Tag: Matt0147

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Step 2 – Beware of Those Bearing Ancient Texts

Sunday August 18, 2019

Step 2 in our quest for a religion which doesn’t require us to pretend anything has to do with jettisoning ancient texts. What follows goes for any of them but focuses on the central text of Christianity, because that is the writer’s religious tradition.

If ever confronted with the common evangelical question Do you accept the Wholly Buy-Bull as the Authoritative and Inerrant Word of Gawd?, it is very important to answer No, of course not. Why would I?

Here’s why you wouldn’t.

First. Jesus didn’t have a Bible and Christianity got along just fine without one. Take those paintings of Jesus holding the Holy Bible in the crook of his arm and file them along with other anachronisms, such as presidential statements about founding fathers securing airports during the American Revolution. Centuries separated the life of Jesus of Nazareth and anything bound on the left remotely like a Holy Bible.

The things generally required for a member of the Christian faith to believe are listed in two similar and compact creeds, known as the Apostles’ and Nicene. Neither contains anything like “I believe in the Holy Bible, the authoritative and inerrant word of God.”

Second. The Bible doesn’t ask us to accept it as Authoritative, Inerrant, or the Word of God. Those claims are made for it, not by it. Although he’s the most often quoted source for the holiness of the Bible (having written as a sideline that all scripture is inspired by God), what would Paul say at a modern church service upon hearing the Reading of the Epistle? He’d probably jump up and shout “Hey, that’s not the Word of God, that’s just taken from one of my letters!” One man’s correspondence is another man’s scripture.

Bible is a word meaning book. The Bible is a type of book called an anthology, or collection of books. There are two versions in common circulation and they don’t contain the same number of books. So much for authoritative. Authorship of the individual books is not generally a mystery. The names of the authors are on many. None claims to be the Book of God. Some of the more important books, the Gospels, differ on central issues – such as what day Jesus was crucified. There goes inerrant.

Belief in the holiness of ancient texts is simply idolatry in literary garb and needs to be called out as such. Invisible gods are a hard sell, ask any missionary, so tangible talismans come in handy. The Bible and the Cross are the two most powerful talismans in Christianity. If you find yourself falling off a cliff and can only grab one, grab the Cross. In it may be your salvation (more on this in a future post). The other is just a book.

MOE

M.I.C.H. – Modernity, Intelligence, Complexity, Humanity

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Step 1.1 Thy will be done on Earth…by chance

August 17, 2019

From the scientists:

It is clear that chance is operative in the World as an ordinary state of affairs.

For the religionists:

Even the Lord’s Prayer directly implies that God’s Will is not operative in the World as an ordinary state of affairs.

Otherwise, why would anyone have to pray for that to be the case?

So Science and Religion, at least Christianity, should agree about the centrality of chance. They should also agree about the absence of God’s Will as a natural force in the Universe.

Nothing happens for a reason – unless we make it happen for a reason. Therefore, never justify personal action as being what God “wants”. Nobody knows what that might be, if anything.

Haiku to the New Haiku

MOE

M.I.C.H. – Modernity, Intelligence, Complexity, Humanity

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Of Briefcases and Walls

August 16, 2019

How is it that a briefcase can be heavier on both sides at the same time?

We place the briefcase against the wall. It falls away.

We turn it around. It falls away.

How can a briefcase be heavier on both sides at once? Is there a repelling force? Science gives no clear explanation for this common phenomenon.

MOE

M.I.C.H. – Modernity, Intelligence, Complexity, Humanity

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A Book That Writes Itself

Sunday August 11, 2019

In answer to last Sunday’s question:

If you were all powerful, what the devil would you need?

The author of all things, what in Heaven would you read?

Humans feel powerless and out of control, but are power mad and controlling. They create deities in their own image. So they imagine that an all-powerful being would spend all its effort controlling everything, all the time. Because that’s what they would do if they could.

The opposite makes more sense. An all-powerful being would more likely create, and delight in, something which generated unforeseen outcomes. (How eternally boring if thought always came into being! No surprises.) So it might make a book that writes itself and stay out of the way as the characters write the story. Spoiler alert! Since it would exist outside of time, if it wanted to know how things turned out it could skip ahead. For the characters in the book, chance might be fundamental and dominate their universe – just as seems to be the case in ours.

