Figuring it all out for over one quarter of a century

01 July 2009 @ 08:08 pm

In which the light at the end of the tunnel turns out to be a train.

"It is not really a banquet but the idea of a banquet," Tamalane said. One clawlike hand described a circle in the air. "The dessert comes, something totally unexpected. The penitent thinks: Ahhh, I have been forgiven at last! You understand?"
Duncan shook his head from side to side. No, he did not understand.
"It is the sweetness of the moment," she said. "You have been through every course of a painful banquet, and come out at the end to something you can savor. But! As you savor it, then comes the most painful moment of all, the recognition, the understanding that this is not pleasure-at-the-end. No, indeed. This is the ultimate pain of the major punishment. It locks in the Bene Gesserit lesson."
-Frank Herbert, Heretics of Dune

My father is a prophet. I realize that's hard for many to swallow, but the fact remains that he has on numerous occasions had dreams/visions giving him little glimpses of the future.

My own spiritual giftings are not so extraordinary. However, it was not uncommon for me to gain knowledge about a person that I really should have had no way of knowing. For example (and it is a very strange example), back in my high school days I seemed to have the uncanny ability to pinpoint exactly how far a girl had gone sexually, often after only a minute of interaction. I'm not exactly sure what the purpose of such a spiritual gift was, nor could I tell you how it was that so many girls ended up confessing their histories to me. But they did, and I always turned out to have been correct. Write it off as my simply being a good observer of people if you wish. For what it's worth, I don't think I can do it anymore. Of course, when pretty much everybody you interact with is married, it kind of takes the guesswork out of things.

But I digress. Intuition and the study of humans does not explain the unusual insight granted to me in the next little portion of my life. Here too, I am not sure what the significance of the following is to my narrative, except that it is true. When it became clear to me that my Dark Night was ending, a girl entered my life, which was not so strange. The strange part was that I knew beforehand how my wooing of this girl would go.¹ The major events of the next month were simply Known to me.

It did not feel like it was fated, predestined, or even a really clever plan. It was more like I was looking back on the events after they had already happened. Things did not have to play out as I foresaw, it's just that they did and would play out that way.

I knew exactly what I had to do to set everything in motion: borrow a book from her. This wasn't even a ploy; I really did want to read it. And it was a very good book, so I finished it very quickly. I returned it to her, and we got to talking, as I knew we would. The conversation turned to church friends, as I expected it to, and I mentioned the party mine just happened to be having that evening, and invited her along. To my unsurprise, she said yes. We went, enjoyed ourselves, and spent some more time talking afterward. And that was all it took. After that, she stopped by a lot.
( So far, so good. )

¹ Certain parties to the following events may want to stop reading this (you know who you are).

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24 June 2009 @ 06:46 pm

Testimonial 6: All Alone in the Night

I which I learn that you must do what is right, even if it gains you nothing.

"It may be hard for an egg to turn into a bird: it would be a jolly sight harder for it to learn to fly while remaining an egg. We are like eggs at present. And you cannot go on indefinitely being just an ordinary, decent egg. We must be hatched or go bad." -C. S. Lewis

In evangelical circles, it is (half-)jokingly said that you should never pray for patience. If you do, God tends to answer the prayer by providing you with ample opportunities to practice patience. When I resumed my prayer life, I included the following simple, powerful, and incredibly dangerous prayer: "Lord, do whatever it takes to make me a better person." Asking to be a better person encompasses not only patience, but a whole host of other inconvenient virtues. Tacking on the phrase "do whatever it takes" then multiplies the danger quotient of any prayer; you signify to God that nothing is off-limit in the pursuit of this goal. Hopefully, you do this with the knowledge that what He considers an acceptable loss is usually far greater than what you would. I knew this, and I prayed it anyway. It is possible that this prayer will go down as the most virtuous act of my life. I am convinced that this was what led to me being plunged into my own Dark Night of the Soul.

They don't usually tell you about the dark night of the soul in Sunday School, but it is actually a standard part of the Christian experience. Augustine faced it, Martin Luther suffered through it, St. John of the Cross named it, Mother Theresa spent most of her ministry in it. Jesus himself experienced one while on the cross, and found it more unbearable than the physical torture he was undergoing. The experience is not even limited to Christians; mystics of all stripes typically go through a period of intense emptiness and hopelessness before they break through to the other side. Even in non-spiritual matters the same pattern holds. To get through pregnancy, you must endure childbirth. Before summer break, you must face finals. Every good story builds the tension on higher and higher before finally wiping it away.

The core of the dark night is an overpowering sense of God's absence. It is indescribable, miserable, and more than a little mystical. Very often, this spiritual depression will find a more tangible focus, such as the loss of a loved one, some difficult circumstance, or some unanswered prayer. Mine focused on the major unfulfilled desire of my heart. I was lonely.

There is no personal validation that comes close to romance. When another person commits to you, they are in effect saying that they are so impressed with what you have done with your life that they are willing to dedicate their own life to it. Even if we put that aside, we are still designed even at our most primal level to seek out a mate. Nothing can quite hide the sense of emptiness when you are single. Reasoning cannot paper over it or assuage it, however true the reasons may be. When we are single, we know we are missing out on something, and it is nearly impossible to see why that should be. Who really even cares why? One might as well lecture the starving about economics. We just want it fixed.

