Step-by-step proofs for why I think what I think will be created without much of my help. One of the reasons I started blogging was to put down some of these ideas, or at least parts of them.

Well, I had a great one. I can remember it's shape, kind of, but I don't remember what it was about or any of the content. It's on the tip of my tongue - I have the feeling that if I just remembered one little detail about the argument, I would suddenly get the whole thing back.

But since that's lost, here are a few things about my life:

My dog, Riggs, has cancer.

This is very sad. He might live and he might not. If you're the kind of person who thinks it's okay to pray for animals, send a few prayers for healing his way. He's a really great dog. If he were to meet you, he would definitely love you.

I live in a neighborhood where they feel like they have to hide the fire hydrants.

I don't care who you are or who you think you thought you were, don't even start to consider thinking about messing with the pillows.

Take a look at this

Do I think that this will help me get what I want from the McDonalds menu? No, I do not. The message that I'm trying to communicate to the drivethrough attendant is already going through their crappy speakers. I don't need it going to California after that! Soon it'll be going to India! (There is a law of the universe that says that eventually all call centers will be located in India and staffed by underpaid but clever Indian gentlemen who don't speak my language. And who can't solve my problem. This is bad enough calling Dell for tech support, I don't want to have to deal with it when all I want is a Big Mac.)

Vs.

2006-04-09T10:50:00.000-07:00

In church today I heard a sermon, and it was a very good sermon. It contained a bit of doctrine that confounded me a bit. This is a doctrine that I've heard many many times in church and from people, and it's probably right. Maybe. Here is the form in which it appeared this morning (Not represented here exactly as the preacher said it):

"We should live as though Christ will be coming back today, and be at peace with our neighbor. We should also act as though Christ is coming back later, and plan for the future and be responsible with our resources."

Well, which is it? His point was that Christ doesn't want us to quit our jobs. My question is, "Doesn't He?"

I mean that seriously. In this the physical world, resources are scarce. Any good work requires time and money. Usually we spread out our good works. We spend some of the time working to keep ourselves alive, some of the time enjoying God's fun creation, and some of the time doing good works. (I think that enjoying God's fun creation is a kind of good work, and that Christ likes it when we, for instance, play videogames). The reason I don't spend all of my time doing good works is that I think that I'll need money to survive tomorrow and the next day and the next week and the next month. There are three reasons I'm going to go to work tomorrow:

A) My parents want me to.
B) I don't think that Christ is coming back for at least two or three months, and I'll need money to survive to continue to do good works for at least that long.
C) I can do good works at work. (Not that I always do).

If Christ were to be coming back today, or in say, one month, I would want to quit my job and do nothing but good works, simply because I wouldn't have to work to survive two months from now.

But isn't this really a small chunk of a bigger question? Didn't Christ tell people to quit their jobs and follow Him? Didn't He tell people to just give away all of their money? Didn't He lead thousands of people out into the desert where they would have gone hungry, just expecting God to miraculously provide for them all?

Christ did not teach people to be responsible with their money. He did not encourage it. Unless God does a lot of miracles for you, you simply cannot run an earthly society the way Jesus encourages us to live.

I'm sure it was a huge shock for the early believers when the widows and orphans were not fed miraculously the way the 5,000 were and they had to take up a collection. How do you deal with that?

Are we giving in to the dark powers of this world when we tell people to go to work on Monday morning instead of telling them to just wander off somewhere and shout about the gospel, and that Christ will provide manna for them?

Shoes

2006-04-06T20:50:00.000-07:00

I believe there are two sorts of men: Men who aren't afraid to tromp across a wet, muddy field, go anywhere, and do anything, and men who purchase and wear cool shoes.

Ladies! (If any ladies ever read this) You can choose between a man who is manly and will do things, and a man who is girly and will wear things.

If you see a man and you think, "Nice shoes", that is a girly man. He will never do anything but preen and groom himself.

If you see a man out there doing something, that man has given less than one thought to how his shoes look. You will not be attracted to him, for he will be hairy, and his shoes will be unpleasant to view. He may have spaghetti stains on his shirt. He doesn't care how he looks.

I know all this because I feel it in my heart. I know all this because today I took one full step from manliness towards girliness. I know all this because today I went to the mall and chatted with a sales lady. There were pink shirts there. In the men's department. The girly men's department.

