NOT

Our Mission, Should We Choose to Accept It

The greatest commandment is to love God with all your heart, soul, and mind. The second is to love your neighbor as yourself. Jesus says, “All the law and the prophets hang on these two commandments”. So LOVE is what all righteousness (law) and revelation (prophets) depend upon and stem from, first of God and then of each other. Without this love, we miss the whole point of our creation. It stands to reason that the Holy Spirit wouldn’t inspire one to break these two commandments, so we can assume that any action or thought that breaks these commandments is not inspired by God.

"No one who is speaking by the spirit of God says ‘Jesus be cursed’ and no one can say ‘Jesus is Lord’ except by the spirit" (1 Corinthians 12:3). That which glorifies God, bearing witness to His supremacy, is of the Spirit, and that which vilifies Him is not. Scripture can be God-glorifying or it can be used (improperly) as a condemnation of God, so it really depends on the context; neither the written word nor the findings of science are of themselves holy or unholy.

Many people, including myself before I became a Christian, see the book of Genesis and its obviously flawed cosmology as a barrier between themselves and Christianity. I found the way through, but the barrier still isolates many people from the message of Christ and the salvation found in Him. This is the greatest of tragedies and must be resolved.

We must realize that adherence to a literal interpretation of Genesis is not central to Christian theology, and isn’t the pill that must be swallowed to be saved. Rather, the divinity of Christ, His sacrifice for the sake of our salvation, His resurrection and ascension are, cumulatively, the pill, and it’s a much smaller pill when one doesn’t have to simultaneously throw up centuries worth of brilliant and honest work from the best scientific minds.

Biblical literalists may want to pick nits and posit stale arguments about some aspect of the scientific perspective on the origins of the universe, but the conflict basically boils down to one group of people that want to hold up a literal interpretation of the Bible and make science adhere to it, and another group of people who want to destroy God and start from scratch. Neither of those positions is satisfactory; we must find a middle ground that moderates on both sides can not only accept, but relish.

In fact I think plenty of people would stand in the center of those two extreme positions, thinking there is a middle ground, knowing that Genesis is not literally true, possibly even suspecting that the story of Jesus is in some ways embellished beyond His own intent. But in spite of all that, they sense a deeper truth that their spirit cannot and will not deny.

These half-Christians may identify themselves as atheists, Christians, or "just spiritual", they might believe in God--maybe a few even go to church--but they also know there’s something undeniable about evolution. They might think God created the universe at the point of the Big Bang, but the Big Bang doesn’t answer their questions: Where did we come from? Why? They know intuitively that no matter how deep we go with science, it will never answer these questions, yet we will still need answers. The spiritual realm has always been the place we look for those answers, and it will always be so.

As Christians, we need to recognize these half-Christians as our neighbors, love them, and stop trying to make them give up Darwin for Genesis. Get to know and love Darwin and the 14 billion year epic of Creation. Praise God! What they really need to understand is that God gave His Son so that they would not perish in an unjust universe, but that they would live, justified, in His Grace.

Who's with me?

Scripture, Revelation, and the Trap of Bibliolatry

For Christians, scripture is text inspired by God. But how can scripture be distinguished from other written words? God doesn’t speak Aramaic, Hebrew, or Greek; it is doubtful that even the original texts of the Bible can begin to capture the simplest idea that resides in the mind of God. The words alone are not enough; before a Christian can gain knowledge of God’s message through scripture, inspiration must be obtained from the Holy Spirit. This is referred to as being "in the Spirit". When such inspiration is found, it may reveal a different or even contrary meaning to what the scripture seems to mean on the surface, but the inspired interpretation will always fit into the context of the passage and of the Word of God as a whole. Many Christians understand this very well, but far too many tend to quote scripture out of context and outside the Spirit to justify their own ideology.

There is a word for the practice of worshipping a book, as opposed to worshipping God Himself. It is "Bibliolatry", and I think it is a growing practice among many proud, well-meaning, conservative people that think of themselves as good Christians. God is unchanging, but people aren't, and what the Holy Spirit reveals to us through scripture changes with us, even as the scripture remains constant. God doesn't contradict himself, but without divine inspiration to understand His Word from one's own perspective at the moment, it can seem that way, and this fact is a dangerous and potent tool of evil.