I hadn't had a girlfriend for almost two years, which at the tender age of 18 seemed like an eternity. Now, the high school portion of that was not a big deal; I was too sick to date as a Junior, and dating as a Senior seemed pointless, since I was just going to be leaving for college soon. But the time for such excuses was past. I was in college now, I knew lots of girls (Christian girls, even, which I knew to be a requirement), and I was still getting nowhere. More time passed, and I reached the tender age of 19, at which point the male body apparently kicks the hormones into overdrive. Still I was getting nowhere.

I was in college now. What I was doing wasn't working. But there were... other options open to me. A trip to the right party, some minor indiscretions which wouldn't even be viewed as indiscretions by most, and I would be loosed.

Except that would be wrong. And I knew it. I've known plenty of others who could do such things and still legitimately claim to be Christians, but for me to would involve deliberately turning my back on God. We sin in a thousand ways daily even though we should, but even so, there seem to be some lines that we really mustn't cross. If I turned away here and said, "I know it's wrong, but I really don't care," would I still be a follower of Christ? This was clearly my latest test.

But oh, how I resented it. This was not how things were supposed to go. I had held up my end of the bargain, and now God was supposed to be working all things for the good of me. What was taking so long? For some reason, He was holding out on me. In the cosmic staring test between us, I was glowering with all my might, and He was just looking placidly back, not a care in the world. God was again presenting me with the question: was I serving Him because of all the good stuff it brought, or was I serving Him to serve Him? And a new principle began to make itself clear to me: God will give us anything that we are willing to do without.

To gain your life, you must lose it. Everything is within our grasp—if we loosen our grip. God wants to give us the world, but He will not abide us wanting anything more than we want Him. If I was going to achieve my desires, I first had to let them go. I had to be willing to do without what I wanted. And though I suspected that in choosing to do without it, I would very likely get it, I could not depend on that. When they faced the fiery furnace, Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego declared, "The God we serve is able to save us from it, and He will rescue us from your hand, O king. But even if He does not, we want you to know, O king, that we will not serve your gods or worship the image of gold you have set up." They knew He could, and they were even pretty sure that He would, but as far as they were concerned, all of that was basically prologue. The important thing was whether or not they were obedient.

It was not a revelation I came to quickly. This particularly trial began not long after I started college, and stretched well into my sophomore year. But as I reconciled myself to the idea of doing what was right, whether or not it benefited me, God became visible in the place where He had seemed absent before. And before long, I met a girl.

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12 June 2009 @ 06:19 pm

Numbers - Stimulus and Unemployment

	Unemployment rate
Maximum unemployment rate Obama promised if we passed the stimulus:	8%
Unemployment rate he warned we would hit if we "did nothing":	9%
Where we are now:	9.4%

From another angle: the following chart shows the unemployment numbers used in the bank "stress tests" to determine whether they could weather a "more adverse" scenario:

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24 May 2009 @ 06:55 pm

Incompleteness

As a side note to my earlier skeptical look at contradictions, logic itself is also an insufficient guide to the Truth. In part, this is because it relies entirely on your axioms being correct in order to get you anywhere correct. If one of those is wrong, your conclusion will be wrong too, as when Lord Kelvin used the logical but incorrect scientific theories of his time to very logically and incorrectly calculate the age of the Earth as 100 million years.

But that doesn't necessarily kill logic. If we could just drum up the right set of axioms, we could then use logic to ferret out all those little bits of Truth that have eluded us all this time. Sadly, Godel threw a wrench into even that plan with his irritating little incompleteness theorem. It turns out that for any logical system, there is going to be something in that system that, while true, can never be proven true in the system. This has been mathematically proven, which is about as absolutely certain as we are capable of being of something.

So, even logic, love it though I do, is not enough if you intend to seek out the Truth. It may be useful, but it can only make up part of your approach. More is needed.

And don't let those Vulcans tell you otherwise; they don't even have a planet anymore.

Everything you know is (Probably) Wrong
Incompleteness | I am large, I contain multitudes | Always Let Your Conscience be Your Guide | Life by the Numbers | Scientific Truth

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13 May 2009 @ 08:38 pm

Theodicy Primer

The Problem of Evil is a bit of an odd-ball. On a basic intellectual level, I actually find it very uninteresting because there are so many intellectually satisfying answers. On a more meta level, it's fascinating, because there no emotionally satisfying answers. Here, at any rate, is very quick run-down of some of the intellectual answers. There's some overlap between some of these, and some mutual incompatibility between others, but I think one could mount a good defense of any of them. This is not an exhaustive list; it's just off the top of my head. Feel free to add your own!

You have Free Will. Sadly, Free Will inherently means the ability to choose evil. Them's just the shakes.

You don't have Free Will. Is it wrong that we take some wood and turn it into a Shakespeare play and take other wood and turn it into toilet paper, then flush it down the toilet (after all, it isn't the paper's fault that it's got poop on it now)? No, it's morally neutral and entirely up to us what purposes and ends we put the wood pulp to. Without free will, you're just another mass of molecules not significantly different from the wood pulp. Puppets don't get to choose what parts they act, and there's nothing wrong with that. See also Isaiah 45:9.

Between those two we've pretty much got everything covered already, but let's go on.

It's worth it, because the existence of evil enables even greater goods. It is clearly true that certain goods (triumph in the face of adversity, perseverance, justice, forgiveness, etc) require the presence of evil to exist. Whether they're worth it is a harder question, because we don't really have enough information. Of course, that's exactly the kind of thing God would know, and apparently He thinks it is.