I know all this because today I bought these shoes:

Sacraments

2006-04-02T19:43:00.000-07:00

So there's some brothers who differ from me in what they think of sacraments. I'll use baptism as an example. There are many verses in the New Testament that refer to baptism, and it's definitely a good thing. The question is "Is it necessary to salvation? If so, what counts as a baptism? What about infant baptism? What about sprinkling?"

Some sort of 'washing' is definitely necessary for salvation. In fact, I would say that salvation is washing. The washing away of sin by Christ's sacrifice on the cross is the necessary condition for salvation. But is this washing in all those verses the same as baptism?

Some say that a physical baptism is required for salvation. To them I would ask (These are the questions that I ask myself that keep me from agreeing with them):
What precisely makes up a baptism? Does it have to be in a river like the baptism from John? If not in a river, does it have to be with water? Does the water have to be straight H2O, or can there be minerals in it too? What about sugar? Could you use cherry soda to baptize somebody? If cherry soda doesn't count but water does, how much sugar has to be in the water before the baptism is unacceptable to God and ineffective for salvation? 90% water? 50% water?

See the point? If you're going to specify that a particular physical act is necessary for salvation, you have to specify exactly what that act is. And it's really really hard to do that. And the Bible sure doesn't do that. And you're also going to have to explain why each point of the specifications for the physical act is necessary, from scripture or science.

What the Bible does specify very exactly is what the state of one's heart must be for salvation: Humble, repentant, obedient, loving. I believe that true baptism is an internal reality, a state of the heart and mind and soul.

I would say that physical baptism (getting dunked) is an outward sign of an inward reality (the inward reality of salvation - the state of the heart/soul/mind). The sign can be there without the reality, and the reality can be there without the sign.

Sometimes, the outward sign is exatly what is needed to help the inward reality happen - As when a person shouts "Duck!" and you duck down before you even think about it.

The thief on the cross next to Jesus. I can't see any important way that I'm different from that man.

Politics III - The Big Scam

2006-03-30T11:56:00.000-08:00

There's a huge scam going on in our country - It's so huge that anybody can see it who cares to look. A few people are getting huge amounts of money, and a lot of people are getting screwed. It's robbery, except it's legal. And I mean legal in both senses: It's legally legitimate, and it has to do with the law.

So lets say some kid falls off the slide at his school and breaks his arm. His parents hire a slick lawyer. They sue the school, the county, and the manufacturer of the playground equipment. They sue them for huge piles of money. Sometimes they get the huge piles of money that they ask for. The school or company or county that has to pay them that huge pile of money takes the slide away, or charges a lot more for slides, or charges a lot more for insurance for kids who go on slides. They have to cover their losses. Across the country playground equipment (This is totally true) is being taken out of playgrounds for this reason. They took it out of the playground at my old elementary school. It looks so sad now when I drive past. Those poor kids.

The lawyer takes a huge cut of the huge pile of money. The lawyer sends some of that money to the Bar Association. The Bar Association sends some of that money to lobbyists who have conversations with Democrats. The Bar Association also sends a huge pile of money to Democratic candidates' campaigns. The Democrats keep the Republicans from passing legislation that would keep the parents and lawyers from taking the huge pile of money.

This is a scam. Actually, it's more like an evil plot! Like a diabolical machine that turns fun into money. And the mechanics of this evil machine are the Democrats.

The same thing is happening in hospitals. A patient can sue their doctor no matter what they sign beforehand. Seriously. If you sign a piece of paper that says, "I will not sue anybody because of this operation, even if a really bad accident happens", you are totally free to sue them as much as you want. You can steal a huge pile of money from them that way.

(The fact is, medicine is dangerous stuff. They're trying to prevent you from dying. It's not safe. Don't sue them because something went wrong. They're trying to help you.)

Then the hospital has to charge everybody more to cover the (now) insanely high malpractice insurance rates to cover the huge pile of money, because the alternative is to go out of business. Would you like the hospital or insurance company to go out of business? Do you like paying a lot of money for healthcare and insurance?

You do? Odd. Well, you should vote for a Democrat.

(Maybe someday somebody who is really knowledgeable about these matters and is also a Democrat will explain to me how this is not a huge scam. It sure seems like one to me.)

