In Support of Raytracing and Public Health

My stackoverflow badge

2012-01-23T20:22:00.000-05:00

Not that I have or ever will be able to make any contribution...

Letter to an Atheist

2012-01-17T18:21:00.001-05:00

You may agree with me that the value system of, say, to pick three people, Al Franken, Michael Moore, and Rosie O'Donnell is completely different from that of what could be called "biblical literalism." You might also agree with me that the value system of Franken, Moore, and O'Donnell is incredibly more preferrable than, say, that of Rick Santorum, Rick Perry, and Newt Gingrich. Where we would disagree is whether the value system of Santorum, Perry, & Gingrich is a necessary requirement of biblical literalism. In fact, I would go so far as to say that you are either as uneducated as the boo-ers in the Republican debate audiences, or a disingenuous propagandist, if you insist that it's so. I would also say that even Penn Jillette agrees with me on this point, as evidenced by exactly how he condemned Michelle Bachmann in a recent interview. I'd also claim that you can do nothing nicer to the "debate boo-ers" than to tell them that they are following the literal dictates of the instruction book left by the Creator of the Universe.

Where Occupy Wall Street is failing.

2011-10-16T08:19:00.004-04:00

A friend on Google Plus found this video to carry some great moral weight. I find it truly sad.

Some may look at this video and see how the cops are intimidating the peaceful protesters and how The Man is personally harassing them. I, and also probably most conservatives or non-OWS fans, probably see spoiled, over-privileged punks insulting police.

If you've read anything else in this blog, you can probably guess that I have extreme sympathy for anyone complaining about what Francis Schaeffer called "noncompassionate use of wealth." Read Martin Luther's Admonition to Peace to see what words I would say to "Wall Street."

But effective protest should involve an attempt to convince someone by appealing to their conscience. Not just pushing on the cultural divide, like someone hopping on an axe that is stuck in wood. That is what these guys are doing. Rather than reach out to the extremely socially conservative blue-collar guy who might feel oppressed by Wall Street, this video sends them running into the arms of the Tea Party.

They also are not wearing khakis and polo shirts.

Beautiful video on overfishing.

2011-09-06T22:36:00.001-04:00

This video looks great full screen
, and has important message about overfishing.

Makehuman: if you're into that stuff

2011-08-23T22:48:00.002-04:00

The development progress of the program makehuman is progressing nicely. They've got it to the point that it can export a fully rigged character to blender. Here is my first evening's attempt at such.

It's pretty cool, but right now it's a bit too much Uncanny Valley for me. I'll have to see if there are actually ways to reduce the realism and make more toonily-shaded characters with it.

A spiritually dangerous film from Focus on the Family

2011-08-02T07:41:00.003-04:00

A Theological Review

of “Lesson 10 - The American Experiment: Stepping Stones”

by Focus on the Family’s “The Truth Project”

by Greg M. Johnson

The Christian view is that man lived in paradise until Adam upset relationship with God thousands of years ago. In the Christian view, the solution is Christ’s work on cross to restore humans’ relationship with God. Individuals remaining in unrepentant sin is dangerous because of Hell. What is necessary for humans is faith in Christ, or “a broken and contrite spirit.”

A view prevalent in certain Christian circles today, and in my opinion offered by the movie, sets up an entirely different narrative of the Fall. It is that USA enjoyed God’s blessings until secularists upset the relationship with God sometime in mid 1800’s. In this view, the solution is humans’ work to restore the country’s relationship with God. Country remaining in state of non-God-honoring is physically dangerous to the nation because God may remove the lampstand of Revelations 2 from the country. What very bad for humans is to “hate America.”

Problem: The speaker repeated a theme that “Without religion and morality, it is impossible to have liberty.” In the early days of the United States, we had a lot of religious fervor, but very little liberty. Thomas Jefferson put the word “God” on some public documents, but believed in a religion where it was okay to have sex with your slaves. George Washington put the word “God” on some public documents, but believed in a religion where it was okay to leave the babies of your slaves naked in winter. If religion were a requirement for liberty, then either: A) these men’s religion is apostate (in a far worse way than Arnold Schwarzenegger’s is), or B) the premise the “religion helps liberty” is false. I object to the films’ premise that the Founding Fathers were of my religion. They are not. I shake their religion from my shoes.

Problem: the speaker referred to the cycle of obedience, rebellion, punishment, repentance, and restoration for OT Israel and said that America was in the rebellion stage. His references to when things started to go wrong were in the mid-1800’s. I on the other hand cannot imagine a greater stage of rebellion than slaveholding. Is it okay for me to believe that the 1700’s were the worst part of rebellion rather than America’s “Eden?” God’s name was on the lips but our hearts were far from him. Undoing physical slavery was the principal work of God for his people in the OT. There is always sin, and I find his reference to 1700’s America as the “good old days” to be unbiblical.

Problem: the movie complained that “Jurisprudence” is now viewed as something that can evolve rather than being based on God’s word. Was our system of laws ever based on God’s word, per se, or one sect in one time’s understanding of it. I note that we went from Dred Scott (1857) to Brown vs. Board of Education (1954), which is a great thing. We went from saying it is okay for the government to keep different races in different schools to an “evolved’ (if you will) state where we don’t say that. As another example, in the year I was born, interracial marriage was illegal in the state I grew up in. The country’s understanding of interracial marriage has “evolved”: God be praised!

Problem: The movie set as a good thing from the old days, that there were Christian religious oaths as a test for holding office. I say, our country has aways been more like the towns of Paul’s epistles than OT Israel. Muslims, Jews, nonbelievers, and radically different flavors of Christianity exist. Is it workable in our society? Is it an outrage to God that the religious tests are gone? Luther said he’d rather be ruled by a wise pagan than a foolish Christian.

Problem: Revelations 2 is talking about a church. The speaker applied it to a country. This is very bad.

Problem: a boy at the beginning said that America was the “light of the world.” I confess someone Else to be. (One should neither teach children to say that, nor should one be a Unitarian Universalist preacher-- another speaker at the beginning of the film).

Agreements: Biblical Christianity is under attack. (First, I must add, it is under attack by this film). Secondly, it is under attack by an intelligentsia that is more dangerous than anything by the ACLU. If you listen to the broadcast media of scientific associations (Scientific American to IEEE Spectrum), you will hear educated people say that “religion mandates violence.” You will hear a cartoony distorted view of Christianity that is probably not actually taught or held to by many people: there is no Cross in this cartoon view, only a Hell, and a Hell that is arbitrarily dished out to basically good people. In one science podcast I used to subscribe to, a man claimed that someone shouldn’t be allowed a job in science if they believed in God.

Solutions:

1) Christ’s work on the Cross

2) Our repentance

3) A witnessing that has folks (or finds) folks in a state of “broken and contrite spirit” long before hell and the need to change where they are going is mentioned.

4) Apologetics work that points out to society that the moral and religious absurdities of 1700’s America and my own life are neither faithful to nor required by the bible, and only shows the need for Christ.

5) Good works, in proper context. (I like the way that Catholics call them “Works of Mercy”).

6) Honoring God in the public square, in a peaceable way that involves risk-taking with our own bodies, not in ways that involve fighting through the government over the right to put a symbol on a piece of land or “airtime” in a secular event.

Links to Original Material:

Outline of Lesson 10:

http://cccgreeley.org/files/PDFs/Adult%20Ministries%20Files/Truth%20Project%20Group%20Resources/Tour%2010%20Participant.pdf

Truth Project Lessons:

http://www.thetruthproject.org/events/A000000068.cfm/

Truth Project

http://www.thetruthproject.org/

Christina Aquilera!

2011-07-25T19:35:00.000-04:00

I'm donating one post on this blog to the World Food Program's response to the Somali famine.

I don't know exactly what Christina Aquilera has to do with the famine, but it's probably nicer than seeing pic of starving baby, which was another option.

Christian life, summarized

2011-07-19T20:57:00.002-04:00

"We accord our willing tribute of praise to him who seeks to ameliorate the condition of the poor, —to instruct and reclaim the ignorant and wretched dwellers in our lanes and alleys,—or to gather in the wandering outcasts on our streets to the house of God, where they may hear of pardon and peace through the precious blood of Christ."

This is a nice summary of the features of a Christian life, taken from John MacDuff's Able to Save, under the chapter of "Bearing Fruit".

Social Media Best Practices, IV

2011-06-10T20:36:00.000-04:00

In this installment, I show how paper.li links in Twitter are just plain annoying and non-conversational.

Social Media Best Practices, III

2011-06-08T20:34:00.000-04:00

In this video, I really tear into foursquare. I point out how boring and aggravating it is to pollute Twitter with 4sq links.

Cynical Speculation about Motivations behind Linux's Interface Problem

2011-06-06T19:37:00.003-04:00

ANALOGY: My wife rented a car. She did not get my advance approval as to the make, model, or year of the auto. I did not even see it until a few seconds before I was supposed to drive it. I went outside, and there was a large minivan in the driveway. I got into the drivers seat and started it up. I didn't even have to think about how to turn it on and access the most critical and basis functions. The human interface from this 2010 model was essentially unchanged from the human interface on the 1970 car I learned to drive in. Across multiple manufacturers from multiple countries, nothing in the interface has radically changed, even though the car's engine & radio & heater & crash protection systems can do far more. I'm guessing the human interface had stabilized long before 1970.

No so with Linux. There are all sorts of problems with every new release. Audio doesn't work. A new desktop environment ships (KDE 4) which makes it impossible to transfer files from one directory to another via the file manager program. Another one (Unity) just befuddles expert users (Brian on Linux Action Show) to the degree that he asks what a Linux enthusiast is supposed to do. Jono Bacon of Ubuntu admitted to "The Linux Action Show" that Ubuntu 11.04 was a "patience release." Gnome 3 threatens worse. Five years ago, distros (OpenSUSE) were alternatively dropping and adding WiFi support. This sucks. What is so maddening, even to those "partisanly" in favor of the ideals of Linux, is that these interface-wrecks show up with a simple "dist upgrade."

Back to the car thing. Right now you can just hand a friend the keys to a car and expect them to be able to hop in your car and drive it. You only have to tell them where it's parked. But imagine cars were like linux. You'd take your car in for a service pak upgrade and BAM!-- you'd be faced with the problem of figuring out where the brake pedal was. The more intelligent among us could probably find the brake pedal with only a small time investment, but the point is why? Why are you fussing with the human interface each release? Are you completely incapable of tuning the engine, or do you see progress mostly as hiding the steering wheel each time? Most of us are very smart and even like to do logic puzzles in our spare time. But we don't like to have to solve logic puzzles when we're trying to do a job with a tool that worked fine yesterday.

I've been stewing about this since at least the first time I tried the first version of KDE4 that showed up with Kubuntu. I have three admittedly cynical speculations as to what's driving this:

Linux devs really are that dumb.
They are incapable of seeing what a normal human being--no, what a person who needs to do some work right now-- needs to do. They really do see hiding & wrecking the human interface as improvements. Perhaps it may be institutional myopia-- a bunch of blokes sitting in disparate basements across the world might not know the aggregate effect of their tweaking.

Linux devs really are that mean
They care not about making a working product. I once printed out a forum posting where one said he really didn't care if Linux became an OS for people's grandmothers. IMO, that's the exact same attitude as "don't care if we are ever Enterprise ready." They like hiding things, in the same way that frat boys like to haze freshmen. It keeps it an elite system for the elect.

Business majors running Linux corps really are that cunning.
Linux is released under the GPL. As such, they have to release the code to you but can sell support services. Anyone can get the code, but they can sell support. Many distros have an "enterprise" version and a "community" version, such as Red Hat Enterprise Linux vs. Fedora. or SLED vs. openSUSE. The community versions are probably what both the uber Linux power-users will seek out and the grannies of the world will stumble on to. These two groups are the ones who will be the most maddened or turned off of Linux by this jerking-around. My cynical speculation is that the business majors running the Linux corps do not care. The more cynical of them might even be able to reason a business advantage out of the rage. If you were in a situation where you were forced to release a free version of your product, could you see an advantage in making your free version buggy & klunky & unpredictable, which would either drive people to get the heck out of there, or to get a business subscription to the corporate version? That's my guess. This possible motivation is more evil, perhaps, but it gives the corps running Linux more credit for having some business smarts.

Disclaimer: my day job involves a company that is involved in Linux, but I myself have nothing to do with this area of the company. I work in computer hardware. Opinions solely my own and based on my own interactions as a hobbyist Linux enthusiast.