To be a truly good world, you must have the Incarnation. To have the Incarnation, you must have sinners to save. This is similar to the previous point. The important thing to keep in mind is that under this view good is worth overpoweringly more than evil. In the standard "there is evil, therefore there is no good God" argument, you must take the view that the existence of any evil is so overpowering as to cancel out and obliterate all of the good. Here, we're comparing good and evil not like matter and anti-matter, but more like solid gold ingots and pocket lint. The Incarnation and subsequent redemption of mankind are so totally worth it that we'll take the million gold ingots untroubled by the fact that we may need to dust them off.

This is the best possible world. This one instinctively seems wrong to most of us. On the other hand, Liebniz thought it was true, and he invented Calculus, which makes him demonstrably smarter than all of you. Combined. On brain pills.

An all-good God isn't obligated to create the best possible world. If anything, He is obligated to create all worlds containing good. I'm partial to this belief myself, because wouldn't an all-good being want to manifest all Good? In fact when you think about it, the idea that God is obligated to create only the best possible world seems downright wrong, since it amounts to a claim that even if there were a perfect man in this world, he should be wiped from existence if some other guy in China 100 years ago shoplifted once. You could modify this to say that God is only obligated to create worlds where the good outweighs the bad, but the evidence is that God is willing to tolerate a lot of bad for the sake of even a little good. We happen to be in one of the worlds with evil in the mix.

The existence of evil actually proves the existence of a good God, because the very concept of evil is unintelligible without one. Also known as Lewis's Riposte, it's basically a rephrasing of the idea that you can't build a real moral system without a good God to undergird it. It's a philosophical argument that deserves a lot more explanation than I'm going to give you, but here's a segment in his own words.

You just don't understand. This doesn't really seem to be much of answer, but it does need to be kept in mind, since we clearly don't understand everything. Plus, that's pretty much the gist of God's own answer to Job. Buck up, because we also have Paul's addendum: you just don't understand, but one day you will.

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12 May 2009 @ 10:15 pm

OM - this whole world is that syllable!

Well, I've recently finished going through the story of Krishna and a bunch of the Upanishads, so I guess I'm a bit more informed on Hinduism now. My favorite verse comes from the Taittiriya Upanishad, Chapter 3:7-9:

One should not belittle food-that is the rule. The lifebreath is food, and the body is the food-eater. ...
One should not reject food-that is the rule. ...
One should prepare a lot of food-that is the rule.

It's possible that I've indiscriminately snipped out the boring portions, butchering the text, though probably a lot less than you think.Other highlights include paeans to how much better members of the Brahmin caste are than everybody else.

In addition, I must say that I've never seen a religious text that talks about semen nearly as much as these did. In fairness to the text, it does make sense and fit in pretty well.

I still think that Hinduism is the religion with the most going for it after Christianity.

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04 May 2009 @ 11:57 am

Analogies

Marriage : lust ::
Capitalism : greed ::
Government : violence

No comment, just wanted to get that down somewhere for future perusal.

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03 May 2009 @ 06:19 pm

RIP Tiny

Tiny the chinchilla, father of four, died yesterday at the age of twelve, most likely from a stroke. In high school he helped me through Lyme Disease. When I went off to college, he accompanied me, and performed the valuable service of luring women into my room. His last days were spent in the spacious estate of Narnia, a wardrobe that had been repurposed into a multi-level chinchilla paradise.

Surviving are fellow chinchillas Pinky and Delilah. Pinky gave birth to his 4 children, but the two later had a falling out. Delilah shared the Narnia estate, but says that the two of them were "just friends," describing Tiny as a "nice guy."

Tiny loved raisins, dust baths, and getting scratched under the chin. He disliked hot peppers, and cats that stuck their paws through the cage bars. He was a great chinchilla and he will be missed.

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25 April 2009 @ 06:08 pm

I am large, I contain multitudes

About 80 years ago, the general scientific consensus was that the universe was eternal, having no starting point. This pleased many, because they could look with disdain on those silly people who took seriously ancient religious texts claiming that God had created the universe in a flash of light at some instant in the past.

Around the 1930s, a rabble-rouser named Georges Lemaitres made some waves with a theory that would later become known as the Big Bang. He proposed that the universe came into being from a single point at a single moment of creation. The atheists hated this idea, and attacked it as being a clear attempt to infect science with religion. A rather brazen one, in fact, given that Lemaitres was a Roman Catholic priest. British physicist William Bonner declared that, "The underlying motive is, of course, to bring in God as creator. It seems like the opportunity Christian theology has been waiting for ever since science began to depose religion from the minds of rational men in the seventeenth century." Soviets, ever the proponents of scientific atheism, branded Big Bang promoters "falsifiers of science who want to revive the fairy tale of the origin of the world from nothing," and sent several of them to labor camps.

Mostly, they did so because they wanted to believe in an eternal universe, but they did have a little evidence, too. According to the calculations undergirding the Big Bang Theory, the universe was 1.8 billion years old. Radioactive dating had proved the Earth to be over 3.6 billions years old. This was a clear contradiction. Obviously, the Big Bang is wrong.

Later, it turned out that Edwin Hubble's observations had been off, allowing the universe's birth date to be pushed back far beyond Earth's. As it turned out, a reader of Genesis 1 was better informed about the start of the universe than the highest scientific experts, and eventually the Big Bang became the new scientific consensus. So, even something as simple as basic logic and pointing out an apparent contradiction will not necessarily lead you to the truth.