Okay, I'll say some more

2006-03-29T06:48:00.000-08:00

There's a funny thing about Christians and AIDS. You see some of us (I think they're not acting in love) calling it a punishment from God. Some refer to Sodom and Gomorrah. I believe that this is a funny prideful human activity called 'gloating'.

The reason they do this is that the sexual habits that we've been recommending for moral reasons for thousands of years, and which have lately come under such criticism, turn out now to be pretty effective quarantine measures. Now, monogamy wouldn't be 100% effective against AIDS - There's still the chance that you'll get it from a dirty blood transfusion or needle.

However, (and this was my original point), if every person practiced monogamy (by which I mean only ever having sex with one person [not just one person at a time]) then AIDS would not be the giant global crisis that it currently is. The fact is, it's called an STD because it is commonly transmitted by sexual means. If you take away that means of transmission, it becomes an uncommon disease.

Those Christians are gloating because the people who disagree with them are literally dying because of their incorrect beliefs (and dangerous lifestyles as a result of those beliefs). If you're immature, this seems like a good time to gloat. It seems like you've won the argument. But this is not a good time to gloat.

It is a bad time to gloat.

It is a time for love and understanding. Peace. I hope I never gloat like that, and I hope that nobody thinks I do.

Now, to answer some concerns:

It seems to me that the phrase "casting judgement" in common usage refers to saying things like, "Those dirty homosexuals! AIDS is their punishment now, and after it kills them off, the fires of Hell!", or "AIDS is the punishment of God on this age for the wicked immoral pre-marital sinners!". It refers to condemnation - setting oneself up as a judge, and then passing a sentance on somebody else.

Here is what I proclaim: There is only one true Judge - God. Since we will all stand before Him, and justice will be done at that time, why should any of us condemn each other? I take my doctrine (and hopefully my way of life) from Romans 14 (Verse 10 is particularly appropriate here).

Who am I to judge? I'm just as much a sinner as any homosexual or adulterer or pedophile: James 2:10 and Matthew 5:28

Furthermore, I believe that all the evil in the world is the fault of sinful man - Including diseases, earthquakes, hurricanes, floods, and all other things. This is a more complex and subtle doctrine, so I won't get into it here. Perhaps later. The short version is: God is perfectly good, so that stuff isn't His fault. He gave us the world, and we have authority over it. When we screwed ourselves up, we screwed it up as well.

But I have good news! He did lighten up on us!

He died for us.

So that we can live, and truly live, and truly live forever. It is excellent.

Romans 3:22-24 - John 3:16

Politics II

2006-03-28T17:22:00.000-08:00

So, summary of last post: I favor freedom over restriction. I feel good about that, since it's in the rhetoric of the government of the U.S.A. "Let freedom ring" and all. In general, I would like government to get smaller, demand less of my money, place fewer restrictions on businesses, and generally do less.

Also, I would say this: It is better for government to threaten evil men to keep them from doing evil than to threaten everybody to keep them from having the power to do evil. Having the power to do evil is not in itself evil, and most powers that can do evil can also do good. To illustrate this point, I'll describe a variety of situations, starting with the most good and ending with the most evil:

No Government & Strong Church:
Guns Allowed - Murder Prevented by Love & Good Teaching
Surgical Tools Allowed - Abortion Prevented by Love & Good Teaching
Playground Equipment Allowed - Children Protected by Loving Parents

Weak Government:
Guns Allowed - Murder Punished
Surgical Tools Allowed - Abortion Punished
Playground Equipment Allowed - Injured Children Fixed By Government-Paid-For Doctors

Strong Government:
Guns Punished - Murder Punished
Possession of Surgical Tools Restricted - Abortion Punished
Playground Equipment Torn Down - Fat, Stupid, Lazy Children

No Government:
Guns Allowed - Murder Allowed
Surgical Tools Allowed - Abortion Allowed
Playgrounds Allowed - Not Used Due to Danger

I'm actually not sure about the proper order of #3 and #4. Is it better to live in a totalitarian dictatorship or in an anarchy?

I see our current government as having elements of all of these.

Politics

2006-03-28T13:02:00.000-08:00

I've been thinking about politics lately, since I'm a conservative Christian and it seems as though my sect has seized power (Or at least the TV, newspapers, and radio have been complaining that we have). I feel the need to re-evaluate my political beliefs.