How to Twitter

2011-05-03T12:18:00.008-04:00

First, get an account, at twitter.com.

Then, decide what you want to learn about. Pick two to ten things that interest you: knitting, NASCAR, rabbit raising, fishing, NBA, etc. For each of these, if you already were to know a famous person in that category, say Dale Earnhardt, Jr., or Danica Patrick for NASCAR, go find out his or her Twitter feed. Type in the name in search box under "Who to Follow" link on Twitter. Just be warned that some celebrities have had pranksters (or earnest fans) create fake accounts in their name: some of these accounts are useful, some are not. Click on their name, then "View Full Profile." "Follow" him or her. Then go to that person's "Following" list and Follow the whole list-- everyone on the list. Don't worry for now as to getting "too many"-- you'll weed out the creft later. On to your next interest. Say you're a huge fan of Pixar movies and like especially the ones directed by Andrew Stanton. Find him-- his userid is actually "6Mman", and follow everyone he's following. You could also just search for a topic -- try "rabbit raising." Follow everyone.

http://twitter.com/#!/who_to_follow

http://twitter.com/#!/DALEEARNHARDT8
http://twitter.com/#!/DALEEARNHARDT8/following

http://twitter.com/#!/DanicaPatrick
http://twitter.com/#!/DanicaPatrick/following

http://twitter.com/#!/6Mman
http://twitter.com/#!/6Mman/following

Perhaps you need some more. Go to wefollow.com, and search for some celebrities your admire or topics you are interested in. For example, if you're a Lutheran, you could go search for "lutheran" . Follow lots and lots of people-- maybe both Nancy Pelosi and John Boehner. Again, when you find interesting persons, go and follow ten or twenty people that they follow as well.

http://wefollow.com/

Hopefully, you will have gotten to a thousand people to follow. One mistake I made when I started Twitter was worrying too much about all the textual garbage that shows up when you view the tweets a person has made when you "View Full Profile". There may be many messages to individual Tweeps in the form of "@Johnny blah blah blah" but these won't show up in your view of Twitter unless you also follow the person addressed. Use instead the quality of tweets in your timeline to decide whom to unfollow.

Now weed out the creft.

Now look at your Timeline. Some people on twitter are saying or sharing links to things which are witty, entertaining, inspirational, or highly useful all day long. On the other hand, some people are repeating themselves every few hours, engaged in inside jokes, puffing themselves up, making a half-dozen posts in a row, and other behaviors that wouldn't be tolerated at a dinner party. Unfollow them. You don't have to apologize, this is not a social friendship in the same way that Facebook friends are. Think of them as news feeds. Do you apologize to CNN for turning off the channel? There are also a number of practices that some Tweeps engage in that are not helpful. If you see someone you admire say something like, "Follow my friend @Johnny, he has links to great steak recipes," that is, give a reason for following him, you may want to follow Johnny. If however you see, "#FF @Johnnie @Billie @Suzie @Millie @Maureen @Doreen @Squidleen", then you probably want to unfollow this person. There is a silly tradition by some to just blindly mention names of people to follow. If you watch these tweeps, you'll find that some of them recommend the same folks over and over-- get out while you can. I find it annoying. There's also an absurd tradition to "Retweet" the "#FF" when you get mentioned; probably some fools who will offer thanks back for the retweeted #FF. Do you see the point? At a dinner party, a friend tells you "Johnny thanked me for thanking him." ???!! It pollutes the stream with text that our already overloaded eyes have to jump over to get to the next tweet. Another pet peeve is multilingual tweets. I'm unfortunately monolingual, so if someone posts even 10% of the time in another language, my eyes get tripped up as it takes me a few seconds to figure out it's a different language.

If you start making tweets and start to get followers, don't worry about following them back. Some are spammers & phishers, some are shameless commercial promoters, some just have bad "dinner party" conversational habits. Some are real people wanting to converse. Again, CNN & Barack Obama & John Boehner will not probably not follow you back. Personally, I do not expect them to follow me until I have built a reputation for the kind of tweet they are interested in.

What's the optimal number of people to follow? Well, for basic users, Twitter has a limit of 2000. My advice first is to grab quickly a thousand people who might seem to be interesting, then weed out any and everyone over the course of a few weeks who makes a single post that is either annoying, uninspiring, or unintelligible to you. You'll probably still have a few hundred, and just check the stream when you can.

If anyone else is boring, tweets too much, or gives unintelligible information, get rid of them. This is your feed. Don't worry about having more total tweets coming in to your timeline than you can read in one day. Twitter is like a dinner party, or a webcam feed from the coolest dinner party ever. Tune in when you can, then turn it off and get on with your real life.

Social Media Best Practices, II

2011-04-02T08:18:00.001-04:00

Climate Gate, explained.

2011-03-29T19:46:00.000-04:00

It contains at least one mistake. The professor should be saying, “I’ve just completed Mike’s Nature trick of adding in the real temps to each series for the last 20 years (ie from 1981 onwards) and from 1961 for Keith’s to hide the decline.” I made a mistake with a dangling "f" when I had to break the comment into two frames.

and the whole set should end with, "Even if the science of future climate change were debatable, I don't think that I'd trust anyone who denies that the globe itself isn't warming." The video tends to knock off the last phrase.

Social Media Best Practices

2011-03-26T12:44:00.001-04:00

What if people used social media in the same way that they talked in real life? What if people talked in real life the way they do in social media?

I say what's stupid in one setting is stupid in the other.

Space Walk

2011-03-23T22:12:00.002-04:00

Here's an image I made in povray. In the background is NASA's recent image of Mercury from the MESSENGER mission. The image is no where near complete. But it's at that stage where I'm just throwing elements together. Sometimes these early versions have so much genius to them by accident, that you can never improve upon, only destroy, with intentional tinkering.

Which kind of universalism?

2011-03-12T07:05:00.009-05:00

Here's a quick post on my take on the recent controversies related to universal salvation. (Rob Bell).

Some may point to passages that seem to imply that Christ saves everyone, not merely that his death could save everyone, but that it in fact does save everyone regardless of their religious view or faith in Him. I do not share this view because I believe it to be disproven resoundingly by a host of other bible passages.

But even if you were take the view that Christ saved all, there are two very different ways to apply this conviction. Different in terms of how you would evangelize, how you'd talk to folks in other religions.

One is to walk into the mosque or synagogue (or the parking lot of such if you are shy) and proclaim, "You are all saved because of the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ, the only Son of God!".
Another is to proclaim, "You are saved by God. You honor this God by worshiping and teaching exactly as you have been doing! Have a pleasant day!" Then you see a the person who doesn't attend any religious observances at all and you hand him the county interfaith directory and say, "Please pick one and become devout at it in order to be saved."

The people I've met and read about who seem to exhibit leanings towards universal salvation seem to have this this Type 2 (above) Evangelism. It's as if they decided first and foremost to be good citizens in the Interfaith Council and then bent a religion around that view. Of course, one should be a good citizen in the (secular) community, but this is not always the exact same this as advancing the interests of the Interfaith Council. It's pushing religion.

I find it to be most deceptive, illogical, and unbiblical. Now, if someone were teaching every week that Jesus was either a myth or not divine or not raised, isn't that more of a problem to the God of the bible than the person who rarely thinks about Him at all? If anything, I would guess that if you actually believed in Christ and met someone who didn't believe in any god, it would be better to leave that nontheistic person alone rather than insist they pick another religion.

IMAGE CAPTION: Pick one, no less than one, or else!

Multi-speed, curved, walk cycles on the moon

2011-03-11T07:32:00.003-05:00

This animation was inspired both by the scenes in 2001 where astronauts exercise by jogging on the inside of a curved spaceship and a Mario Brothers game where Mario runs around little planets. I also wanted to show of the versatility of my walk system in povray. I've got characters walking according to curves in 3D space and multiple speeds.

Walk around the world

2011-03-08T19:12:00.000-05:00

More tweaking of povray walk cycle code. Testing out that I can make the walk path lie on a nonplanar surface.

Man through maze, second draft.

2011-02-03T19:23:00.002-05:00

In this version, I simply put in a natural_spline for the spline that controls time-to-position along the path, and this makes for a very natural acceleration. The red dots are on the ground every nth increment of time.

It got cold last night!

2011-02-02T20:41:00.002-05:00

I noticed that yesterday, between 2PM and 2AM, the temperature dropped-- it did not increase-- thereby disproving all claims of so-called "global warming". Wait, do you find that a dense observation? Okay, I suppose that I note it got colder from September to December of this year? Is the theory of climate change disproved, or am I still dense? Okay, what if we go to a really, really cold winter? Is it dense still? Would it leave a false impression if I were to go find proof of a very cold winter season (during a calendar year which scientists say ties for the warmest on record), and only mention the winter part of the story?

NOAA's report says,

"According to NOAA scientists, 2010 tied with 2005 as the warmest year of the global surface temperature record, beginning in 1880. This was the 34th consecutive year with global temperatures above the 20th century average. For the contiguous United States alone, the 2010 average annual temperature was above normal, resulting in the 23rd warmest year on record."

Just a reminder that if the average of something, say school buses' weights, were increasing year to year, then it is no disproof of the average weight change if you were able to point to one really skinny kid on the bus. In temperature terms, that means that the summers got hotter than any cold parts got colder.

Now let's discuss this. There you are, sitting in your chair, not thinking about the weather at the moment, and someone comes up to you and makes sure that you have information that this past winter was really cold. Then they go and mention "global warming" and "the religion of climate change". This is what happened in my reading of Frank Turk's Pyromaniacs blog. It's a blog with religious and Christian themes, not a blog about science. My view is that if you had kept up to date with the scientific data (not the theories, just the raw data), you would be questioning whatever political or religious philosophy that inspired such posturing.

What views of government and religion are threatened by the data?

In my view, biblical Christianity, the doctrine of the church historic is not. Martin Luther, in explaining the meaning of the Seventh Commandment (Thou Shalt Not Kill), in his Large Catechism, said,
"It is just as if I saw some one navigating and laboring in deep water [and struggling against adverse winds] or one fallen into fire, and could extend to him the hand to pull him out and save him, and yet refused to do it. What else would I appear, even in the eyes of the world, than as a murderer and a criminal?
So Christianity isn't threatened by worrying about people drowning. It demands it. It points to how helping those who are laboring in deep water is a way to honor the commandments. It also tells us how greed and covetousness isn't God's will.
In my view, free market economics and a philosophy of small government is not threatened. Say, take the issue of some toxic chemical or bird flu virus strain. If I am convinced that something threatens the public, this information doesn't threaten free market economics. I could first and foremost pull the plug on all tax subsidies, and I could strive to make sure that the court system doesn't prevent those who have been damaged by the product from seeking damages. Those two things would go a long way to addressing the problem, more so than "regulation". I could also refrain from dissing those who use the public square to educate the public about the dangers. I could also refrain from publishing misinformation, spurious pieces of data.
Humanism, per se, isn't even threatened, at least not that kind that is defined by thinking highly of humans. Humans produce poop and CO2. Our civilization long ago got used to the idea that people ought to be careful how they handle one product of their body, where they put it. What's so strange that another body product has to engender equal care?

In my opinion, in religion, a gospel reductionism or antinomianism is surely threatened. Wordnet defines Antinomianism as: "The theological doctrine that by faith and God's grace a Christian is freed from all laws (including the moral standards of the culture)" In my opinion, one reason so many conservatives are upset about global warming is because it presents a place where they are being called to repentance. Their churches aren't doing it, focusing instead on choosing the correct team.
A statist conservatism is threatened. If you got chills at the idea above of people being able to sue over pollution, I think you're a bit statist. Pollution is a subsidy. You want the state to prevent people from getting compensation for damages they suffer, because the damage-ers are politically favored, or something called "civilization" benefits.

These criticisms are not directed at the person who doesn't care about global warming. They are not directed at folks who don't understand the science, or are troubled by all the arguing, or even skeptical. My criticisms are directed at those whose philosophies are troubled by the possibility of woefully sinful behavior in your everyday actions. At those who introduce scientific topics into religious settings, and in so doing misrepresent the facts-- not the esoteric theories or predictions, but the actual facts that a fifth grader could verify, like whether 2010 was hot.

More povray walking along a path

2011-02-01T20:32:00.000-05:00

A pastor friend asked me to make a video of a man walking through a maze. Here's the first draft, showing my walking system in action.