Many religions, in fact, are built on apparent contradictions, powered by the tension between the two extremes. Taoism particularly stands out in this regard. In the Tao Te Ching, you'll find the statement "He who humbles himself shall be preserved entire. He who bends shall be made straight. He who is empty shall be filled. He who is worn out shall be renewed." Westerners will note that this sounds remarkably like Christianity's Sermon on the Mount. Christianity may not be as centered around such things as Taoism, but it still has its own set of paradoxes that it puts forth.

But I digress. Though many self-styled skeptics like to point to contradictions like this as disproofs of a given religion, it is apparent to most of us that these are of a different nature from flat-out logical contradictions. Unfortunately, it turns out that even clear logical contradictions do not provide us with a fool-proof truth-finding mechanism. What seems like a contradiction may in fact only be due to your own faulty understanding, or a simple data error.

Physicists have apparently taken the lesson to heart, because they now preach both Einstein's relativity and quantum mechanics, even though the two are known to be mutually incompatible. Both can explain phenomena that the other cannot, and neither can seem to incorporate the other (quantum physics most notably can't explain gravity). If you believe in modern physics, you too believe in something even though it contradicts itself.

Everything you know is (Probably) Wrong
I am large, I contain multitudes | Always Let Your Conscience be Your Guide | Life by the Numbers | Scientific Truth

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21 April 2009 @ 07:49 pm

Always Let Your Conscience be Your Guide

"It is clear, then, that some men are by nature free, and others slaves, and that for these latter slavery is both expedient and right." -Aristotle

The ancients had a lot of moral blind spots. Slavery is one we are particularly aware of, in part because we only ended it very recently, but there are plenty of others things we could list. Our forefathers treated women like cattle, ditched their unwanted babies in the woods to die, and were rather fond of sex with little boys. Your own grandparents probably held a number of moral views that you would find embarrassing or even repugnant. In a few decades, your grandkids will feel the same about your views.

All of these people had consciences, just like we do; that little voice guiding them through right and wrong. And in many notable cases, it failed. Sometimes it was silent in the face of wrongdoing; sometimes it actively sanctioned the wrong.

If we think about it a bit, we ourselves have experience with the fallibility of our own consciences. At some time in our life, we have each done something that seemed fine at the time, but we afterward felt terrible about. Inversely, our conscience can be made silent about wrongdoings through repeated exposure to them, even if they at first horrified it. No surprise then, that whenever somebody works out their own morality, they discover that all the things they find most tempting are perfectly okay.

So, we can't fully trust our conscience, which is probably not that surprising to most of us. But I wonder if we fully grasp the implications of this. Some of the things that we feel are right are actually wrong. Some of the things we think are wrong are actually right. So, if we were to encounter the perfect moral system, parts of it (perhaps very large parts) would seem wrong to us. The perfect religion should grate on you.

Everything you know is (Probably) Wrong
I am large, I contain multitudes | Always Let Your Conscience be Your Guide | Life by the Numbers | Scientific Truth

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11 April 2009 @ 09:08 pm

Life by the Numbers

I enjoy giving atheists a good ribbing on this blog, so I suppose it's only fair to give a little credit where credit is due. The numbers, as it happens, don't all tilt against them. While church attendence correlates with all kinds of good stuff, people who simply call themselves Christians cannot make the same claim. In fact, when you compare self-proclaimed atheists with self-proclaimed "born-again Christians," the atheists tend to come out on top. In IQ tests, they average 17 points higher, and on the old SAT, their scores were about 200 points higher. In America, atheists make 2/3 more than Christians. In the world at large, the higher the percentage of Christians in a country, the poorer it tends to be; the more atheists, the richer it is.

"Born-again" Christians are far more likely to get arrested, and are in fact four times as likely to end up in jail. And despite all the talk of family values, we are slightly more likely to get divorced, and significantly more likely to have children out of wedlock.
( And it gets worse )

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07 April 2009 @ 06:12 pm

Happiness is a used book sale

Really, is there anything better than a good used book sale?¹ They sell actual knowledge and wisdom at deep discounts, nicely combining my thirst for learning with my inborn cheapness. Recently, I got to go to the Bryn Mawr Book Sale. Jennifer and I emerged with about 20 books for about $30, and now I've got to work through them.

Last week, I finished up the writings up Mencius, one of the premier Confucians. I was rather impressed with him, actually. Many of his views were downright Christian, such as the idea that rulers exist for the sake of the people, rather than vice versa. He even lays down a positive formulation of the Golden Rule, though in most systems the negative formulation is more common ("do good unto others" as opposed to "don't do bad things to others"). Of course, he also tempers that with the view that everyone should stay in their place, and is at least as concerned that people observe The Rites. Still, he was way ahead of his time, and deserves some credit for that.

I'm now moving on to Calvin's Institutes, or at least a slightly abridged version. It's with a great deal of shame that I must admit that until now, I haven't read any Calvin. but, better late than never, and once I'm through with this, I think I'll have at least touched on each of the most significant Christian thinkers. It's a big list, though, and there are certainly plenty more important ones I have yet to read.

The trouble is that there's just far, far more out there to know than I could ever hope to assimilate. I don't know whether that fact excites or depresses me.

¹ Answer: Yes. This girl.

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06 April 2009 @ 06:39 pm

Scientific Truth

The Earth lies at the center of the universe. Around it rotate the Moon, the Sun, and the planets. Encompassing all of this is the great celestial sphere, into which each of the stars are set. You'd think things would be good for Earth here at the center, but it turns out it's pretty rough. Everything from the Moon down is subject to decay. The heavens, though, are pristine and pure, and never change.