Let it be that telling people what to do and killing / imprisoning / torturing them if they don't do it is called 'control' (I don't actually believe that a person can be controlled). A 'government' is an entity that has 'control' over all of the people in a particular area of land. The term 'political' denotes anything having to do with 'government'.

Right away we come to a political belief of mine: There should be no government. I find that I am fundamentally an anarchist. If people were good, as they should be, there would be no need of one. Nobody who loves their fellow man wants to control them with threats of violence.

If any government exists, it is either put in place by evil men, or it is put in place by good men as a concession to the evil of the evil men in order to keep the evil men from doing evil. (This is simplistic as stated - I understand that each person has both good and evil tendancies). Sometimes it's put in place to keep lazy men from not doing enough good.

In any case, I don't like it. It restricts freedom. When it does what it's supposed to do, it restricts the freedom of evil men to do evil, and that's (not good but) better than the alternative. Still, it's main activity is the restriction of freedom.

Since I favor a method of getting people to do good that's not threatening them with violence (this method is conversion to Christianity), I now find that government is actually a concession to the failure of the church to do its job. Instead of teaching people, in love, to do the right thing, we have put in place a system that threatens them if they don't do the right thing. It's easier that way, and it's wicked of us, and anybody who votes or pays taxes is complicit in it. I am complicit in it, as part of the demos.

So! More pastors, less policemen. More sermons, less laws. I'm not saying "Overthrow the government!", I'm saying, "Let the church rise up! ...until there is no more need for government."

All I'm Saying Is

2006-03-24T12:12:00.000-08:00

If you want to stop AIDS, stop adultery.

There is no such thing as a Sexually Transmitted Disease without adultery. If people aren't committing adultery, diseases cannot be transmitted sexually.

Simple.

That's all I'm saying.

Meditation

2006-03-23T21:01:00.000-08:00

When I was in high school, there was this one CD of Bach's greatest organ works that I listened to all the time. Recently the tune from one of them came back to me, and I figured out how to play it on my bass guitar. I think it's "Jesu, Joy of Man's Desiring". I like that tune.

Just now I turned to Psalm 89 where he says, "I will sing of the LORD's great love forever; with my mouth I will make your faithfulness known through all generations." And I thought to myself:

That's what Bach was doing when he wrote that song. He was declaring the LORD's love through all generations. I am part of 'all generations', and Bach is using me to declare the love of the LORD. Every time somebody turns on the classical music station or puts on a Bach CD with that song on it, they're participating in Bach's praise of God which echoes, is continually echoing and will continue to echo through time and space and all generations.

Lite

2006-03-20T10:45:00.000-08:00

If you do not already know about the following awesome things, it is only because of the extreme depravity of the sick, sick world we live in. Attend!:

The Pillows
If you've seen FLCL, The Pillows are the band that did the soundtrack for that excellent cartoon. They probably make the best rock music in Japan. If the song "Hybrid Rainbow" does not steal your heart, then you do not have one.

Oblivion
This game is not out yet, but when I purchase it tomorrow I will probably die of delight. Screenshots are viewable here. It is for the XBOX360 and for mighty PCs. If my computer is not powerful enough to run it then I will die - For I will engage in blood combat with Philip over playing it on his 360, and I will lose, since justice will be on his side.

The Great Outdoor Fight
Who will win? Will Ray and Roast Beef get run over by The Jeeps? Achewood

Solution! (I think)

2006-03-14T20:25:00.000-08:00

I think I finally understand that one point that Kant was making. To catch you up, the question is: Is space the form of outer perception or is it a property of the objects perceived? Another way to say this is: Is an object's position something that it sends to us through our senses, or is it's position just our way of arranging the object? Kant says the later. I didn't understand point #1 out of 4 that he uses to support that claim.
He wanted to put the emphasis on the fact that all things are presented as being in different spaces - First he says that each thing is in a different space from me, and then he says that each object is in a different place from all other objects. This necessary differentness is unique to space (and I guess time has it too, in a different way).
For instance, two things can be the same color, or the same hardness, or the same texture, or the same weight. No two things (things here meaning objects of outer perception) can be in the same space (place). This means that place isn't like greenness or heaviness - If it was, you could imagine two objects to be in the same place the way that you could imagine two objects to be the same shade of green, or the same weight. Since you can't, and each object gets it's own unique location in space, it's extremely unlikely that location is a property of the object itself, and much more likely that it's a property of our way of perceiving that object.
I don't think that this point is conclusive (I don't think it by itself proves that space is nothing but the form of outer perception), but it is another way to set our perception of space apart from our perception of other properties of objects.
(I feel like this won't make any sense to somebody who hasn't read the Critique of Pure Reason extremely recently. Oh well. If you read all that and you're confused and angry at me for wasting your time, I'm sorry. That's what's on my mind now.)