Top Twelve Twitter Sins

2011-01-31T18:30:00.004-05:00

1) SIN: Post in more than one language. Maybe I'm a lowbrow, but I only know one language, and suddenly finding something in a language I don't speak really disrupts the enjoyable, quick scanning that is possible with a long Twitter read list.

SOLUTION: Why don't you instead set up _es, _en, and _fr separate accounts.

2) SIN: Post more than two items in a row. I note that The Washington Post, CBS News, USA Today, even three local papers in my region, never post more than two in a row. But the paper for my hometown makes ten posts in a row randomly sometime between 6 AM and 7AM. Twitter is like a dinner party or a discussion in a university philosophy or history class. That is: talking much during a class may be tolerated only if you really were that profound; talking uninterruptedly in one stretch would be taken universally as a sign of arrogance.

SOLUTION: Get Hootsuite and set up delayed postings if you have lots of stuff to say right now.

3) SIN: Same exact text, back to back, from an "org" and a "person." Somewhere along the line I must have subscribed not only to a humanitarian or artistic or scientific organization, but also to the one guy or gal who runs it. In three separate situations, I've found the same text in back to back posts, and felt my intelligence insulted.

SOLUTION: Give up delusions of grandeur.

4) SIN: Cursing. In one case, I watched a guy post on a political topic over the course of days and go from a mindset of determination to unfocused sexual cursing. Like dude, were you upset that the world's leaders weren't reading & obeying your Twitter feed? Before you call me a prude, it wasn't just the "f" or "d" words, but described his enemies with references to women's bodies parts. That demeans women and is surely ad hominem. (But if you agree with me on the sexual cursing, maybe I have a point on the f & d words < wink > ). The cursing at the end of the month only gave reason for unfollowing to those who might have shared his conviction at the beginning of the month. I've been known to curse at times, but I am of the opinion that loose use of it shows a lack of critical thinking.

SOLUTION: Get off my lawn!!

5) SIN: Foursquare. I'll subscribe to any interesting artist or scientist around the world, but I'm not interested in where he or she ate pancakes. I have enjoyed tweets from multiple tweeps about how they enjoyed a meal, but 4sq links about their presence at a diner just annoy. I realize that there are a myriad of users will have a myriad of purposes for using Twitter, and some of these will be connecting with friends. But I'm not interested in knowing that my f2f friend became mayor of a train station.

SOLUTION: visit pleaserobme.com

6) SIN: Same post AM & PM. Some days, Twitter has been the first thing I read before retiring and first thing I read upon rising. And I've found the same post from the same guy (new time stamp, of course!) Isn't this an insult to the readers? SOLUTION: Get a life.

7) SIN: "The 'blank' Daily is out!" I respect what paper.li is doing, but the announcement in a Tweet that a paper is out is non-information to the reader.

SOLUTION: put it in your profile.

8) SIN: "Retweet for charity". Maybe I'm a Scrooge here, but shouldn't the person giving cash just go and do it? I wonder, if this practice is not overly tacky, that I should set up a few dozen fake Twitter accounts to make retweets from. Isn't that what the person is after?

SOLUTION: give cash directly, and do not let your right hand know what your left hand is doing.

9) SIN: Links to things that do not give me the promised information on the first click. It's on a site with click-thru ads, buried somewhere deep on a busy page, or to be found on a link from your meta-site.

SOLUTION: Consider the user's time and trust, both of which you just spent unwisely.

10) SIN: Polluting the hash tag stream. In one case, I wanted to learn about a religious denomination. Human Resources employees of the denom's pastors' pension fund were trying to get all the pastors in the denom to do some paperwork. So two of them made a couple of tweets a day urging pastors to to this paperwork, for weeks. Q: Were all pastors following that hashtag (are a tenth of them even on Twitter? )? Was the purpose to annoy all pastors (let alone laypeople) until the last one fills out the paperwork? But that's not the bigger problem. Several well-meaning members of the denomination kept retweeting the announcements every day, I guess as a way of supporting the financial health of the denomination. So, to go to this hashtag, one would find it filled with retweets of the same bureaucratic announcements, reworded each day. The value was lost, I gave up going there, I imagine others would too. And that, my friend, must be a way in which the retweeting harmed the denomination more than its ability to help it (because of filled-out paperwork).

SOLUTION: Think about the aggregate effects of what you are doing!

11) SIN: dumping same content, verbatim, into every social media internet service that exists. For a time, I was following President Obama on both Twitter and Facebook. That is, I would actually read the material that came from both sources. When your brain sees the same exact words twice, you feel gamed, that subscribing to one of the sources is a waste of time. An equally dense version of this is using your Twitter feed to encourage folks to come to your Facebook page. (Will we find invites to go to the Twitter feed there?
SOLUTION: Give different angles-- even stick through a thesaurus machine or something-- if you're going to dump material into multiple media.

12) SIN: Follow Fridays, and thanks for RT.
SOLUTION: Abstain!

Saving Lutheranism from Ayn Rand

2011-01-29T12:33:00.004-05:00

Note: Blogger is preventing me from formatting this note in the way I desire. For a cleaner-reading copy, please see: https://docs.google.com/document/pub?id=1hCxx4AfhZN2DxQLoHtfY-maBtNFfPDVRKdMpCQjKLqM

First of all, let me stress that I believe there are serious theological problems in the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America. I have occasionally been dumbstruck by some of the “theological liberalism” coming from official publications or media of churchwide office. Here are some examples:

i) The Grace Matters radio show and podcast was billed as “the radio ministry of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America.” One of their episodes took pains to attack the idea that the bible could provide a motivation for humanitarian concern for the disabled. It was promoting the view that “the healing stories of Jesus in the bible show an anti-disability bias” and “were probably put in there by someone with an agenda to prove the divinity of Jesus.”

ii) The study guide for the Journeying Faithfully Together books published the the ELCA were meant to facilitate small-group discussions in ELCA congregations about sexual ethics. The booklet touted Jungian spirituality as offering insights to Christians, and implied homosexual persons were more spiritually attuned than others. ‘The psychoanalyst Carl G. Jung held that homosexually oriented people were often endowed "with a wealth of religious feelings, which help to bring the ecclesia spiritualis [church of the spirit] into reality, and a spiritual receptivity which makes them responsive to revelation." ‘

Here is how I sum up this “liberal theology”: Scripture does not reliably confess a divine Jesus; people with an agenda put that into the text. The parables of Jesus’ healing don’t show God’s compassion for us or a model of how to treat our neighbor but are instead a source of prejudice against the disabled. Gay and lesbian persons are better spiritually because Carl Jung told us.

Now I believe this kind of theology to represent neither all nor certainly the best of the ELCA. But if material like this got into its national media, then no wonder people wanted to reform it!

Given these problematic examples of an approach to scripture and church tradition that is completely foreign to that of my own, I have great sympathies, if not some allegiances, with those who were trying to “reform” the ELCA and Lutheranism. In a book published by the reform group WordAlone, By Whose Authority?, a case was made that social justice had become the raison d'etre for this denomination. Surely, too much of any good thing -- any thing-- can be bad. But is its complete absence any better? Or how about a bitter sarcasm for that thing-- for something that has been part of church tradition for centuries?

Around Christmas 2010, I read three pieces by “reform-minded” Lutherans which offered an approach to social justice and concern for the unfortunate that are completely foreign to my understanding of scripture, the Lutheran confessions, and church tradition.

The first was a tongue-in-cheek statement from “Bishop Barbie”. Bishop Barbie is the nom de plume of a satirist within (ex-ELCA?) Lutheran circles who jokes about matters from a theologically or politically conservative perspective. This person published a “Barbie who saved Christmas” story on “her” blog:

“You see, boys and girls, the true message of Christmas has nothing to do with sin, death or the power of the devil being overcome by our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. The true message of Christmas is not the coming of God’s Son into the world to redeem the world from its bondage. The true story of Christmas is a message of social justice, where you learn to care about the Bob Cratchits of the world because it is the right thing to do (with or without your exemplar, Jesus). “

My view: it is of course reprehensible that anyone within Lutheranism could have the view satirized here-- social justice minus “sin death, power of the devil overcome by our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ.” I wouldn’t doubt that too many Lutherans do have this view. Equally reprehensible, however, is the view that social injustices (as the world is talking about them) have nothing to do with “sin, death, and the power of the devil”: that there were a dichotomy! The message from “Barbie” here is that social injustices are worthy of no “air time” within a Christian’s faith walk, that the most important thing for biblically minded peopled to do about social injustices is to mock the machinations of denominations who talk about them. Similarly, Bishop Barbie’s Facebook status once featured a parody of “The Twelve Days of Christmas” . In the ensuing list of the parody, we see juxtaposed the “Ten Signs of Justice”, “Four Fair Trade stoles” with “Prayers to …[sic] ” and “Five De-i-ties!”. The satirist is lumping concern for the oppressed with being unsure about who or what God is. In contrast, I actually went to two different congregations’ Christmas services this year. One was ELCA, one was non-Lutheran evangelical. Both times I heard a bible passage mentioning justice as being part of Jesus’ mission.

During the Offering at my ELCA congregation’s Christmas Eve service, I made the mistake of checking my email on my smartphone. There was a letter from the WordAlone organization which contained an article, “The Crisis of Christmas”, published by Pastor Jaynan Clark. I figured it’d be fine to read more inspirational Christian material during this lull-- wouldn’t it? Pastor Clark introduced her article by saying she took an email that was originally addressed to “liberals and conservatives”, but she had transposed the two groups to be “Those Conformed to the World” and “Those Being Transformed by Jesus and the Work of the Spirit.” That right there ought to give one pause. I personally take pains to put “theologically” in front of the words “liberal” or “conservative” when talking about theological movements within Christianity. Sometimes it seems that there are folks who conflate the “conservative” as used by political pundits like Sean Hannity with the “conservative” approach to scripture that say, theologians like James Nestingen might have. There’s a difference between preserving the social order (warts and all) and preserving the confession handed down to us through the centuries. I would contrast Clark’s schismatic address with those of Pope John Paul II. I note a tendency in his encyclicals to address them various church leaders, various Christians, and “persons of goodwill.” JPII included the humanitarian-minded non-Christian in his addresses, and I think this was a brilliant witness. You open the door to evangelization by acknowledging that some folks are already allied with a part of the church’s mission. Pastor Clark’s goes

To those conformed to this world:

Please accept with no obligation, implied or implicit, my best wishes for an environmentally conscious, socially responsible, low-stress, non-addictive, gender-neutral celebration of the winter solstice holiday, practiced within the most enjoyable traditions of the religious persuasion of your choice, or secular practices of your choice, with respect for the religious/secular persuasion and/or traditions of others, or their choice not to practice religious or secular traditions at all.

The best wishes for “Those Conformed” including a holiday that is “environmentally conscious, socially responsible”. Again, I was dumbstruck over the idea that having environmental and social concerns goes hand in hand with being conformed to the world. I could just as easily imagine that indifference to your neighbor’s suffering is fruit of being conformed. After mentioning “America”, the piece offers a disclaimer: “Not to imply that America is necessarily greater than any other country nor the only America in the Western Hemisphere.” Is this a jibe at those who aren’t sufficiently nationalistic? The piece continues with a fairly good theology of the cross, offered of course to the conservatives / “Those Transformed by Jesus”.

It’s just two quotes from the Lutheran reformers, but I only had two quotes from the headquarters of the ELCA. Perhaps it would be fairer to judge a movement based not only on its sarcastic moments alone but also on a scholarly exposition of its views in one of its magazines. Later in the week I read “Focus: Feed the Hungry,” by Pastor Joseph S. Copeck, in the November/ December 2010 issue of Connections: a magazine for evangelical Lutheran Christians. It was published by Bible Alive Ministries and the issue featured many articles by officers of the WordAlone organization and/or pastors of the Lutheran Congregations in Mission for Christ denomination. If it matters to anyone, I believe I received a copy in the mail because I have given money to WordAlone several times over the past decade.

I suppose it would be fruitful to start by citing the places I agree with Pastor Copeck. He says, “Our Lord commands us to feed the hungry.” He cites many different ways to raise money and provide outlets for direct relief of the hungry. He also stresses the need for evangelism of the poor, not to “leave out the food that feeds the soul-- the Word of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord.” He also talks of how Christians have to be careful in handling the potentially difficult situation this arises-- “When [receiving] faith is too connected to the food or clothing given, it can become a coercive push toward belief in Christ.” All of these are good thoughts.