Such was the wisdom handed down by Aristotle well over two thousand years ago, and such was the scientific consensus up until a mere few hundred years ago. It deserved to be the scientific consensus too, because it aligned very well with the observed world. Oh sure, that Copernicus came up with a heliocentric model in the mid-1500s, but there just wasn't anything to support it. Put aside for the moment the rather clear observational evidence that the Moon, Sun and stars revolve around us. Try even to put out of your mind the little detail that if Earth were doing all this spinning and orbiting then by all rights we should be flung from its surface.

The stars alone provide the evidence. If the Earth were not at the center of the celestial sphere, then when we compared them to each other throughout the year, we would notice what is called "parallax," whereby the apparent positions of the stars would shift as we changed locations. But there is no stellar parallax, which puts us pretty clearly at the center of these many rotating spheres. Now, of course you could get around this by theorizing that the stars are so infinitely far away from us that the parallax is unmeasurable, but we invented Occam's Razor specifically to deal with troublemakers like you.

As for the immutability of the heavens, that is confirmed by simple observational evidence. We have been watching them for thousands of years, and they have remained the same. What more evidence could you want?

All of it fit the best observational evidence available, and all of it was quite wrong. In 1572, Tycho Brahe noticed a new star in the sky, and called it a "nova" after the Latin word for "new." This disproved Aristotle's view of the immutable heavens, and inspired Tycho to take up astronomy, where he gathered volumes of the most accurate astronomical data yet. Kepler¹ in turn took this data and used it to ferret out the three laws of planetary motion, placing the sun at the center and helping to spark the scientific revolution while he was at it.

Ah, science. Science has shown us marvelous things, and unearthed countless immutable natural laws that govern the world we live in. What's that? How do we know they're immutable? Why, we've been watching them for hundreds of years and they have remained the same. What more evidence could you want?

Actually, science does not show us that the world is governed by immutable, repeatable laws, so much as it assumes it. The naive will tell you that a single contradictory observation is enough to disprove a scientific theory, but in truth, science has built up a number of mechanisms specifically for the purpose of ignoring any instances where he physical laws might vary, or where observations might be outside of what the theory expects.

In fact, the field of statistics is basically there in order to smooth out or discard observations that don't seem to fit the scientific law. In a large enough sample, we actually expect to find outliers. But, because we assume that nature is consistent, we have made methods to fit them into the bulk of compliant data, ignoring this rather consistent reminder that perhaps nature is not consistent. If a particular outlier is troublesome enough, we may even exclude it from our dataset altogether.

The fact that we demand repeatability is actually a tacit admission of the fact that the universe isn't as consistent as we like. If one group of researchers conducts an experiment and gets a given result, but nobody else can duplicate it, the conclusion is that they made a mistake somewhere (or were lying). It's never that the laws of nature might apply themselves inconsistently, even though this explains the situation just as well.

Our faith in immutable laws is so strong that we actually discard and ignore our own observations that they are not so. And here, I use to term "we" to literally mean both myself and you dear readers. For me, the most memorable instance was a chemistry lab I carried out in college. I don't recall the details of the experiment, but I do recall that according to the measurements we had taken, my lab partner and I had apparently created mass. Naturally, we concluded that we had made a mistake. But why did we conclude that? We concluded it because ultimately, we had more faith in what some book told us than we did in our own clear observations of the world.

All of you do, too. I am confident that every one of us has had numerous occasions where our measurements in the school laboratory did not match up to what the theory said they should have been. Odds are good that you nudged them a bit in the right direction, because otherwise your teacher would mark you down. Odds are also good that it never even occurred to you to think "maybe the theory is wrong."

I'm afraid I'm not leading to any glorious demonstration of why we should believe that the universe is rational and consistent. Even though I could probably come up with a few theological underpinnings, it still boils down to certain leaps of faith. I still do believe that the universe is lawful and that my own experiences to the contrary were due to mistakes on my part, but it's not something I can come up with a good justification for.

Once you've learned how the sausage is made, it's so much more difficult to feel confident about the final product.

¹ It should be mentioned, by the way, that both Kepler and Tycho were devout Lutherans. Kepler was so dedicated to his faith that chose to leave his home and all his belongings rather than convert to Catholicism. Don't judge the Catholics too harshly for this; Kepler's exile was what forced him and Tycho together in the first place.

Everything you know is (Probably) Wrong
I am large, I contain multitudes | Always Let Your Conscience be Your Guide | Life by the Numbers | Scientific Truth

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21 March 2009 @ 10:33 pm

Revival Fires

One particularly interesting tidbit I picked up from Christianity's Dangerous Idea was that the Azusa Street Revival was not in fact that start of the Pentecostal movement. Or rather, it was only one of several such beginnings. Within the space of about five years, numerous Pentecostal revivals broke out independently around the world.

The Welsh revival may have been the earliest, starting at around 1904, and netting 100,000 converts in about 6 months. The Korean revival overlapped this somewhat, starting in 1903, but reaching the climax at Pyongyang in 1907. Though they highly emphasized the Holy Spirit during this time, there does not appear to have been any speaking in tongues during this revival. On the other hand, charismatic features such as miraculous healings became so prevalent that the Korean Presbyterian Church was forced to amend their bylaws which had originally stated "The power of doing miracles stopped at present time."

Pentecost also came to India, at the Mukti Mission, a home for poor women and children. Inspired by the Welsh revival, they started praying for one of their own in 1905. It hit that same year, and included featured the gift of tongues, and the fact that the participants tended to describe their experience as feeling like they were on fire.