flickr

2006-03-10T19:56:00.000-08:00

fP1030176, originally uploaded by talamini714.

I have to say that I am in love with the idea of attaching searchable tags to things. I would marry that idea. I wish you could attach tags to every object, real or imaginary, and turn the world into a giant searchable xml database.

flickr takes us one tiny step closer to that world.

A Geometric Point

2006-03-10T17:10:00.000-08:00

It seems to me, upon reflection, that if I did occupy space, I would have to be a kind of point. My thoughts are as follows:

When somebody throws a stone and it hits you, what do you blame for it? Not the stone. Not the hand that held the stone, or the arm that threw it. You blame the person who threw the stone. You can only tell which person it was by looking at the arm and hand that threw the stone. The stone-hitting seems to me to be an action that originated with the person, the very self, and then travels to the brain - nerves - arm - hand - stone. Each thing that was a part of the chain points back to it's source.

I don't blame a person's mind for the stone-throw either. Their mind may have been under the spell of another person - They may have been tricked into throwing that stone at you. In that case the chain of blame would go back through the stone - hand - arm - nerves - mind - other person's voice - other person's throat - nerves - brain - mind - other person.

See? If you're getting oppressed by some army, you don't blame the miserable grunts who are actually beating you up, you blame the army leadership. For example.

But where is this person? Nothing that has any mass or takes up any space can be blamed. Even some invisible things can't be blamed - It's not that person's memories' fault that you got hit with a rock, or their beliefs, or their knowledge of calculus - It's the person.

And so not finding anything physical that takes up space that is the person, but finding many physical things that point back to the person, I have to agree with Kant that a person takes up a geometrical point worth of space. There is no space inside of it, but it does have a location in space. It cannot be said to take up space, but it must be said to have a location in space.

Now, how does this help me with my earlier dilemma?

Trouble with Kant

2006-03-09T17:37:00.000-08:00

I started reading the Critique of Pure Reason, at a leisurely pace this time. Not to merely understand it, as before, but to understand and pass judgement on it. "Pass judgement" is a cruel phrase - I mean that I'll decide whether I agree with him or not, and on what points.

Here's my current sticking point:

I'm at the Transcendental Aesthetic, Section I: Space -
He says that, "Space is not an empirical concept that has been abstracted from outer experiences" (wow, I just realized that 'abstracted' is typed with only the left hand) Anyway, he's making the point that space is not something necessarily in the objects themselves, but is fundamentally really just our way of arranging the things as they present themselves to us. I can't think of anything really wrong with this idea, but I'd need a good reason to believe it. Here's the one that he supplies that I'm most inclined to agree with:

"For the presentation of space must already lie at the basis in order for certain sensations to be referred to something outside me (i.e., referred to something in a location of space other than the location in which I am)."

The () and i.e. are his. I don't even understand what this means. I mean, I understand the syllogism that he's making, I just don't see how A follows B. Say: IF the things I see look like they're at a different place than I am THEN space (aka things being at different places) must be a part of how I'm looking at the things and not a part of the things themselves.

How does that follow? What am I missing?

His statement seems to contain the assumption that I experience myself as existing in space, and I don't know if I agree with that. I experience things like my hands and my torso as existing in space the same way that I experience things like a guitar or a computer as existing in space - But my own very self? The 'I'? How does one experience that as being in space?

Especially since he says earlier that, "Time cannot be intuited outwardly, any more than space can be intuited as something within us". What sort of thing experiences itself as existing in space, but does not experience itself as having any space within itself? A geometrical point, I guess... But I don't experience any normal objects as geometrical points in space...

Pickup Truck

2006-03-07T07:06:00.000-08:00

My family just got a pickup truck.