So what did I find objectionable, does anything warrant the tying of “Ayn Rand” to this flavor of Lutheranism? He cites problems: “hunger campaigns connected to specific political goals,” “solving the world’s problems,” “common connection of alleviating world hunger with political solutions.”

While it would be bad for the church to reduce the struggle to alleviate hunger to mere political advocacy, it’s equally naive to think that political problems themselves don’t cause hunger. From wars to trade rules, government policies affect hunger. These items have been on the radar scope of social justice Christians and advocacy organizations like Bread for the World. I would note that Bread for the World’s financial supporters include the Lutheran Church Missouri Synod World Relief and Human care, Catholic Charities USA, and the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops-- groups that ought to have some street cred in theologically conservative circles. While we shouldn’t worry too much about whether the new Lutheran groups will give financial support to Bread for the World, per se, I do wonder what kind of witness they would have on policy problems that oppress the poor. I would note that talking to princes has been a part of the faith tradition: Moses said to a Pharaoh, “Let my people go!” Likewise, it’s not like our denomination isn’t named after someone who ever wrote a letters to a prince. Luther’s “Admonition to Peace” not only warned the peasants against rabble-rousing but also told princes and lords that their own unjust treatment was directly responsible for the unrest. Luther might be accused of “seeking political solutions”, but he was also calling those who abused the poor to repentance. Let me say that again: he wrote to get them to turn from a sin, not just to affect some sociological benefit to the country. Luther spoke of a spiritual effect on the princes as a result of their active deeds of oppression, at least including God’s wrath. Now today, on this whole planet, are there no cases where employers or princes are abusing the poor worse than those in Luther’s day? Is anyone, to these contemporary oppressors, preaching a “repentance and forgiveness of sins in Jesus’ name?” I do see a lot of sarcasm directed at those who make complaints of injustices, in politically conservative circles of Lutheranism.

Pastor Copeck makes a few mentions of Pope Benedict XVII. But I don’t think that the philosophy of his piece meshes with other writings of Benedict XVII. His Encyclical Letter, Caritas in Veritate, says

The market is subject to the principles of so-called commutative justice, which regulates the relations of giving and receiving between parties to a transaction. But the social doctrine of the Church has unceasingly highlighted the importance of distributive justice and social justice for the market economy, not only because it belongs within a broader social and political context, but also because of the wider network of relations within which it operates. In fact, if the market is governed solely by the principle of the equivalence in value of exchanged goods, it cannot produce the social cohesion that it requires in order to function well. Without internal forms of solidarity and mutual trust, the market cannot completely fulfil its proper economic function. And today it is this trust which has ceased to exist, and the loss of trust is a grave loss. [Emphases original]

Furthermore, the Catechism of the Catholic Church goes so far as to say:

1938 There exist also sinful inequalities that affect millions of men and women. These are in open contradiction of the Gospel: Their equal dignity as persons demands that we strive for fairer and more humane conditions. Excessive economic and social disparity between individuals and peoples of the one human race is a source of scandal and militates against social justice, equity, human dignity, as well as social and international peace.44

In these two quotes, there is a specific call to address “the world’s problems”, to struggle against them, if not “solve” them. My analysis of one’s responsibility to the poor, in Catholic doctrine, is that istcannot limited to handing over materials goods from one’s excess.

I see that this quote from the Catechism has the word, “social justice” in it. Pundit Glen Beck famously said last year that conservatives should leave congregations that have “Social justice” on their web pages. Frankly, that this kind of sentiment is popular in many political circles made me more sensitive to how Christian reform groups talk about justice. I would note that at the time of this writing, Google had 589 hits for “social justice” at the Vatican’s web site. Should (political) conservatives leave the Catholic Church, or at least leave off quoting Catholic scholars? Indeed, I am heartened that the popes have been making annual Messages on the topics of "World Day of Peace”, “World Day of the Sick, “World Food Day”, “World Day of Migrants and Refugees." Can’t you imagine Bishop Barbie or an article in First Things making fun if these Messages were to come a mainline denomination bureaucrat?

I think that social justice and solving the worlds problems are part of the tradition of the church historic, it’s just often under-reported. John Bunyan wrote “The Life and Death of Mr. Badman.” In it, he makes reference to, naturally, a bad man, and catalogs a list of sins. Here is an extended excerpt:

Well, this Badman was a sad wretch ...

As for Example: There is a poor body that dwells, we will suppose, so many miles from the Market; and this man wants a Bushel of Grist, a pound of Butter, or a Cheese for himself, his wife and poor children: But dwelling so far from the Market, if he goes thither, he shall lose his dayes work, which will be eight pence or ten pence dammage to him, and that is something to a poor man. So he goeth to one of his Masters or Dames for what he wanteth, and asks them to help him with such a thing: Yes, say they, you may have it; but withall they will give him a gripe, perhaps make him pay as much (or more) for it at home, as they can get when they have carryed it five miles to a Market, yea and that too for the Refuse of their Commodity. But in this the Women are especially faulty, in the sale of their Butter and Cheese, &c. Now this is a kind of Extortion, it is a making a prey of the necessity of the poor, it is a grinding of their faces, a buying and selling of them.

But above all, your Hucksters, that buy up the poor mans Victuals by whole-sale, and sell it to him again for unreasonable gains, by retale, and as we call it, by piece meal; they are got into a way, after a stingeing rate, to play their game upon such by Extortion: I mean such who buy up Butter, Cheese, Eggs, Bacon, &c. by whole sale, and sell it again (as they call it) by penny worths, two penny worths, a half penny worth, or the like, to the poor, all the week after the market is past.

These, though I will not condemn them all, do, many of them, bite and pinch the poor by this kind of evil dealing. These destroy the poor because he is poor, and that is a grievous sin. He that oppresseth the poor to increase his riches, and that giveth to the rich, shall surely come to want. Therefore he saith again, Rob not the poor because he is poor, neither oppress the afflicted in the gate; for the Lord will plead their cause, and spoil the soul of them that spoile them.

Oh that he that gripeth and grindeth the face of the poor, would take notice of these two Scriptures! Here is threatned the destruction of the Estate, yea and of the Soul too, of them that oppress the poor. Their Soul we shall better see where, and in what condition that is in, when the day of Doom is come; but for the Estates of such, they usually quickly moulter; and that sometimes all men, and sometimes no man knows how.

Bunyan here is complaining about actions that are not socially responsible, about a social injustice. He is complaining about the worlds problems. But more importantly, his motivation for the complaints of these business practices appear to be not limited to the sociological, but the spiritual. Bunyan mentions the Soul. Bunyan in effect ties the works of “sin, death, and the devil” to legal, mutually voluntary transactions in a free marketplace. Now is there no business anywhere on earth today doing anything less compassionate than Bunyan’s contemporaries? I’ve heard worse criticisms of WalMart. Who will preach to them? More importantly, who is sardonically mocking those who are making any such kind of complaint in a Christian setting? Pastor Copeck mentioned evangelizing the poor; how about the oppressors of the poor, too?

Some may say, “I have a different way of helping these people,” or “the church must not be involved in politics,” or, “the church must not endorse one piece of legislation or one political philosophy.” These criticisms are fair enough. The controversy here is not who to vote for, which bill in Congress is God’s will. It’s about proclaiming law and gospel to lost souls, to unrepentant sinners. The church ought not be a (direct) player on the political stage. It is, however, a major player on the philosophical stage, and some philosophies ask it to be quiet. I believe this plants the seeds for Antinomianism and Gospel Reductionism.

I would note that in the 2005 Churchwide Assembly of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, there were votes not only on homosexuality but also Palestine. First 51% opposed a resolution that would have allowed non-celibate homosexual persons to serve as pastors. Secondly 75% voted in favor of a resolution expressing concern about Israel’s wall-building in Palestine. I would venture to speculate about the makeup of the denomination based on these votes. Half might be “theologically liberal” on the biblical record on sexual ethics, but “social justice” on oppressed people. One quarter might be “theologically conservative” on sex, and “politically” conservative on criticizing U.S. allies. In my opinion, these two slices of the pie are very well represented in the dominant factions that have come forth in American Lutheranism since then. I believe that there is another quarter who were theologically conservative, peace-and-justice Christians within Lutheranism and do not have a voice now. That is my cry.

Back to Christmas. I had mentioned how I attended two different church’s services on Christmas. At the evangelical congregation, there was a beautiful musical service, accompanied by everything from violin to electric guitar. One of the hymns was, “O Holy Night.” Given the shock earlier in the day (Pastor Clark’s letter), these words hit my soul like a freight train:

Chains shall He break for the slave is our brother;

And in His name all oppression shall cease.

Sweet hymns of joy in grateful chorus raise we,

Let all within us praise His holy name.

Social Justice intruding into Christmas! Oh woe to those ignoring sin death and the power of the devil! ;-) But the “politics” of this hymn were prefaced with:

O holy night! The stars are brightly shining,

It is the night of our dear Saviour's birth.

Long lay the world in sin and error pining,

'Til He appear'd and the soul felt its worth.

A thrill of hope the weary world rejoices,

For yonder breaks a new and glorious morn.

Maybe you can both talk about social injustices and proclaim Christ’s victory over sin. For some of the time, for some of the people, the two might go hand in hand.

Sweet hymns of joy in grateful chorus raise we,

Let all within us praise His holy name.

Then I wondered if the hymn were somehow foreign to Lutheranism. I googled, “O Holy Night + Lutheran”. It was everywhere, “even” in those of the most theologically conservative Wisconsin Evangelical Lutheran Synod. The dichotomy is a harmful myth.

On civil discourse

2011-01-13T07:33:00.000-05:00

Martin Luther said that a Christian's response to an attack containing a false charge ought to be, "God be praised! I am innocent!" (The "God be praised" being sincere thanks that someone would take time to call someone to repentance (for ...the better of soul or society??).) In certain political circles today, any criticism involving pointing out consequences of someone's actions is now referred to as "Hate on."

While liberalism is probably synonymous with "Antinomianism" or licentiousness in religious circles, I think today's conservatism has the same flaw. When it focuses on whether folks have made the right religious choice and not focused on a "preaching of repentance," you've got probs. All dialogue becomes a matter of "clearing the bench" (baseball brawl) for the right team.

Blender 2.55 + Makehuman Alpha

2010-12-06T22:00:00.002-05:00

Blender 2.55 + Makehuman Alpha, originally uploaded by pterandon.

This was an attempt to take a MakeHuman character and import it into Blender. It appears to have worked well. I was astonished at how well the toning & colors worked out. There was a great big headache with importing some python scripts from MH to Blender involving the latter's Add-Ons menu under User Preferences. But it actually worked.

Saving the Bible from climate change

2010-11-25T07:38:00.008-05:00

Representative John Shimkus has drawn attention to the role that Christian theology can play in the climate change debate. My sources of information are a Huffington Post article, which is based on a Toronto Star article by Cathal Kelly.

In a 2009 hearing, Shimkus cited God's promise to Noah:

“Never again will I curse the ground because of man, even though all inclinations of his heart are evil from childhood and never again will I destroy all living creatures as I have done.

“As long as the earth endures, seed time and harvest, cold and heat, summer and winter, day and night, will never cease.”

(Interestingly, Jerry Falwell's 2007 sermon on climate change quoted the same passage. ) Here's Shimkus' analysis, from the Star article:

“I believe that’s the infallible word of God, and that’s the way it’s going to be for his creation,” Shimkus said. "The Earth will end only when God declares it's time to be over. Man will not destroy this Earth. This Earth will not be destroyed by a Flood," Shimkus asserted. "I do believe that God's word is infallible, unchanging, perfect."

I for one, do believe that the bible is infallible, unchanging, perfect. My problem is that he sets up the bible to be disproved by events in history. Shinkus took the trouble to cite this scriptural passages to say that the bible refutes global warming alarmism. That is a very fair assessment of his purpose in citing Scripture.

Okay, what is global warming alarmism? It is that due to anthropogenic gas pollution, the earth will experience radical, geographic shifts in its zones of agricultural productivity, and experience massive local flooding (just the low lying areas of the planet, not "the earth" as in the flood of Noah). Can anyone point to me a major green organization, a citation from the ICCP, or Science or Nature that says more? I'd like to see it!