And, also at around the same time (1906), the Azusa Street revival took off. This actually had roots going back a few years earlier to Charles Parham, who lead prayer meetings asking for (and receiving) the gift of tongues back at the turn of the century. Though he may have been something of a white supremacist (such claims are in dispute), it was a black student of his who really sparked the movement. William J. Seymour, the son of freed slaves, attended Parham's seminary, and then brought those ideas back to LA, sparking the Azusa Street revival. This revival was marked especially by the gift of tongues and a large amount of interracial mixing (note that it would be another 50 years before Martin Luther King Jr.'s campaign got underway). The LA Times derogatorily described it as follows: "Colored people and a sprinkling of whites compose the congregation, and night is made hideous in the neighborhood by the howlings of the worshippers who spend hours swaying forth and back in a nerve-racking attitude of prayer and supplication." From there, Pentecostalism spread throughout America, forming several denominations, including my own home, the Assemblies of God.

The fact that most of these occurred without knowledge of each other is interesting in itself, but these scattered events are also very significant to the world today. I've recently mentioned the massive growth Christianity has been experiencing; I may not have mentioned that it has almost all been of the Pentecostal/Charismatic type. Go Team!

Tags: christian history, christianity

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14 March 2009 @ 09:15 pm

Quotes

Just some notable passages I've encountered in my recent readings:

"In the Louvre there is a picture, by Guido Reni, of St. Michael with his foot on Satan's neck. The richness of the picture is in large part due to the fiend's figure being there. The richness of its allegorical meaning also is due to his being there--that is, the world is all the richer for having a devil in it, SO LONG AS WE KEEP OUR FOOT UPON HIS NECK. In the religious consciousness, that is just the position in which the fiend, the negative or tragic principle, is found; and for that very reason the religious consciousness is so rich from the emotional point of view." -William James, Varieties of Religious Experience

"What Dawkins does not seem to appreciate is that his Blind Watchmaker is something even more remarkable than Paley’s watches. Paley finds a “watch,” and asks how such a thing could have come to be there by chance. Dawkins finds an immense automated factory that blindly constructs watches, and feels that he has completely answered Paley’s point. But that is absurd. How can a factory that makes watches be less in need of explanation than the watches themselves?" -Stephen Barr, quoted in What's so Great about Christianity?

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09 March 2009 @ 09:07 pm

Links - Smart Diplomacy, Limbaugh

Misc

Neither Moderate nor Centrist - Peter Robinson
Congratulations this week to three journalists who have finally taken up that constant struggle: Christopher Buckley, David Gergen and David Brooks. All three used to insist that Obama was some species of centrist or moderate. Now that Obama has proposed the most massive expansion of government in the history of the republic, each has recognized that just conceivably he might have been mistaken. ... A couple of implications here are worth noting. The first is that a deep, recurring pattern of American life has asserted itself yet again: the cluelessness of the elite. ... Limbaugh and Sowell both got Obama right from the very get-go. "Just what evidence do you have," Sowell replied when I asked, shortly before the election, whether he considered Obama a centrist, "that he's anything but a hard-left ideologue?" The elite journalists, I repeat, got Obama wrong. The troglodytes got him right.
Should Geithner Go? - Megan McArdle
Henry Blodget thinks it is time for Timothy Geithner to go. So far, Geithner's performance has been shockingly unimpressive. It's not as if he's walking into the crisis anew; he's been the head of the New York Fed for years, and dealing with these issues from the very beginning. Yet on the really crucial problem of what to do about the banking system, he's been very nearly silent, going to Congress with a non-plan-plan that terrified the very markets it was supposed to reassure.
Shock! Palin Appoints Former Planned Parenthood Member to Supreme Court - Matthew Archbold
Gov. Sarah Palin on Wednesday picked a former board member of Planned Parenthood to fill the latest vacancy on the Alaska Supreme Court despite efforts by a conservative Christian group to convince her to do otherwise. Heartache? Now, before you write off Palin completely there are some extenuating circumstances. You should know the way the process in Alaska goes. A liberal board (made up of leftist trial lawyer types) nominates two people and the Governor has to pick one.
Another One Bites the Dust - Abe Greenwald
Timothy Geithner’s pick for deputy, Annette Nazareth, has made “a personal decision” to bow out of the interview and vetting process. At this point, it’s not the particular case of Nazareth that’s newsworthy. As the AP reports: "Five weeks into his tenure, [Geithner] has yet to name a single top deputy or assistant secretary. This has left Treasury with too few people authorized to make decisions or represent the department in meetings with stakeholders." Thank goodness we all managed to overlook the tax problems of this “indispensable” Obama pick.
What Should Conservatives Do About Obamanomics? - David P. Goldman
The Republican party has been reluctant to take on the moral issues that separate conservative libertarians and religious conservatives. These are decisive in the present crisis, for reasons I have tried to make clear in a number of essays on the subject at Asia Times Online and elsewhere. The first thing that conservatives have to tell Americans is: “You are poorer because you failed to bring up enough children. The decline of the traditional family is undermining the American economy.”
Yet Another Obama Nominee's Tax Problems - Paul L. Carson
Add Ronald Kirk, former Dallas mayor and President Obama's U.S. Trade Representative nominee, to the long and growing list of administration nominees and officials with tax problems (Gregory Craig, Tom Daschle, Tim Geithner, Nancy Killefer, and Hilda Solis). The Senate Finance Committee today released a three-page report detailing various mistakes on Mr. Kirk's 2005-2007 tax returns. Mr. Kirk has agreed to pay almost $10,000 in additional taxes for, among other things, wrongly deducting $17,000 for season tickets to the NBA Dallas Mavericks and wrongly taking charitable deductions for contributions of honoraria from speaking fees from Austin College even though he had not included the honoraria in his income.