No Soul Left Behind?

I was talking to Joe Luna today and brought up this idea I had about the devil. I had been thinking about this for a while: will Satan ultimately be redeemed? I can't imagine God as a hypocrite (love your enemy, right?), so certainly His love extends to the adversary, but has God written the Devil off, or does His elaborate plan ultimately bring Satan to salvation in Christ, setting free all the imprisoned souls in the process? I'd like to write a book about that! I hope I didn't give away His secret!

Discovering the Power of Prayer

I didn't exactly start praying the first day I became a Christian. Leading up to that day I'd been moved by other people's prayers and I felt the power of the Holy Spirit; that power is what brought me to that moment of giving myself to Jesus Christ. You could say I was in the habit of thinking prayer was foolish; you know, talking to the wall and expecting it to help you is kind of ridiculous, especially when there is no wall.

Even though I had gone through the stages of realization that first an omnipotent, omnicient, and involved Being was possible, then likely, then evident by virtue of the very nature of existence--having come to feel in the depths of my soul that the wall was all ears--even though the foolish had become wise to my eyes and the wise had become foolish, I wasn't ready to be one of those people.

But privately I tried it, not out loud mind you. (I wouldn't anyone to hear me acting foolish, least of all myself!) I mean God's supposed to hear even silent prayers, right? So I tried it. I privately asked God to help me navigate some small obstacle in life. No big deal. But the crazy thing was...it helped. It's like God heard me ask and He said, "Sure. Don't worry about it. I've got this." So I started doing it more. Even sitting at work when I felt unmotivated, I asked God to help me find the strength to keep pushing forward, and He said, "You have it." and I did. It was trivial but apparently He didn't mind.

Maybe it's foolish to think at the mind-reading wall, but deluded or not, when the wall starts helping me out, I'm going to gratefully accept. There's something very powerful about just the asking, which is not to say there's not something wonderful in the receiving.

The Bible, Powerfullest Book EVER!

One thing's for sure about the Bible: it's old. You can be pretty sure its authors are not trying to trick you or scam you. Granted, they could have been trying to scam somebody thousands of years ago, but whatever their agenda, be it political or personal, you can rest assured that it doesn't apply to you, and besides, it would probably be lost on you anyway.

God can speak to you through any means he chooses; why would he speak through an ancient book translated by human beings and printed on an ordinary man-made machine? Well, I say he does speak through other means, but it's hard to filter him out from all the other noise in our world. The Bible at least remains relatively constant; even the translations have hardly changed in the last 400 years or so (since King James). That amount of time tends to filter out the ulterior motives of unscrupulous individuals.

Today we have the New International Version, which is certainly more comprehensible, but the language is strikingly similar to the King James Version when you put them side by side. This translation is done by a committee of scholars, which in my mind makes it more accurate, so I find the NIV translation most trustworthy.

The Bible doesn't have to be the word of God in your mind for you to acknowledge that the ideas it contains are powerful--just look at its legacy--but it's all the more powerful if you're actually perceiving the voice of God communicating with you through those words. That's the whole deal with the Bible, really. Once you start thinking that maybe God really is behind the Bible, even just for the most part, its power starts to really come through, and it's hard to deny. Without that thought, it's still easy to see the results of its power, but you can't really taste it.

Spirits in the ethereal world

We are spirits in the material world, so the song goes. What is material about the world? Newton boiled it down to particles with well-defined behavior, though there are some notable inconsistencies between the observable universe and what Newtonian physics predicts.

Then Einstein came along and said (if I understand relativity at all, which I might not), we shouldn't "nevermind" that, we need to patch those holes, so he boiled down to discrete units of energy with well-defined behavior. But there were still holes, they were just smaller, and took eight years of college to detect.