Now the question is whether the earth has already suffered cases of massive local flooding, or radical shifts in zones in agricultural productivity due to weather changes? The suffering of the Bangladeshi people due to flooding is all too well known. It's already happening. Global warming alarmism is that more parts of the earth will experience flooding, not that the entire planet will be underwater. Greenpeace just released a statement saying,

"In an extreme runaway scenario, a complete melting of the Greenland ice sheet would add 7 metres to the world’s oceans, and a complete melting of the Antarctic sheet would add 60 metres. Those scenarios would require a massive restructuring of human civilisation as we know it. However, even a one-to-two metre rise in sea level will inundate certain port cities, islands, atolls, flood deltas and coastal plains, obliterate vulnerable species and displace millions of people.

Now let's look at seedtime and harvest. Has the weather either starved people or caused massive local suffering? How about the Irish potato famine (blamed on increased rainfall & cool weather that led to blight), and the American Dustbowl (blamed on a drought) being but two examples. And as one of my conservative friends pointed out, even during the Irish famine, the country was a net exporter of food. So we had massive suffering due to loss of agricultural productivity, but no "end to seedtime and harvest".

I would also note that the promise in Genesis 8 speaks to what God Himself would not do, not what people can do to themselves.

As I see it, there are five possibilities:

The Bible (or at least Genesis 8) is fallible and has been completely disproven by multiple events in history, OR
God breaks his promises, OR
Our recollection of human history is wrong, because the bible is true. Those Irish immigrants to the United States were lying to us about conditions back home. OR
There is a significant portion of the green movement that is saying the earth will lose all its agricultural productivity and be completely flooded, like to the top of Mount Ararat (and I just haven't been listening), OR
Shinkus is engaged in three sins: One is a misrepresentation of what green activists and climate scientists have actually said. The second is setting up the reliability of the Word of God to be mocked by people who read the newspaper. The third is tacking "and the bible is infallible" to the end of his political opinions.

Tea Party versus Reality

2010-11-21T21:17:00.010-05:00

First, let me digress a bit with a talk about how difficult it can be to get a firm grasp on some political questions. For example, I have heard (or heard of) two different interviews with former Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan in the past year or so. From my memory, in the two talks, Greenspan gave completely different philosophies on taxes and government deficit spending. What is Greenspan's view on deficit spending? Why did I perceive two different opinions? Well, I might have heard him incorrectly one or both times; Greenspan might have misspoken or he changed his mind; he himself might not have sufficiently developed his own opinions in order to realize the contradictions. Or I might not know enough about economics to comprehend a highly nuanced theory. Furthermore, what does it matter what Greenspan's opinions are? Will knowledge that Greenspan himself weighed in on one side or the other of this issue immediately change any partisans' minds? Probably not. So, to a large degree, political questions of this type may be "unknowable" or hopelessly intractable.

I might not know much about economics, but I know a thing about how cold I've been over the past twenty years, and in twenty years of discussion with friends and family members about how cold it was for them across the Eastern Seaboard of the United States. I know that it's gotten warmer since 1973, by my own direct observation. If however scientists were able to come up with a scientific explanation that says I was wrong in my direct observations, I probably should listen. But they haven't.

What if I were to consult the scientific consensus and it were to confirm my own personal observation that the earth (and the Eastern Seaboard) were in fact warming, AND political activists of a certain political persuasion tell me that the earth is cooling? How likely is that the political activists would be right, and my personal observations are wrong, and the compiled scientific data are also wrong? I think it's pretty unlikely.

This is my response to a poll by the Pew Research Center on climate change. They asked all kinds of questions related to policy decisions, and I don't care about that. I did not quote any policy-related poll data below. Maybe the question of what is the best policy is another unanswerable, intractable question. Similarly, the poll says that there's about a 20% of the populate across the board who believe that the earth is warming, but it's not due to human pollution. Fair enough: it's interesting that this one view does not correlate to any political orientation. But is anyone in the room stubbornly denying reality itself? I think it's pretty obvious here.

What is completely alarming is the response to the question of whether the earth were warming at all. The poll answers here show an amazing sensitivity to political affiliation. Seventy percent of Tea Party Republicans believe that there is no warming. Fourteen percent of Democrats have the same denial of reality. This is sad. If you're completely wrong, most likely denying your own observation of reality, on one point, how many other points can you be wrong on?

Global Warming Poll, originally uploaded by pterandon.

School of Visual Arts, MFA playlist

2010-08-24T19:18:00.003-04:00

While poking around Youtube, I found this school's channel. Every one is a masterpiece. This is great stuff. It reminds me how quality storytelling is possible in a short film.

Global warming doubting

2010-07-02T20:47:00.001-04:00

The percentage of Americans who believe that global warming is occurring has decreased by 20% over the past three years, according to a Pew Center report.

Latest data from the Goddard Institute for Space Studies, including 2009 data:

The Health Care Debate and the Prisoner's Dilemma

2010-05-24T22:14:00.002-04:00

In game theory, there's a concept called the Prisoner's Dilemma. There are many analogies used to explain the concept, but I think the best example involves the produce market in a rural community. One vendor brings vegetables to barter; another brings fruit. Every week they trade a box of produce, and open it when they get home.

If the fruit vendor gets home to find he's received moldy carrots but had given away his freshest apples, he'll be really ticked. And in that same transaction, the veggie vendor would have received the greatest gain-- he gave away something worthless and got something of value in return. Next week each may have a strategy based on the prior week's results-- the fruit vendor may want to retaliate, while the veggie vendor may realize he cannot go on forever trading the bad vegs because eventually he'll want some good fruit for his family. So as the rounds of trading play on, there may be cycles of "betray" and "cooperate". Even if both players were acting in good faith, there may be cases where accidents of weather and hired hands that prevent one from always bringing good produce to the trade. You may or may not choose to "punish" your best friend and trading partner for a single instance of bad produce.

(Thus, bad offerings to your partner might not always be due to an active choice to defraud-- that, I believe, is the weakness of the original articulation of the Prisoner's Dilemma, which involves the plea bargaining of two thieves in court. When trying to explain PD to a child, I got caught up in questions of, "Shouldn't you always tell the truth?" when talking about the police and courts. In contrast, the fruit/ veggie analogy is free of this ethical conundrum and makes it easier to understand how trading might work.)

The same Prisoner's Dilemma may be applied to the debate over slavery in the 19th century. England eventually took an ethical stance and forbade slavery within Britain and did so decades before America did. But once it had done so, Britain now had a HUGE incentive to get the other Altantic nations to forbid slavery as well. It was now bringing fresh vegetables and didn't want to compete with vendors habitually bringing moldy fruit.

Same goes for the recent health care debate. Whether you've been vilifying the HMO execs or decrying government intrusion, in my view it is clear that the health care companies have been operating under a Prisoner's Dilemma. I believe that the competition between companies has been so stiff that have felt forced to adopt several unkind practices, such as the one involving pre-existing conditions. I can see that one HMO might feel that otherwise, they'd attract a bunch of sick people and provide disincentives for getting coverage to healthy, working, 25-year-olds. They may fear being the only one company that makes it too easy to wait until you're sick until you get coverage. They may fear being the only company bringing the freshest apples to the market, if mold is "in".

Thus, I believe I've seen the health care companies ambivalent towards proposals by liberals that make every player in the market act in a certain way, in removing a certain amount of mold from the fruit. They don't want to take it on the chin by being seen as the nicest company on earth, but are willing to play a nicer game if everyone were forced to. I cannot point to a particular article, but I got this feeling from my reading. Same goes for environmental regulations-- some businesses don't mind a playing field where everyone is required to play nicer. I think liberals need a greater awareness of the economic limitations of HMO's-- sometimes it's not always an active choice to be an arse. And I think when conservatives get alarmed at even these modest proposals to eliminate incentives to be an arse, it just shows they have no compassion.

Neanderthals, Mitochondrial DNA, and the Tower of Babel.

2010-05-17T22:21:00.001-04:00

Here's an interesting take on the recent science news that certain races of humans may have some common DNA with Neanderthals.

The organization "Reasons to Believe" has a series of podcasts which attempt to advance an Old Earth Creationist position. That is that God took supernatural action to create over hundreds of millions of years. It holds that Genesis is literal history, if one is careful about the translation of certain words. Anyway, their May 10 Podcast was entitled, "Ancient DNA shows interbreeding between Homo sapiens and Neanderthal".

They advanced a fascinating interpretation. We may remember that the biblical story of the Tower of Babel shows humanity as having a single culture, and then being dispersed afterwards by the action of God. In this episode, Hugh Ross offers the idea that the mixing of humans and Neanderthals may have been part of what happened in this story. A fascinating listen!

Is there any way to combine these two videos?

2010-05-12T08:45:00.000-04:00

VERSUS

Is there any way to combine these two? The truthfulness of the first is of no doubt. But its message is weakened a bit by its apparent sarcasm to the second. And that it is as much a message to the converted, it seems to say, "The real urgency is in the Great Commission (Matt 28:16:20); don't worry about Lazarus (Luke 16:19-31) or being a Goat (Matthew 25:31-46)."

In college, one of my conservative friends claimed that the purpose of all social concern was to create a Utopia, and Christian truths show us that creating a Utopia is impossible. I replied, "I guess that depends on whether your purpose is to create a Utopia or to keep people alive long enough to hear the gospel." I really don't know where those words came from, because I hadn't ever before put that thought together.

When did the producers of the first video see Christ hungry? In the second video!!

Animatable mesh2 in povray for character animation

2010-05-10T20:02:00.000-04:00

I've spent more time working on an animatable mesh in povray. This object here is a single, mesh2 object created in povray. It may look creepy now, but I hope someday to make a character like in the movies. The biggest success seen here is that I was actually able to get the character's head to rotate back and forth. I was fighting the code and didn't realize it was actually working this well until I saw the final video. I still haven't figured out why the back of the head has a flat spot on it-- that's next to fix.

Benthamite Utilitairianism vs. the Active Choice to be an Arse

2010-05-08T18:17:00.002-04:00

A while ago, I listened to a podcast of Justice: What's the Right Thing to Do Series, which featured lectures by Michael Sandel about philosophy and ethics. One lecture was about Bentham's Utilitarianism. The lecture implied that there were moral limitations to utilitarianism, that eventually pure, unfettered utilitarianism could lead to justifying outrages that shock the conscience.

Examples were given:

The Roman Coliseum
It was claimed that a utilitarian argument could be made that the pure, ecstatic joy provided to thousands of Roman spectators could outweigh the short-term pain inflicted on a few Christian martyrs.

The Pinto gas tank
In this case, Ford Motor Company made a utilitarian calculation about the cost of replacing a defective gas tank design that was leading to death and injury in rear-end explosions. During a trial, it was revealed that Ford calculated that the $11 repair, multiplied by millions of cars, outweighed the benefit of reducing a few hundred deaths. Sandel in his lecture claimed that a utilitarian argument justified this calculation.

The Ticking Time Bomb
The question was asked in today's situations with terrorism. If you know someone has information about an up-and-coming terrorist plot which could kill hundreds, it was asked, wouldn't it justify a little torture to save those lives?

Given the horrible outcomes of the first two cases, the argument was that moral philosophers have been forced over the centuries to seek limitations and modifications to utilitarianism. I would disagree that unfettered utilitarianism is to blame.

Q: Are the Romans currently tearing apart Christians?
A: No, they ticked off so many of their neighbors that they were eventually overrun by the Gauls.

Q: Is Ford Motor Company doing well financially today?
A: No, the liberal media and trial lawyers tore them apart during those trials leading to great financial loss back then and, as some conservatives have argued, helped usher in a regulatory environment that hurt them.

So, if your calculation were to provide emotional benefits to your Roman citizens, your calculus failed. You forgot the Gauls. If your calculation was to provide financial benefits to Ford shareholders, you failed. You forgot the liberal media. In my estimation, there was an active choice in each of these cases to be a meanie, one which blinded planners to all the likely outcomes.

Now let's consider the case of torture, or those enhanced interrogation that Amnesty International calls torture. First of all, let's assume you actually have a person who has knowledge of ticking time bomb cases. Many critics of torture have argued that the tortured person gives not what you need to know but rather any and everything that he or she thinks will stop the torture. In this example, even over the short term, the utilitarian calculation may be weak.

Over the long term, I would argue that there are additional factors that have to be considered. It has been said that making the torture a policy of the state endangers U.S. soldiers who in the future might ever be captured. And if you ever torture someone who wasn't actually a radical, he or she sure as heck will be by the time you're done.