MOE

M.I.C.H. – Modernity, Intelligence, Complexity, Humanity

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A State of Wedding Exists

August 10, 2019

Humankind has approximately fifty percent fewer problems than Mankind.

If we look honestly at what we would want changed in the world, most of it stems from the behavior of homo-so-called-sapiens and, looking even more honestly, to the behavior of the male of the species.

The male of the species is on average larger and more aggressive than the female of the species. This was a tremendous advantage in the days of rocks and sticks. Less so in the age of killer drones and nukes deliverable by Amazon. But it’s behind the power imbalance between the male and female. The latter appears from recent research to perhaps be the smarter of the two, but has less power. The male, better at lifting heavy objects and winning domestic disputes, hogs what it can. Its favorite group activity is called war and it spends its time planning the next one.

While rare counter examples can be found, the female of the species appears more interested in making the world a better place in which to live. To this end, it prefers planning weddings to planning wars. Therefore, in a rational country, presence of a dick and balls would be immediately disqualifying for the holding of high public office.

News headlines might then read “A State of Wedding Has Been Declared Between the United States and the Peoples Democratic Republic of You Name It.”

It is probable that many of the marriages, hastily arranged, would not work out. But the party planning, the music, the dancing, the free food and drink would be fabulous. And the product – babies – are widely seen as preferable to corpses. Even though the male of the species likes to confuse the two, sex and violence are not the same thing, or even in the same category of thing. The former is pro-life, the latter is anti-life. Further, even though a bad marriage may be bad, it beats choking on mustard gas while flagging down machine gun bullets far from home. Does it not, guys?

MOE

M.I.C.H. – Modernity, Intelligence, Complexity, Humanity

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ME AND MY GUN

August 8, 2019

My father gave me a gun for my fourteenth birthday. I asked; he chose.

Surprise! It was a twenty gauge pump action shotgun. I still have it, decades later. It still works like new. Holds one in the chamber and two more in the magazine.

There is a wooden dowel in the magazine, commonly called a plug. It’s still there. Removal is simple and would raise capacity to five rounds. The reason for the plug is that state game laws, at least at the time, forbade going into the field with more than three rounds in the gun. I recently looked online to see if this was still the case and could not find any information on the subject. Maybe there is some sensitivity that state laws afford more protection to wildlife than to women and children at Walmart.

I would have liked to own a machine gun; but it was against the law. And I accepted the reasoning. Law enforcement could make a cogent argument against the weapons, pointing back to the days of Pretty Boy Floyd and Machine Gun Kelly with their Thompson sub machine guns (“Hand me that choppa!” Oh Brother…). And anyway, life on the farm wasn’t war. Still, I thought TV’s Sergeant Saunders was cool. He had a Thompson and every week saved a little bit of the world (which shall forever be Combat) from the Jerries who were lurking in every barn and farmhouse in France. We had a barn and farmhouse. I was afraid. I was a child.

I subscribed to Guns and Ammo and looked forward to the arrival of each new edition. I don’t recall there being much about military weapons, except occasionally by way of historical retrospective. My dad got Field and Stream. It had advertisements and reviews for, mainly, rifles and shotguns, alongside a great deal of fishing and camping gear, tales of survival in the wild, the one that got away, the bear that almost got the hunter, or maybe got the companion, and such. Dad was mainly interested in the fishing parts. Although he had a double barrel twelve gauge, and could use it, he had given up hunting because all the gun gave him was dead birds, which he didn’t actually want. Hunting was mostly the result of peer pressure from clients to remind each other that each was a real man. He was, so he gave up hunting because it didn’t suit him. Mom was happy with that decision, since it fell to her to pluck and gut the birds. What a stench! (“The steam will rise from my guts and I will sing no more.”- Jack White, Seven Nation Army). Once, by way of demonstrating how miserable this made her, she showed me how the little finger was used to push pheasant poop out the anal sphincter from inside the carcass. I became a vegetarian but remained a gun owner.