Smart Diplomacy

The Great Destabilization - Mark Steyn
British prime minister Gordon Brown thought long and hard about what gift to bring on his visit to the White House last week. Barack Obama is the first African-American president, so the prime minister gave him an ornamental desk-pen holder hewn from the timbers of one of the Royal Navy’s anti-slaving ships of the 19th century, HMS Gannet. Even more appropriate, in 1909 the Gannet was renamed HMS President. The president’s guest also presented him with the framed commission for HMS Resolute, the lost British ship retrieved from the Arctic and returned by America to London, and whose timbers were used for a thank-you gift Queen Victoria sent to Rutherford Hayes: the handsome desk that now sits in the Oval Office. And, just to round things out, as a little stocking stuffer, Gordon Brown gave President Obama a first edition of Sir Martin Gilbert’s seven-volume biography of Winston Churchill. In return, America’s head of state gave the prime minister 25 DVDs of “classic American movies.”
Russian media teases Clinton over 'reset' button
Russian media has been poking fun at US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton after she gave her Russian counterpart a "reset" button with an ironic misspelling. Clinton's gift to Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov at their meeting in Geneva on Friday evening was meant to underscore the Obama administration's readiness to "to press the reset button" in ties with Moscow. But instead of the Russian word for "reset" (perezagruzka) it featured a slightly different word meaning "overload" or "overcharged" (peregruzka).
Nyet - Abe Greenwald
President Obama’s secret offer to Russia on scrapping an Eastern European missile defense shield is a debacle. Obama sent a letter to Dmitri Mevedev last month suggesting the U.S. would abandon its plan to deploy a missile intercept system in Poland and the Czech Republic if Moscow got Iran to halt its nuclear program. The worst part of the offer is not that the U.S. president was willing to turn his back on our Eastern European allies (that’s just a dangerous and depressing long-term side-effect); it’s that the offer was flatly rejected by Moscow. This is called diplomatic failure. ... Here are the fruits of “smart power” so far: Iran responds to President Obama’s “extended hand” by demanding apologies for a litany of American crimes; China has been given an American green-light to ramp up undisguised human rights abuses; the Russian president brushed off Obama’s appeal for help like so much dandruff; and Eastern Europe, where George W. Bush had successfully built up a spate of American allies, has been cut loose.
Barack Obama 'too tired' to give proper welcome to Gordon Brown - Tim Shipman
British officials, meanwhile, admit that the White House and US State Department staff were utterly bemused by complaints that the Prime Minister should have been granted full-blown press conference and a formal dinner, as has been customary. They concede that Obama aides seemed unfamiliar with the expectations that surround a major visit by a British prime minister. ... The official dismissed any notion of the special relationship, saying: "There's nothing special about Britain. You're just the same as the other 190 countries in the world. You shouldn't expect special treatment."

~~Bush~~ Rush Hate

A Poorly Chosen Foe - J. G. Thayer
There is considerable talk about the continuing fights between Obama and Rush Limbaugh. It appears to be a well-coordinated and deliberate move by the White House. The underlying strategy seems to be this: 1. Constantly identify and reinforce the notion of Limbaugh as the leader of the Republicans. 2. Attack and degrade Limbaugh. 3. Severely damage the Republican party as a consequence. When has attacking Rush Limbaugh ever actually achieved anything?
Rush and Hannity listeners most informed about US politics - Soren Dayton
The tastiest bit is that of all the categories, as measured in the poll, people who get their news from Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity are the most informed about US poltics. (at least if you accept Pew’s metric).

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08 March 2009 @ 07:46 pm

Ramblings and Portents

Today at church we the speaker was a Chinese missionary (in both the sense of being a Chinese guy and being a missionary to China), and I was once again reminded of one of the major stories of this century: the Christianization of Asia. In China, Christianity has gone indigenous and is exploding in membership. As with South Korea, which jumped from 1% to 30% Christian in a single century, they've now reached the point where they're sending out missionaries to other countries, particularly ones which are used to thinking of Christianity as a European thing.

These are the trends which are going to shape the future, and the main reason I think China may yet surpass us. If you want to understand the tides of history, you really have to study religion. Christianity rebuilt the West after Rome had collapsed under its own decadence, and infused it with thosee peculiar notions of individual rights. It was the Great Awakening that gave us Abolition, and the belief in a rational God that gave us science. Islam conquered large swaths of Africa and the Middle East and made them into the lovely places they are today. Hinduism split Indians into the castes around which they order their lives. Judaism has kept the Jews together as an identifiable people during several exiles and their 2 thousand year Diaspora, and then brought them back together to build perhaps the only worthwhile country in the Middle East. Confucianism united China into society that impressively remained stable (but ultimately stagnant) for about 2 thousand years.

Sadly, the religious factor is one that tends to get ignored in Western studies. Our theorists by and large accepted the theory that everyone would just become more secular, and we'd ultimately hit some sort of "End of History." Huntington, on the other hand, took religious differences seriously, and foresaw that Western civilization would be clashing with Islamic civilization. As goes the religion, so goes the region.

It's times like this that I wish I could jump forward a thousand years or so to see how things work out. I'd really like to read the great Asian and African theologians and see what bits of truth they've teased out of scripture that we've missed. At least we're starting to reach the point where we can get a glimpse.