Certain questions in society may be difficult to answer. They may have a right or wrong-ness fully apart from any utilitarian calculation. I believe that Benthamite Utilitarianism does not in and of itself lead to awful questions, if you consider the "Gauls" in any situation.

Slavery's new apologists

2010-05-08T09:20:00.000-04:00

On the internet, a Lutheran pastor that I know was sharing links to this old clip from the TV show, "West Wing." The one where the fictional President tears into a fictional "Dr. Laura" conservative pundit. The President tries to make the argument that if you use the Bible to come to an opinion on the morality of homosexual sexual relations, you must also follow its directives on the Sabbath and slavery. According to the clip, the directives on the Sabbath are for each of us to up and go stone those who work on the Sabbath. It also means that a prosperous man can sell his daughter into slavery whenever he pleases.

Too many of those who have been advocating for justice for GLBT persons, who advocated setting aside the traditional ethical requirements for pastors in churches like the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, did so against the bible. They used arguments like my Lutheran pastor above that if you rely on the bible alone, you're going to have to do all kinds of awful things, like let men sell their daughters into slavery. Indeed, upon watching the 2009 Churchwide Assembly of the ELCA, I ended up with the feeling that the slavery issue were being re-opened. That 21st century Christians now were no longer sure that the bible was against slavery. It was like watching a convention of apologists for slavery from the 1800's.

I'm open to progressive ideas on the rights of gay and lesbian persons, but have to speak up when some advocates nail their platform on the idea that the bible motivates brutality. They may have evidence that some apologists for slavery did use the bible to support their position. But I have yet to find an abolitionist of that age that used 21st century liberal dogma: dissing the authority, historical accuracy, etc., of the scriptures. Those who argued against slavery used the bible, too, and in my opinion, took more passages more literally.

Find me a group that's speaking for gay rights from a biblical perspective, and I'll join them. I cannot join church movements, per se, that state as obvious that the bible makes you a brute.

Here's my latest piece of evidence. I have been reading William Wilberforce's 1807 "Letter on the Abolition of Slavery." Here's the part where he deals with the biblical record on slavery:

"[H]owever, most of all astonishing, that our opponents attempt to vindicate the Slave Trade on grounds of religion also. The only argument which they urge with, the slightest colour of reason is that slavery was allowed under the Jewish dispensation. The Jews were exalted by the express designation of heaven to a state of eminence above the strangers who sojourned among them, and the heathen who dwelt around them, from either of whom, as a mark of their own dominion, God, who has a right to assign to all his creatures their several places in the scale of being, allowed them to take bondmen and bondwomen, treating them, however, with kindness, remembering their own feelings when they were slaves in Egypt, and admitting them to the chief national privileges, to the circumcision, to the passover, and other solemn feasts, and thus instructing them in the true religion. Besides this, the slaves were to be set free at the year of Jubilee, or every fiftieth year, a command which was alone sufficient to prevent their accumulating in any great number.

But they who thus urge on us the Divine toleration of slavery under the Jewish Theocracy, should remember that the Jews themselves were expressly commanded not to retain any of their own nation, any of their brethren in slavery, except as a punishment, or by their own consent; and even these were to be set free on the return of the sabbatical, or the seventh year. Inasmuch therefore, as we are repeatedly and expressly told that Christ. has done away all distinctions of nations, and made all mankind one great family, all our fellow creatures are now our brethren ; and therefore the very principles and spirit of the Jewish law itself would forbid our keeping the Africans, anymore than our own fellow subjects, in a state of slavery. But even supposing, contrary to the fact, that our opponents had succeeded in proving that the Slave Trade was not contrary to the Jewish law, this would only prove that they would be entitled to carry it on if they were Jews, and could, like the Jews, produce satisfactory proof that they were the chosen people of God. But really it would be consuming your time to no purpose, to enter into a formal proof, that fraud, rapine, and cruelty, a contrary to that religion, which commands us to love our neighbour as ourselves, and to do to others as we would have them them do to us. I cannot persuade myself that our opponents are serious in using this argument, and therefore I will proceed no farther with this discussion. Besides, even granting that it were possible for any of them to be seriously convinced that Christianity does not prohibit the Slave Trade, I should still have no great encouragement to proceed, for,—it may be prejudice, but I cannot persuade myself that they are so much under the practical influence of religion, that if we should convince their understandings, we should alter their conduct.

William Wilberforce, A letter on the abolition of the slave trade, 1807

Strong stuff.

Christianity is evil

2010-05-03T22:11:00.026-04:00

"When we cast our eyes towards the south-west of Europe, and behold extensive countries, once possessed by the most polished nations, the chosen seats of literature and the liberal arts; and now behold one universal waste of ignorance and barbarism, we have always been accustomed to ascribe the fatal change to the conquest of a band of Mahometan invaders... But with what shame must we acknowledge, that in Africa, Christianity and Mahometanism appear to have mutually interchanged characters-- Smith, the African Company's own agent in 1722, tells us, 'the discerning natives account it their greatest unhappiness that they were ever visited by the Europeans. They say that we Christians introduced the traffic of Slaves, and that 'before our coming they lived in peace.' But, say they, it is observable, that where ever Christianity comes, there come with it a sword, a gun, powder, and ball.'
The same picture may appear to claim still greater attention from the hand of Mr. Parke, whose visit is more recent, and whose knowledge of Africa is more extensive. Speaking of the Foulah nation, who are many of them professed Mahometans, he says, 'religious persecution is not known among them..."

"... we must abolish the Slave Trade before we attempt to diffuse among the Africans the lessons of peace and love; lest we are asked the same well-known question, and receive the same well-known reply, as the Spanish priest from the poor dying Peruvian, when the Spaniards in America were acting on the plan which is here advised of at once ravaging and converting: 'Are there to be any Europeans in the Heaven, where you wish me to secure a place?' Being told 'yes', 'Then it is no place for Peruvians.' "

William Wilberforce, A letter on the abolition of the slave trade, 1807

This is a work by a great Christian apologist, in a passionate letter of Christian reasons to abolish the slave trade. William Wilberforce wrote it in 1807 to the "Freeholders and other inhabitants of Yorkshire" to urge Britain to outlaw slavery. In it, he basically says that Islam laid waste to the south-west of Europe. But that in Africa, "Christianity and Mahometanism appear to have mutually interchanged characters." One was an undeniable sociological evil in one place and time, and another is an undeniable sociological evil in another. So saith one of the great Christian apologists of Britain.

This is again a reference to Franklin Graham's "Islam is evil" approach to evangelism. One might just as well have equal anecdotal evidence that "Christianity is evil." That's the charge actually made by some atheists, based on equally flimsy logic. In this regard of sloppy attacks, the devout followers of Islam and Christianity might have more in common than opposition. Here's a checklist of questions I ask before blaming any religion, especially my own, for a social ill:

The real question is whether the the Koran and/or the Bible required these periods of brutality. Not whether some nut could find a few verses to support the brutality, but whether a comprehensive faithfulness to the whole text as authoritative really motivates one to be a brute.
If someone could point to a few verses which appear to give a "green light" to the outrage, is there even a single "red light" verse which says, "STOP!" ? (Like, "Love your enemies"?)
How are the Law portions of the text being used? Are the brutes using the "law" portions of the sacred texts only as a list of things that the "elect" get to do to their enemies, or as a demand for all humans to exercise restraint? (i.e., permission to slaughter your/God's enemies vs. a call to exercise restraint in advancing your interests.)
Who is advocating the brutality? Were all camps of traditionalists within the sect in favor of the brutality?
Were there any "social conscience traditionalists" (like Wilberforce, King, Romero, Bonhoeffer, John Paul II) within the sect in effect "spoiling the party" by complaining about the brutality?
Were those who complained about brutality appealing to either the literal demands of the sacred texts or to older authorities in the faith tradition? (This is opposed to attacking the text's authority, complete inspiration, accuracy, humanity, etc.)?

IMO, it is necessary to go through this kind of thought process in order to distinguish between "a jerk who happens to be of Religion X" and "the jerkiness inspired by Religion X."

My point is not that both religions are good, and therefore you ought to feel good about either. You should be a Christian because Jesus died for your sins, and you cannot earn merits with God based on your works. In my last post, I said it was "evil" for any religion to promise such merits. Furthermore, I suspect not only are there contemporary Christians whose religion brings the world "a sword, a gun, powder, and ball," but also there are mild-mannered, faithful Muslims who aren't out to kill us or oppress their women. (Bush, Blair, Colson, and Buckley, Jr., repeatedly insisted so after 9/11, didn't they?) You'll do little to achieve religious conversion of these mild-mannered folk-- or engender their strategic cooperation against the brutes of their own religion-- with the kind of broad brush that Graham paints with. Or by implying they are less faithful than the suicide bombers.

Franklin Graham calls 10% of Islam to repentance

2010-05-02T08:26:00.004-04:00

According to a Pew Research study

In all nine predominantly Muslim nations surveyed in 2009 a strong majority say it is equally important to educate girls and boys. This opinion is shared by more than eight-in-ten in Lebanon (96%), Israel (93%), Indonesia (93%), Turkey (89%), Pakistan (87%) and the Palestinian territories (85%).

Now we all know that Muslim countries are known generally to be behind the west in terms of women's rights and education-- the Taliban's abuse of women being an extreme but all-too-real example. But what to the Muslim citizenry wish for? Equality, at least in education according to this poll. It's also not too hard to believe that if these people are residents of Muslims country, they are actual practitioners of Islam, and therefore probably don't see some degree of equal treatment for boys and girls as being incompatible with all flavors of faithful Islam. How do you reach these people for Christ?

Here's Franklin Graham's approach. Franklin Graham is the son of evangelist Billy Graham and the head of Shepherd's purse. He was recently disinvited from a Pentagon Prayer day at the request of some Mulsim advocacy group. Graham has taken heat for comments he has made in reference to Islam. He has called it "evil". Recently, on the April 22 edition of Fox News' Fox & Friends:

GRAHAM: You know, Gretchen, first of all, I love Muslim people and I want Muslims everywhere to know what I know, that God loves us, that he sent his son Jesus Christ into this world to take our sins and he died for our sins and rose from the grave and that Christ can come into their heart and change them and they can have the hope of eternal life, salvation. I want them to know that they don't have to die in a car bomb don't have to die in some kind of holy war to be accepted by God. But it's through faith in Jesus Christ and Christ alone. But when you look at Islam, I love the people of Islam but the religion, I do not agree with the religion at all. And if you look at what the religion does just to women, women alone, it is just horrid. And so yes, I speak out for women. I speak out for people that live under Islam, that are enslaved by Islam and I want them to know that they can be free, free through faith in Jesus Christ and Christ alone.

[emphasis added in red].
He also said,

"True Islam cannot be practiced in this country," he told CNN's Campbell Brown last December. "You can't beat your wife. You cannot murder your children if you think they've committed adultery or something like that, which they do practice in these other countries."

Okay, so now take those 80% of residents of the Islam world who would like to see their daughters educated. Are they going to view an accurate view of Islam as one where they murder their daughters? How many of them are going to take pause at Franklin's suggestion to accepting Christ instead of doing suicide bombing? Are Islamic people all just strapping on their bomb vests, and need a missionary like Graham to tell them to stop?

I suspect Graham's statements read like nationalistic prejudice, where you tell people to repent of a stereotype of their nationality. I put Graham's "I want them to know that they don't have to die in a car bomb don't have to die in some kind of holy war to be accepted by God" isn't very well received by the vast majority of well-behaved Muslims. I suspect it would be taken as well as saying to Israelis, "You don't have to kill Palestinian babies by bulldozing their houses..." or to Southern men, "You don't have to have sex with those animals..." Or to Italians, "You don't have to become part of a Mafia where you go kill old ladies." There should be pastors bravely making sermons about the very real cases of animal abuse and indiscriminate use of force by security operations. But you don't address people by a large class that doesn't comprise the set of those doing the bad things. To do so is immature, silly, counterproductive to evangelism of real people. I remember Bush, Blair, and Buckley, Jr., all making the case after 9/11 that the terrorists were heretics of Islam.

Franklin's statements are probably however red meat to certain kinds of Christians as far as supporting certain kinds of evangelism. I have also seen a lot of ugly things said by his supporters on the internet.