My wife briefly joined the NRA. She was in it for the free swag – especially the NRA caps. These are useful when you have to tell a carload of armed strangers that, no, they are not welcome to discharge firearms on your property under the guise of hunting, even if they promise to abstain from sipping from the flask while doing so. The cap makes them figure you already have the hunting base covered and it might be risky to intrude, given your evident love of guns. If you just tell them you’re a vegetarian and prefer your friendly local wildlife alive, no respect and occasional poaching. This can escalate to the threat level of potential armed conflict. So we kept the cap, but didn’t renew.

With NRA membership comes American Rifleman. Compared to Guns and Ammo and Field and Stream of yesteryear, the rag was a real eye-opener – containing as it did almost nothing but ads for para-military weapons. Assault rifles and handguns cover to cover. For the former, fifty and sixty round clips. For the latter, nine round clips for “concealed carry” and nineteen round clips for “home defense.”

Since I can hit what I’m pointing it at, I figure one roughly sixty-two caliber slug from the old pump action ought to be all that “home defense” should ever require at the distances encountered going room to room, up stairs, down stairs, in the hall. Looking for Colonel Mustard in the parlor. Concealed carry is not an option with a blunderbuss and not one that I would want under any circumstances. It reeks of premeditated murder rather than defense. Handguns are good when ordering the troops up and out of the trenches and are the most common choice of the suicidal, Kurt Cobain notwithstanding, as well as failed world dominators in their bunkers. Home defense? Most commonly used by family members against family members, including kids who couldn’t pick up, much less load, a long gun.

It seems to me, looking back at myself, that one of the central problems with assault rifles is their appearance. As with Sergeant Saunders’s Thompson, it’s hard to make an argument for them on legitimate hunting or personal defense grounds. But style matters; and if you grew up on Mortal Kombat, assault rifles have the look you want. This goes double if you’re a wannabe with the mind of a child, who would be rejected by the local police force or the military on grounds of lack of mental stability (or are, in fact, a child). If that’s you, and you’re still determined to save the world despite that badge or uniform for which you just can’t hope to qualify, a double barrel twelve gauge, even loaded with ball bearing equivalents, just isn’t gonna cut it in your mind. (Even though it would more than cut it in any reality most might imagine – I’m talking about the Real Reality here). Wouldn’t look right. Accessorize the AR-15 or AK-47 with the 60 round clip. Even though it will reduce ballistic performance, for good measure screw on a silencer. Looks great in profile. I take that back. Cuts down on flame spitting out the muzzle. Forget it. Retain only for photo ops online. Anyway, you want them to hear you, right? This is your swan song after all. With a silencer, you might hear actual cries of actual human anguish. Because real people don’t die in three dimensions the way actors do on screens. This could diminish the realization of your fantasy. Leave the silencer home. Rat-a-tat tat is the right soundtrack for this.

A study of the progression in gun advertising from early Guns and Ammo to the current American Rifleman would make a nice term paper (serving suggestion) and would also give the lie to the NRA’s preposterous assertion that American gun rights have somehow been eroding over time. The opposite is true. The government is not coming for your guns; the gun manufacturers are coming for your wallet. To this end, the NRA is currently advocating the inalienable right to a silencer to go with that concealed carry/home defense thingamabob they sold you on. They say it’s to protect your hearing – presumably while you’re out killing, since practice is almost always done wearing muffs, which are better. But more presumably so that one could better get away with one’s deed after preemptively defending oneself against whatever it was one was planning to defend oneself against after one decided to slip the Death Dealer 9 clip into the “carry gun” for “concealed carry” before leaving the home. And after making sure the “car gun” was ready. And that there were extra clips under the seat. And more in the glove compartment and some in the trunk. And after keeping as many DeathDealer 19 and 60 clips as could be afforded back home – for home defense in case the police showed up.

https://youtu.be/FqTAiUgOaqo

MOE

M.I.C.H. – Modernity, Intelligence, Complexity, Humanity

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Step 1 – Accept Chance

The first in a series of short Sunday posts on science and religion – toward a religion where we don’t have to pretend anything.

Sunday August 4, 2019

How often have we heard “nothing happens by chance” or “everything happens for a reason” ?