If you know my family, you'll understand that this is odd. We're a minivan family.

My parents grew up in New Jersey. I didn't think they knew what a pickup truck was.

I guess a lot of things are changing with the move to California.

PC

2006-03-04T18:20:00.000-08:00

Is there such a thing as a family trait? Yes.
Are there physical family traits? Yes. Hair color, height, skin color, bone structure, etc.
Are there emotional family traits? Moral? Psychological?
Trickier question. The answer is yes, there are. If your Dad has a problem with drinking, you're likely to have the same problem. If your Mom is really good at math, you're likely to have the same skill. This is probably mostly because you were raised by your parents, and almost everything you know you learned from them - But that doesn't make it any less a family trait.

Is a race a very big family? Yes.
This is the support for racism. There very well might be an entire race with certain distinct moral or psychological traits. They're passed down from parent to child the same way race itself is. What color skin a person has is probably a very good indicator of what type of person they are.
Here's why racism is bad: Who cares about a person's traits? Having a trait seems to me to be the same thing as slavery - Slavery to the past, slavery to your parents, slavery to your genetics. If it makes you act a certain way, you're a slave to it.

I am not a slave. I am free. I have no traits. If I act as though I do it's a symptom of my sin nature. A symptom of my enslavement to the world and my flesh.

In general, here's a good rule. Don't prejudge people. Don't postjudge people. Don't judge people. If I'm right and people have a free will, it's not possible to judge anything about them. They're FREE. At least, we ought to treat them as though they are. They could act any way at any time regardless of their past actions, genetic makeup, parents, environmental factors, upbringing, education, or anything, and it's THEIR OWN CHOICE.

Nobody should be blamed because of their race, and nobody should be excused because of their race.

Blogger Settings

2006-03-03T12:47:00.000-08:00

Let me make it clear that I basically spend all day every day fiddling with the settings on programs. If I had a nickel for every time I clicked on the word "Properties"...

I'd probably be getting paid about the same.

Anyway, I pretty much ignored the settings for this blog, with the result that I turned off comments by carelessness. I apologize to anybody who wanted to leave a comment but couldn't. I don't hate you. I want to read your comments, and I want everybody else to be able to as well.

I love comments. Well, I love your comments because I love you. I hate all those other people.

(The joke is that I'm addressing the ENTIRE WORLD. There aren't other people.)

Anyway, please leave comments. If you leave a comment to this post it will officially count as a meta-comment.

2006-03-03T11:58:00.000-08:00

Sir Robert and I talked for a long time last night about whether there's a difference between miracles and regular physics. I currently think (not with certainty) that there's no important difference between something done by God via 'regular physics' (= something we understand, like gravity's inverse square law) and something done by God via Jesus saying, "Let it be done". He thinks there is a difference. I was asking him exactly what the difference was so I could believe in it and agree with him and then convince everybody else so that the church on earth will have perfect unity of doctrine.
We talked about whether there's a difference between being carried along by a sneeze and being carried along by a prophetic utterance.
If there is a difference, I don't see it, and I wasn't able to see it via Sir Robert - (Which is rare. Usually we come to an agreement in like 30 seconds - He's very bright, and very often right)

Fun times. Fun times. Fun times. I say it again, fun times.

2006-03-01T14:37:00.000-08:00

Right now the weeks go by very very fast.

I spent the day removing malware from a client's computer.

I feel that the writer of that malware is my invisible enemy. My adversary. An evil force against whom I bend my will. We fight. In fact it's a war. I'm just a little soldier in one army.

I fight to protect my clients, and he fights to steal from them, or just from malicious mischeviousness.

Does this conform to the law of love? I want people to be able to use their computers because I love them. But I hurt my enemy in this war, and he hurts me. The casualties are time and energy spent, files lost or corrupted, money.

I am not at peace. I'm fighting somebody. It's a person. They want the computer to exist one way, and I want it another way. If they get their way, they get paid by advertisers, or they steal a credit card number and get money. If I get my way, my client's computer is free and happy. I'm fighting for justice and good and right and the American way - But I'm fighting. I'm killing my opponent. Not as much as a soldier kills his opponent, but more than a peaceful man does.