If you've made it this far, you might have noticed that I haven't yet criticized his idea that "Islam is evil." This is also the statement that the secular press and liberal-protestants within Christianity will take most offense at. And here I will support Reverend Graham. From the context of a Theology of the Cross in Christianity, any good deed that causes you to place an iota of hope for rightness with God is a mortal sin. Indeed, Martin Luther wrote in his Heidelberg Disputation:

The works of the righteous would be mortal sins if they would not be feared as mortal sins by the righteous themselves out of pious fear of God.
By so much more are the works of man mortal sins when they are done without fear and in unadulterated, evil self-security.
To say that works without Christ are dead, but not mortal, appears to constitute a perilous surrender of the fear of God.
Indeed, it is very difficult to see how a work can be dead and at the same time not a harmful and mortal sin.
Arrogance cannot be avoided or true hope be present unless the judgment of condemnation is feared in every work.

Luther is here saying that good deeds can be mortal sins, if we put our hope in them. This is the sense that Islam is evil in the view of a theology of the cross. That it is a works-based religion where humans must strive to put themselves right with God apart from a righteousness based on Christ. If the confessions of Christianity are true, then telling people they can get right with God apart from Christ is nothing less than evil.

The problem with Franklin Graham's approach is that he's not saying this. Or it's not getting into the papers. Perhaps a theologian of the cross would, too, be dis-invited from the Pentagon.

My 3D Search Journey

2010-04-14T07:16:00.001-04:00

Small gifts for the poor.

2010-04-11T13:01:00.002-04:00

I found in my folder at church about 20 brown paper lunch bags (empty, new). I'm not entirely sure who gave them, but it's because I as a layman coordinate the list of volunteers to make lunches for the local homeless shelter. It's fascinating, that I really don't have a convenient way of using them, or getting them to the massive rotating list of persons preparing the meals. But someone thought enough about the poor to stick these lunch bags in my folder, perhaps in effect in Christ's name. I don't know exactly what to do with them, but I don't think I should trash them or stick them into my family's own pantry. It's just an interesting little burden and privilege to have these holy bags taking up space in the kitchen.

Vendor lock-in, the quick sell, and the rise of smart phones

2010-03-26T23:10:00.010-04:00

ITEM:
Two or three years ago, I wanted to buy a GPS system. I was searching the database in Amazon.com of all of the models of GPS units produced by Garmin. At first I was astounded by the vast array of options available, then I eventually figured out a pattern in the table that Amazon made available. Every model that had a capability of subscribing to a Microsoft-based traffic information service cost about $100 more. I didn't figure I lived in a city big enough to have its own traffic data; I don't like Microsoft; I was happy to save $100. About a year later, Google announced a feature of the Droid phone OS which would provide turn-by-turn navigation. In response, Garmin's shares plummeted in October 2009, according to the Wall Street Journal. Google was giving away for free on a smart phone a feature that you could have easily paid $200 for as a standalone device, plus $100 or more for the right to pay additional subscription fees to Microsoft.

ITEM:
1) I bought a clock from Brookstone that was supposed to never need resetting because it was permanently set with the correct time. Guess what-- it needed resetting out of the box, it didn't have the correct time. I took it back.
2) I bought two wireless weather clocks from Brookstone. It broadcast the correct time and 5-day weather forecast for my city. It was an amazing device. Miraculously, both stopped working after about 4 months (even with replaced batteries). There wasn't any sign in the store informing me it was a limited time service.
Both of these items have features that are duplicated by the smartest of smartphones. Ads for Google's new Nexus One tout its ability to display the correct weather and time when left on its charger stand.
In my humble opinion, there's some cynicism behind both companies' decisions listed above. Not so much how can we serve the customer but how can we get their money. Both problems just want me to rely on an Ipod Touch as my only alarm clock. The problems make me want to get a Google Nexus One. I believe what is radical about these phones is not just the new technology but the empowerment of the consumer. Instead of purchasing a series of single-purpose, barely functioning, electronic devices, we'll just buy another $3.99 app for the multi-purpose device we're already carrying around. As it's probably more fair and green, I hope this model continues to be a business success.

Unedifying focus on the End Times

2010-03-14T07:47:00.004-04:00

I've been thinking about the End Times. For some Christians, the study of the End Times is a source of great fascination. My worry is that paying too much attention to "the signs" may cause one to have exactly the opposite state of mind that ought to occur if it's "your time to go".

Christians are called to repent, and to witness to others. There are few tasks which should be higher on the list of the faith walk of a believer. One might even say that the closer one feels to their own time of death, the more urgently one tends to undertake these activities. I'm sure we've all heard Christians who, upon hearing they have but a few months to live, take time to set their affairs in order upstairs, and talking about faith with their loved ones. We should be witnessing & repenting all our lives-- Luther said, "the whole life of believers should be repentance."

Somewhere also on the list of essential activities for a Christian is probably speaking up for the oppressed and providing relief to the victims of disasters.

My fear is that a focus on the End Times may cause one to look for signs at the expense of repentance, witnessing, speaking up for oppressed and relieving want. If you look for the signs, what are you looking for them for? Is it a case of, "I would only do these essential things if I knew the Earth had a few months to live?" I should hope not. Is it a case of wanting to get a better seat on the bus to Heaven? I wonder what works specifically taken on in the End Times would provide oneself merits towards one's salvation or place in Heaven. I suspect there are none, given that salvation is a free gift.

Sam Harris, a New Atheist, once predicted that most Christians would rejoice upon first hearing news of a giant fireball appearing over New York City-- because to them it would be a sign of the impending End Times. Faithful believers should take Harris' comment as an insult to orthodox biblical faith, but I fear it's too likely to be true. An End-Times focus can put one in a state where disasters don't tear at the heart, but make one walk to the other side of the road. Does one see suffering people, even the suffering of bad people who instigated war, as just part of the play unfolding on the stage before you?

Finally, what does Old Testament prophecy mean for you? Take the book of Isaiah. I see it to be full of calls to repentance and beautiful allegorical predictions of the sufferings, death, resurrection, and mission of Jesus Christ. I say we should be reading these texts over and over, so that eventually the Spirit may overcome our stubborn hearts. Perhaps upon the tenth reading we may see yet something else we may repent of, something else we may caution our neighbor about. Repenting and witnessing, repenting and witnessing. That's one take on Isaiah. Another take is to gloss over all these details in the text about our sin and Christ's work, and instead see what's in it for you in the End Times. Memorizing all the signs so you can hop on that bus to Heaven.

If you were about to die, you'd probably focus on all the right things in the faith. If you focus on the signs of the End Times, I fear you'll neglect repentance, witnessing, helping the oppressed, binding up wounds.

Even more refinement to comic panel format

2010-01-07T19:26:00.000-05:00

Flickr stream of creative commons pics with "beach" tag

2010-01-02T22:35:00.000-05:00

More refinement to comic panel format

2009-12-29T20:42:00.002-05:00

Test of comics frame implementation in povray

2009-12-27T21:45:00.002-05:00

This may not be that interesting to a lot of people, but this was set up as a single-pass render in povray. Using the camera_view pigment in Megapov, I can now do a single-pass render of a whole four-panel comic. More to come.

Business as usual?

2009-12-23T08:12:00.001-05:00

Blizzard missed me.

2009-12-21T19:54:00.003-05:00

I live in one of the green triangles in the top right quarter of the image. We only got a light dusting of snow.

This image from the NASA Earth Observatory, which I notice in this Universe Today posting.

"Who is he that struck thee?", unladen swallows, and global climate change

2009-12-15T22:42:00.000-05:00

And they blindfolded him, and asked him, saying, 'Prophesy: who is he that struck thee?' Luke 22:64

Jesus, the Son of God and one who confessed to being "one" with the creator of the universe, was mocked. His tormentors expected him to be able to relate information about the physical world around him, to use his omniscience to say what had just happened while blindfolded. The text does not say that Jesus bothered to answer such a question.

Similarly, imagine some philosophical bullies trying to taunt one of the great Christians in history, say Mother Teresa or Saint Francis. Can you imagine a bully demanding that St. Francis answer a question about the science of the moon-- to have an up-to-date understanding of what his contemporaries new about astronomy? Such an expectation would be absurd. Or more recent bullies might ask Mother Teresa something about the atom. But I doubt ever her harshest critics would expect her to have supernaturally obtained information about the physical sciences around her. No one is that mean. These great Christians knew their place, and few of their critics demanded something completely out of their job description.

But what if Mother Teresa did make it a point to say something utterly stupid about nuclear science-- and then tied it to an eternal spiritual truth? How would most people react to the spiritual truth on this basis? I'm guessing that most people would respect the preacher with few scientific opinions but doubt the one who has strong opinions and is horribly wrong about them. You might take everything the latter preacher says with a grain of salt. You might wonder how much of what they say, they really believe, or are they just reciting propaganda?

Consider the science behind global climate change. Here are three cases:

Jerry Falwell gave a sermon where he called concern about climate change to be a trick of the devil. In it, he distinguished between fake and "evangelical scientists." He also told us we really had to pay attention to the findings of one paper in Nature. Interestingly, if you look at other articles by that author or in that season of Nature, you'd find tons of evidence for catastrophic anthropogenic warming. Was the scientist only "evangelical" when he said something that could be taken out of context?
A pastor I know put on his facebook page a Michelle Malkin article saying that scientists were covering up evidence that the earth has been cooling! The pastor then went on to defend the article!
Another pastor put these three items on his blog: i) a widget that updated folks on regional flooding concerns, ii) a FoxNews widget, and iii) a sarcastic comment that a Lutheran body had made a statement about global climate change. The ironies of these three items being together is just astounding!

Don't get me wrong. I believe that folks should become evangelical, bible-believing, tradition-honoring Christians. I just think that when we tie garbage to the gospel, people will mistrust all of Christianity as kooks or idiots.

Christianity makes little sense w/o fall or cross (note this, Darwinians)

2009-12-12T19:53:00.003-05:00

First of all, I'm not sure that there is necessarily required a conflict between all flavors of Darwinism and all flavors of biblical Christianity. Even though I consider myself an Old Earth Creationist. But there are some Darwinians, such as Richard Dawkins, who take the implications of Darwinism as a disproof of Christianity.

But I just heard a podcasted lecture from the Royal Society about how poets in Darwin's age responded to Darwin. The narrator offered as a given that natural selection showed that whatever creator exists, it could not be both good and all-powerful. I have a few responses:

i) This is exactly the argument I've heard from some Young Earth Creationists, who never seem to tire in finding objections to biblical faith for the scientifically literate. If animals suffered before the advent of Adam, the YEC's say, therefore the bible has to be wrong about everything, including salvation. Because a good God wouldn't allow animals to suffer the way they appear to have since before humans arrived. In this view, the YEC's become the most extreme animal rights activists-- probably more than PETA-- but just this one issue this one time. Even PETA believes in the right of natural carnivores to eat their prey. Faced with such animal suffering, Old Earth Creationists would have few other recourses than to point to the specialness of humans in God's creation.

ii) The historian gave a critique of Christianity without any mention of the Fall or the cross or resurrection. I, too, will agree that Christianity is completely philosophically absurd without a cross. It's like a bus without wheels.

Obama!

2009-12-12T18:03:00.000-05:00

P112409PS-1649, originally uploaded by The White House.

The White House has released many photographs of President Obama under a very liberal license. I had heard that the creator of the iconic Obama posters used during the election got in trouble with the Associated Press for allegedly using an AP photo. If only the artist were to have had available a site like this.

Addendum
Even though one link on the page says that there is a liberal license on the page, another statement on the page says the photos are not to be used for any derivative purposes. A case of battling forms.

"Nuther red-cyan anaglyph

2009-12-11T21:31:00.000-05:00

Made with Megapov.

Detailed analysis of the context of the hacked CRU emails (climategate)

2009-12-10T07:50:00.000-05:00

CRU Controversy: Look at the data yourself!

2009-11-30T19:29:00.000-05:00

Through a link at slashdot, I found RealClimate's posting of a bunch of raw data related to climate. Feel free to study it yourself!

Offering of Letters video stream.

2009-11-14T15:54:00.003-05:00

I'm going to make a presentation at my church tomorrow about Bread for the World's Offering of Letters. This time I thought it would be cool to show a bunch of Youtube videos on the topic. I've got everything from the dry words of BFW President David Beckmann to lectures by Bono to scripture readings to funny animations. Hope it flies.

Dems on health care: is there something in the water?