When, in fact, we know from experience that more or less the opposite is true.

Science is right on this one. Chance is not only operative in the world, it forms the basis of everything that goes on. The deeper you dig into the fabric of the universe, quantum fields and such, the more this appears to be so.

So, in order to have a religion where we don’t have to pretend anything, the first thing we need to do is accept chance as central to the operation of the universe.

How this could be so, and why it does not necessarily stand in opposition to the existence of any god, is simple, obvious, and will be posted next week.

MOE

M.I.C.H. – Modernity, Intelligence, Complexity, Humanity

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Elected Incompetence

July 23, 2019

We recently read an opinion piece by William Davies, published in the New York Times about a year ago (July 13, 2018). The title: “Boris Johnson, Donald Trump and the Rise of Radical Incompetence” about says it all. And what’s left is covered by the tag “Like America’s president, Brexiteers resent the very idea of governing as complex and based in facts.”

Radical incompetence! Now there’s a term for the times.

But what to do? Here’s a thought.

In the States we have two governments – professional and elected. It has come into fashion to attack the former as the “deep state” because of its semi-permanence and lower visibility. Although deep state is sexier, there were already plenty of terms on hand (bureaucracy, institutional memory, and maybe even the fundamental quality of inertia come to mind) to cover the bases regarding the professional government, or as Steve Bannon called it, the administrative state.

In reality, the administrative state is the government in the sense that it is what makes the government work. The United States Government is the United States. So deconstructing it, as Bannon has called for, would be an odd thing. This especially because the country is blessed with a good professional government, run by trained professionals who show up and tend to do their jobs competently day in and day out. Whether you agree with that last statement or not, it can be said that they possess demonstrable skills and take qualifying tests, such as the Civil Service test.

Then there is the elected government. Qualifications are essentially nil, unless you want to be President – in which case you have to have been born here and have attained the age of 35. A pulse helps. Lesser offices generally do not have such stringent standards.

Cincinnatus was a rare type and he’s long gone now. These days, those who seek elective office, more often than not, intend never to leave. In the absence of term limits, that’s entirely possible. Since those running for office are looking at it as a career, they should be asked to take a test, like the Civil Service test. Their scores should be posted prior to running. It is of vital interest to the people to know if a candidate can find China on a map, add up a column of numbers, spell their name correctly, follow instructions, and print clearly. If that is too much to ask, then the candidate should be directed to the barn to wait for the next feeding.

MOE

M.I.C.H. – Modernity, Intelligence, Complexity, Humanity

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At Least It’s Not Socialized

July 22, 2019

Student loan debt is now on the order of $1.5 trillion, higher than either credit card or auto loan debt and exceeded only by mortgages. Why?

Well, not that terribly long ago, the word went out from our version of Caesar Augustus that higher education should be made “affordable.” And all the world should not be taxed, because that would be political suicide.

Many advanced nations manage to make higher education affordable, in some cases free, by paying for it with tax dollars. But that’s socialist. Of course, we do the same here in our public elementary and high schools. America’s main socialist features are public education and the military.

But college is seen as different. So, loan programs were made available. And what happened? Exactly what could have been expected.

Any Realtor can tell you that when mortgage rates go down, or financing becomes in other ways looser, housing does not become more affordable. Prices simply rise to reflect the new level of effective demand.

So the price of higher education rose inexorably, year after year at multiples of inflation, in order to accommodate the new ability of customers to pay. Since the majority of schools are not-for-profit, outlays had to rise too, in order not to show a profit. These commonly took the form of ever higher salaries and expanded staffing in the administration – the faculty, not so much. Expensive new physical facilities were built, the better to attract paying customers with glossy photos of the new student center, gym, or stadium in the equally glossy brochures junk-mailed to wealthy zip codes.

And then there’s the for-profit sector. Whoa, Betsy, let’s not even go there; or to the multi-million dollar salaries some schools pay to acquire star coaches.

Bottom line: providing easier financing doesn’t mean you’re making a product more affordable. It just increases the likelihood that more of the product will be bought.

MOE

M.I.C.H. – Modernity, Intelligence, Complexity, Humanity