I am not a pacifist. I would have to be able to draw a line between wasting somebody's time and wasting their life to be a pacifist, and I can't find where that line goes. How much do you have to hurt somebody for it to count as war or killing or murder? I say it counts if you do it at all. And I say it's right to do it. It's just and good to fight evil to protect the innocent.

2006-02-14T14:20:00.000-08:00

I do not understand girls.

This is why I am spending Valentine's Day at home playing Romance of the Three Kingdoms VIII, eating black licorice Twizzlers and surfing the web. Maybe I'll play some Gitaroo Man. If you have not heard of Gitaroo Man, it is an extremely awesome game which is very hard to find now. If you EVER see it in the store, buy it as a reflex action.

The perfect girl would love video games.

2006-02-09T09:55:00.000-08:00

Servant Leader

I had an interesting thought this morning, wondering about leadership. It seems to me that the fundamental definition of a leader is one who says, "Let my will be done", and the fundamental definition of a follower is one who says, "Let your will be done". This makes the time when Jesus' washed His disciples' feet a very strange event to me: Was He being a leader or a servant or both? He performed an action that was usually performed by servants. That is, nobody wants to wash somebody else's feet, so they have to be commanded to do it. They say, "Okay, your will be done, I'll wash the feet." However, when Christ washed His disciples' feet, He wasn't obeying their will. He was taking on the role of a leader by saying, "My will be done. I will now wash your feet." In fact, when one of the disciples protested, saying, "No, my will be done, You may not wash my feet", Jesus did not take on the role of a servant. In this confrontation, the role of the servant would have been to say, "Okay. Your will be done. I will not wash your feet." Instead, He gave a reason why He should wash his feet, and then the two agreed, and the feet were washed.

It seems like Jesus was not really being a servant here. If He had been a servant, He would have said something like, "Disciples, your will be done. Would you like Me to wash your feet?" And they, taking the role of leader, might have said, "Okay. Our will is that You wash our feet" This is the example given when in church I hear the strange doctrine of the Servant Leader propounded.

It seems to go something like this: A Servant Leader serves people by leading them. Let's translate this according to the fundamental definitions above: A Servant Leader does peoples' will by making them do his will.

This is only logically possible when the will of the Servant Leader and the will of the person-being-servant-led are for the same thing. As soon as there is any disagreement, one can no longer be a Servant Leader but must become either a servant and do what the other person wants, or a leader and do what ones own self wants. This is what happened at the foot-washing. As soon as the disciple disagreed with Him, Christ took on the role of leader and told him what to do.

However, this theory smells incomplete to me. I must think more on this.

2006-01-31T21:35:00.000-08:00

I think that many people around me (including myself) have a strange disease... I would name it Failure To Realize That Nothing Matters. Seriously. I've been hearing this line in sermon's since I was old enough to go to big people church: "Jesus, you are everything to me". Jesus said, "Store up your treasures in heaven, where moth and rust do not destroy or theives break in and steal.", "Sell all you have and follow me", "Anyone who does not give up his family for me is not worthy of me", "Take up your cross and follow me,", etc. etc.

The idea, logically, is something like this:
1) God created you.
2) God does what is good.
3) #1 + #2 = You ought to exist.
4) Plus existance is nice.
5) Your existance is being threatened by death.
6) Christ is the solution to death.

Numbers 7 through infinity are things like wealth or family or other people who are not Christ or computers or candy or rocks or dolphins; If you don't give them up for the sake of Christ (for the sake of #6 for the sake of #3 and #4) then you aren't worthy of Him (and you aren't worthy of #6, #3, and #4). This neatly divides everything in the world into 2 sets: Important Things (#1 - #6) and Unimporant Things (#7 on).

The disease I mentioned above happens when somebody doesn't realize this, and spends a lot of time and effort and worry and bother on anything in the Unimportant Things set. The symptom of this disease is fear.

Please do not have this disease! Let me exhort you to not have pain or fear or worry over anything that is not in #1 - #6! This means do not worry about boys or girls. Do not worry about what to eat, or what to wear, or where to go, or what time it is. Do not worry about money. Do the lillies of the field mean to be clothed as they are? Do they worry about it? No! It happens by divine providence, or, from the point of view of the lillies, by accident. Not for any reason that they have to worry about. Be like the lillies. I am trying to be like the lillies.