So now we have quantum theory or quantum string theory or some other theory that none of us regular folks, even the pretty smart ones, really understand (certainly I don't), but there are still holes that drive guys like Stephen Hawking up a wall. But in any case I hear that at the quantum level things get quite unpredictable and the units, which are hardly discrete, start behaving unpredictably, with a sort of life of their own. I fail to keep my finger on the pulse of physics research to a sufficient degree to claim to know how far this rabbit hole goes, but none of these pills seem to make me larger; each seems to make me and the whole universe more empty and more insubstantial than the last. So "we are spirits in the ethereal world" is perhaps closer to the mark.

The Heisenberg uncertainty principle, if I understand it at all, tells us that the better you know where a thing is, the less you know about what it’s doing, and the more you know about what it’s doing, the less you know about where it is. What this means is that things are not so much firm objects in space and time, but more nebulous clouds of possibility ; the more you nail down where they are, the less they seem to be anywhere at all.

By being afraid to explore the deeper reality of the universe, we also deprive ourselves of the deeper meaning. I think the scariest thing for us, though, is the deeper meaning, because inevitably it tends to imply that our self-importance is a delusion. Like currents in a river, we are not made of the same stuff from one moment to the next, yet there we are. But the reality is, if we choose it to be, that the more we understand the ethereality of our form, the more we see ourselves as patterns in the flow of space and time, the more miraculous we become--perhaps more miraculous than we had ever thought possible--and as organizing forces in a chaotic and unpredictable universe, more important than ever.

Realizing this, perhaps it's not so hard to understand how there could be some creator God out there with time in His busy schedule to love each and every one of us.

"I think" may not imply "I am"

If a premise is true, that premise must not be false. This syllogism (or truism) is the foundation of all logic, of mathematics, and arguably of all thought. Logic is the inherent binary reality implied by this statement, a reality in which statements are either true or false. Does the universe obey this rule? Does it reside in the reality of logic? Maybe.

What is maybe? It is an expression of uncertainty. It means that a statement might be true, or might be false, but we don’t know which it is. However, we assume that given sufficient data, one could evaluate the statement “The universe resides within the reality of logic” and it would be true or false, even if the resources needed to record and evaluate the data are beyond the resources of the universe itself.

What if the above statement is false? If the universe is not bound by the rules of logic, what can we say about it? Well, assuming it is not, it may be. Therefore in such a universe, knowing it is does not imply that it is, and knowing it is not does not imply that it is not. Knowledge has no meaning! This is getting silly now.

Deductive logic relies on assumptions, and all conclusions are true only if the assumptions upon which they are based are also true. The most basic assumption we make as humans is that there is a duality to the universe. The universe, we believe at the most basic level, is a binary machine, albeit a complex one. True and False are the most basic opposites in our reality. Here and there, self and other, we can see that there is a difference. “I think, therefore I am” is foundational in philosophy.

What about “I think therefore something is”? That which "is" may not be "me". There is clearly at least one thing in the universe—the universe itself—or else nothing would be, and I would not have written about it. But even here there is a duality, nothingness and somethingness. Something is the absence of nothing; nothing is the absence of something. (The English gets messy here because we as humans have little need for such mind-bending, silly ideas.) Does something rely upon nothing for its existence, then, or nothing upon something, or both, or neither?

Ideas for future revisions of CSS

CSS nesting so I could do something like div.class { /* everything in here applies to descendants of div.class */ h3 { text-align: right; } h2 { color: red; } }. Also you would want to allow importing of external CSS inside curly braces, so that the imported CSS would be effective only within that tag. This would have a sort of namespace effect, so that a page can import CSS from disparate sources without conflict.

Another big thing would be the parent selector. I'd suggest '<' since '>' already specifies the parent to child relationship. This would enable relative CSS paths selectors that depend on children. So "span.someclass < div.otherclass" would select div.otherclass elements that have span.someclass as direct children. You would need an ancestor selector systax as well, perhaps '^'.

I got a used scooter the weekend before last. I got it insured, bought a helmet, and got my motorcycle learner's permit. I rode it to work for the first time today. It should save me some money riding it to work for the summer.