At least when the Chinese are the dominant power, my kids will have an edge on all you whities.

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02 March 2009 @ 07:10 pm

Numbers - Deficits, Money Supply

Updated Deficit table

Government	Time Span		Deficit	Annual Rate
Bush Republican Congress	2000-2006		$2,832,795,689,328	$472,132,614,888
Bush Democratic Congress	2006-2008		$1,517,750,997,697	$758,875,498,848
Obama Democratic Congress	First month	Stimulus Package	$825,000,000,000	$2,985,000,000,000
	2/23/09	Obama holds Fiscal Responsibility Summit
	This week	Omnibus bill	$410,000,000,000
		Proposed budget	$1,750,000,000,000

Monetary Base

Tags: numbers

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02 March 2009 @ 05:37 pm

Links - Internation Relations, Abortion, Grammar

Don't Write off America - George Walden
There is something neurotic in Europe's view of the US, something perpetually out of kilter. Think of the crush on Bill Clinton felt by many women, the demonising of Bush and now Obamamania. We seem unable to get a cool, factual grip on the country, one that is free of fashion, inchoate historical resentments or delusions of superiority. Neurotic too - in the sense of arbitrary and unstable - is our view of American culture and society. It is possible to say anything and its opposite about the US and still command instant agreement.
How Do You Solve a Problem Like Abortion? - Ross Douthat
Which means that the universalization of this program, according to its supporters, might reduce the national abortion rate by somewhere between 1 and 2 percent. That's not nothing, obviously, but it's not a whole lot either - and in a country of millions upon millions, where countless trends shift the number of pregnancies and abortions around from year to year, it's perilously close to statistical noise. When you consider that there's good reason to think that Roe v. Wade raised the abortion rate by well over 50 percent, I think you can see why most opponents of abortion look at a "more birth control" strategy as a cop-out, rather than a cure.
Markets Aren’t Snowed by Summit - Jennifer Rubin
You have to chuckle at the AP headline which reads: “Obama urges spending curbs, hands out $15 billion.” But on a day when the Dow plummeted another 250 points and two consumer confidence surveys reached all time lows, this is no joking matter. The non-plan for a bank bailout, the mortgage bailout plan, the prospect of deficits as far as the eye can see, and the reminder that the Bush tax cuts will end in 2010 have sent investors scurrying and the markets plunging.
Do You Want To Know a Secret? - J.G. Thayer
Right now in Congress, they’re working on the budget. And just like the last time the House prepared to spend ungodly amounts of money, the Democrats have excluded the Republicans. Even worse, they’re not letting the public see the bill before it’s voted on. Meanwhile, the Obama administration is working on its defense bill. And to make certain that everyone sings from the same hymnal, they’ve ordered top defense officials to sign a secrecy oath that they will not discuss the details with anyone outside the federal government.
How to Win Friends and Influence Nothing - Abe Greenwald
So there's the much anticipated result of America being "liked" again. The man who promised to restore the U.S.'s image in the world has met with "repeated rebuffs" from our NATO allies and is hanging it up. (Just wait until he tries to cash in his good-guy chips in the Muslim world.) This marks Obama's second failure to elicit new international help: European countries have dashed all administration hopes of taking in Guantanamo detainees. It was always the height of silliness to suppose that leaders would readily send their countries' citizens to fight alongside Americans if only America would ask more nicely.
Governors v. Congress
Debt-laden state governments were supposed to be the big winners from the $787 billion economic stimulus bill. But at least five Republican Governors are saying thanks but no thanks to some of the $150 billion of "free" money doled out to states, because it could make their budget headaches much worse down the line. And they're right. These Governors -- Haley Barbour of Mississippi, Bobby Jindal of Louisiana, Butch Otter of Idaho, Rick Perry of Texas and Mark Sanford of South Carolina -- all have the same objection: The tens of billions of dollars of aid for health care, welfare and education will disappear in two years and leave states with no way to finance the expanded programs.
Obama and “Me” - Benjamin A. Plotinsky
Patricia T. O’Conner and Stewart Kellerman, writing in the [New York Times'] op-ed section today, point out that Obama often makes a common grammatical error, using the word “I” when he should properly use “me”—as in the phrase “a very personal decision for Michelle and I.” But it turns out, the authors continue, that the president isn’t really guilty of grammar crimes. “For centuries, it was perfectly acceptable to use either ‘I’ or ‘me’ as the object of a verb or preposition, especially after ‘and,’” they write. “It wasn’t until the mid-1800s that language mavens began kvetching about ‘I’ and ‘me.’” O’Conner and Kellerman are utterly wrong, as you can confirm by taking a quick look at English primers a good deal older than the nineteenth century.

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26 February 2009 @ 05:51 pm

Trial by water

I picked up an interesting little tidbit recently while reading about Johannes Kepler (father of modern astronomy and dedicated Lutheran). It turns out that witch-hunting predates Christianity by a lot.

In the Code of Hammurabi (ca. 1760 BC), we find the "trial by water" test for witch-craft. At the time, someone accursed of cursing another would have to throw themselves into the river. If they were innocent, the river would show it by floating them, but the guilty would sink.

It seems hard to imagine anyone being found innocent by this test, which is perhaps why the Assyrians flipped it around, so that the water would "receive" the innocent by sinking them, while rejecting the witch, who would float. This was the tradition that Europe carried on until a few centuries ago. India also had a trial by water that roughly followed the Hammurabi rules, and could be used for determining guilt in any number of situations.

So there you have it. We've been drowning suspected witched for at least 4,000 years now.

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