2009-11-13T19:09:00.001-05:00

Over the past weekend, there were two monumental votes in the House of Representatives related to health care. One is known as the Stupak amendment (HR884), which provided restrictions on federal funding of abortions, restrictions which are tighter than current U.S. policy. The other is the Health Care Omnibus (HR887), which provided for federal funding of health care. Basically all the Republicans took the knee-jerk conservative positions on both bills. I am fascinated by the variety of opinions found among Democrats on the bill. The overwhelming majority of Dems voted pro-choice and pro-health care. That they would is not that interesting. It is interesting that about 75 broke with party ranks in various ways. Sixteen voted pro-choice but against health care; forty-one voted pro-life but for health care; twenty-three sided with the Republicans (restrict abortion funding but against the bill anyway).

I will call the three positions "Wall Street Libertines" (pro-choice, pro-business), "Rust Belt Catholics" (pro-life, pro-people), and members of the "Bible Belt / Old South".

I find it very interesting that the three groups are geographically segregated. The pro-choice, anti-health people tend to live along shoreline states. The pro-life, pro-health people seem to be clustered around Ohio and those Appalachian states that Hillary Clinton carried in the 2008 Democratic primaries. The pro-life, anti-health people seem to be concentrated in the Slave States during the Civil War. Of course there are exceptions, and my labels might not apply to everyone: I'm sure not all the "Rust Belt Catholics" are in deed Roman Catholics. But why are they segregated?

A friend of mine once claimed that all religionists merely pick up and parrot the religious views of their family and those around them. I ask, how did we get segregated? Is there something in the water? Does the inevitable regionalization of blue collar jobs affect things? Is there something about your blue collar parishioners being coal miners, fishermen, or agricultural hands that makes a pastor preach differently? Do the rich people affect the area: do seaside hotel owners, coal executives, and tobacco kingpins each contribute to vastly different charities & civic groups?

Sources:
http://politics.nytimes.com/congress/votes/111/house/1/887

http://politics.nytimes.com/congress/votes/111/house/1/884

The Right Abandons the Unborn, VI

2009-11-12T20:41:00.002-05:00

According to this dailykos article, the health insurance plan of the Republican National Committee covers elective abortions.

According to this Time magazine article, the health insurance plan of Focus on the family covers elective abortions.

Freedom!

2009-11-11T19:10:00.000-05:00

Carl Sagan

2009-11-10T18:42:00.000-05:00

I was just thinking recently about Carl Sagan's poetic vision of his observation about Earth as the Pale Blue Dot. Then today I found this youtube clip on the Universe Today website:

Health care bill: a good compromise

2009-11-09T18:20:00.003-05:00

There's a Calvin and Hobbes cartoon where Calvin says, "A good compromise leaves everyone half-mad." On the recent health care legislation passed over the weekend, I'm guessing everyone is half-mad, except for pro-life liberals like me. We're estatic!

If I have read the news correctly, Democrats passed a health care bill which does not allow for federal funding of abortions.

Maybe God *does* in fact work through the compromises required by a two-party system.

Everything I needed to know about screenwriting, I learned from "The Office."

2009-11-03T20:51:00.003-05:00

Here are my observations:

1) Create some characters.

2) Make some of them despicable.

3) Make the despicable qualities of the unsympathetic characters create problems for the sympathetic characters. Make the audience wish for the defeat and banishment of the unsympathetic characters.

4) Let the despicable quality turn into a vulnerability, and have the the unsympathetic characters suffer for it. Make the audience feel sorry for them.

5) Have the unsympathetic characters also demonstrate some amazing skills which are entertaining or useful.

6) Stockpile Emmy nominations.

5K Walk/Race

2009-11-01T08:04:00.002-05:00

I ran (walked) in a 5K race put on by my employers' "Well-being" group. I had my Android phone running CardioTrainer with its GPS service during the race. I then went to CardioTrainer's website and downloaded a kml version of the coordinates. At every second of the race, it had recorded the GPS coordinates.

I used my own understanding of geometry and the radius of the earth to come up with a formula for instantaneous position, and then instantaneous MPH. I later realized a mistake in the algorithm, but I don't think it would affect the overall calculation by much.

Anyway, I kept up 4.5 MPH for most of the race, and then had a few spurts close to 7 MPH at the end. All this on a knee which was operated upon in April, and was occasionally giving me pain during climbing stairways.

God's injustice, or ours?

2009-10-30T07:54:00.003-04:00

Pastor Ken Klaus' Oct 29 Devotion was entitled "Maybe, Maybe Not."

In it, he spoke of how the story of Anne Frank deeply touched his heart. He spoke of how he saw a dramatic production of her diary where Anne is portrayed watching a wedding. Pastor Klaus says this image deeply tore at his heart, because he knew how her story ends. Then Pastor Klaus immediately launches into a religious lesson.

Good, he should do so, I say. If our religion isn't influenced by or has an answer to the worst horrors around it, how can it be either useful or from the divine? I myself was thinking, yes, I remember hearing about Corrie Ten Boom's sister was bald, naked, miserable, and lice-covered in an concentration camp. How can we think that anyone deserves such treatment, even today? (We do have our own concentration camps. Even liberal TV personalities joke about how something awful-sounding ought to be played to Guantanamo captives; Alabama prison officials are dreaming up new ways to torture inmates. )

The problem is that Pastor Klaus spoke of the injustice of God and not the injustice of people. He said that the holocaust that awaits unbelievers in hell is far worse than the holocaust of the Nazis. Again, he speaks of the injustice of God and not the injustice of people. This is the conservative heresy.

On the contrary, I say people are unjust and God is just. Suppose:

A nut on the street were to tell you a giant space dragon is angry at you, YES YOU, in that you are complacent with the torture and sexual humiliation of detainees at Guantanamo, but that he sent his only baby dragon to earth, and it too was tortured & killed at Guantanamo, and if only you believed in the dragon, he'd forgive you.

This is entirely different from what we have seen from Pastor Klaus:

There's a space dragon that has prepared a living hell for all the inhabitants of earth and the only way to survive is to pay tribute to its baby dragon.

I imagine you'd have an entirely different reaction to our two hypothetical nuts. Heaven and the promise of salvation are for people who are in hell because of their sins. For those who know they are living decent lives, you're not going to get very far with such a brick to the head. Carlton Pearson, a former evangelical preacher featured in a "This American Life" episode, said he used to turn to the person sitting next to him on airplanes and say, "You're going to hell." This is essentially what Pastor Klaus has done.

The order for Confession of Sins found in the red hymnal of the Lutheran Church- Missouri Synod says,

I confess unto Thee all my sins and iniquities with which I have ever offended Thee and justly deserved Thy temporal and eternal punishment.

This is a basis of witnessing.

As I've said before, in certain evangelical circles, Damnation is the primary problem and the Act of Believing is the primary solution. In a Theology of the Cross, Sin is the primary problem and the Cross is the primary solution.

High Fives

2009-10-25T19:30:00.001-04:00

High Fives, originally uploaded by rofreg.

Did you know this was what the true meaning of those traffic signals?

Originally seen at the blog of Jason Eppink.

Demoscene: Orion's $21

2009-10-25T18:11:00.003-04:00

This is an incredibly imaginative and captivating animation from demoscene. It kind of makes fun of the materialism of shopping channels or perhaps indulges in it. I ran across this years ago, and was just delighted to find it at youtube. I'd pay big bucks for more music made by the people who made this. It's ultra cool.

xkcd comic

2009-10-20T19:32:00.000-04:00

This xkcd comic was pretty inspiring:

Cute and Cuddly, Boys

2009-10-12T20:32:00.001-04:00

bay 055, originally uploaded by pterandon.

The penguins at the Central Park Zoo were very active. I'd never seen these birds this active and personable. It was eventually apparent that they thought we might have had fish.

11SecondClub Draft

2009-10-09T18:52:00.001-04:00

I'm working on a new animation for the 11SecondClub October 2009 round. I usually like to work on the lip syncing first. I still have a little bit of work to do on this yet.

Hudson River Walkway

2009-10-04T19:49:00.001-04:00

Hudson River Walkway, originally uploaded by pterandon.

Photo taken with a Google Android T-Mobile cell phone.

From the new walkway over the Hudson River in Poughkeepsie.

"Racism" and the paucity of spiritual language to describe mean-ness

2009-09-19T08:15:00.005-04:00

There's a lot of buzz these days about racism and the off-the-wall protests against President Obama. At these rallies we see signs that are outright mean, to the point of calling for the President's assassination. In this culture, there's also a disconnectedness from reality-- from "death panels" to the false controversy about whether he is a citizen. This crowd has been called "birthers" because they doubt Obama had a U.S. birth.

Now the talking heads, religious and secular, are talking about the issue of racism in these rallies. Are the birthers inherently racist, or is race merely a factor among some of them, the talking heads ask. I think that this is ultimately a flawed approach, because I am sure that all the birthers can point to a black politician they admire, or a personal friend who is black and shares much of their culture and political aspirations. We have this litmus test that if you don't hate EVERY black man, then we call off the karma police and leave you alone. That is the problem.

Take South Carolina Representative Joe Wilson. Before he shouted "You lie!" at the president, he was involved in the following:

Fomenting resentment at illegal aliens,
Defending the flying of the Confederate Flag over the state capitol,
Not only supporting the invasion of Iraq, but also getting really upset, to the point of questioning a man's patriotism, when someone pointed out we'd sold weapons to Saddam Hussein.

Now ladies and gentlemen, there's nothing wrong with being a Republican in order to advance a libertarian point of view, but what Joe Wilson does are simply things that good people do not DO.

Everyone knows what liberals do when they are evil-- they do drugs, spread venereal disease through promiscuity, then have an abortion as birth control. (Republicans might do these things, too, but these things are understood by the public to be the immoral "extremes", the fruit, of liberalism.) At the rallies against President Obama, and in the work of Joe Wilson, we are seeing the evil extremes of conservatism. We need better language to describe this than the word which means hatred of every person with a different skin color. We need to go back to the old social statements of the church.

A political "sanity check" from Spiro Agnew's assessment of the anti-Vietnam-War left

2009-08-26T22:49:00.004-04:00

These words are from a speech by then Vice President Spiro Agnew about the anti-Vietnam War protesters. It was used as a backdrop for a song by electronica musician Professor Kliq.

This speech could be an anthem of the political right at the time. I find it a bit comforting to listen to it (at least in the form of the song) even though I've taken liberal positions on wars from Nicaragua to Iraq. I think Agnew was ultimately on the wrong side of history; I am on the side of church movements that opposed his wars. What is comforting is that it is so well-thought out. This speech might be the result of taking one of your nuttier political adversaries after the their mother, pastor, and university professors forced them to boil down their position to one based on reason and reality. There's comfort in remembering that there could be sane reasons driving the political disagreements around us. There's also comfort in looking at yourself in an uncloudy mirror, to see where you need to shape up.

Shameless plug of my artwork at zazzle.com

2009-08-20T21:03:00.000-04:00

make custom gifts at Zazzle

Conservative woman on the street on health care.

2009-08-19T21:46:00.000-04:00

Christians and worldwide cooperation.

2009-07-29T19:33:00.002-04:00

In another forum, someone asked why Christians were so afraid of movements for international cooperation. This was my reply:

Three theological movements: Dispensationalism, Theology of Glory, and Antinomianism. Plus idolatry of the state and confusing the United States with the New Israel.

Some might not be threatened by worldwide humanitarian cooperation if your Theology were one of the Cross, where the devotion of living an examined life (including examining one's contribution to social woes) reminds one of one's need for the saving grace of Jesus. Here, sin and death and suffering are the primary problem, and the cross is the primary solution.

On the other hand, if you're practicing a Theology of Glory, damnation is the primary problem, and choosing to accept Jesus is the primary solution. Sin is reduced to a few nominal and childish vices (gay relations, drunkenness, impatience with spouse). Evangelization becomes more about mocking those who've picked the wrong spiritual "football team", quite different from the witness-and-social-reform movements of 19th century evangelists. If your focus were on getting the best seat on the bus/ fighter-jet in the End Times, as is the focus in many popular forms of Dispensationalism, you'll skip over the old testament lessons that show God's concern for the poor, and look instead in these passages for ways to come out ahead-- how you can find the be the first to find "the signs". The entire focus eventually becomes Antinomian, where any mention of the law, especially social sins, is somewhere between ignored and decried. In these theologies are also a confusion of the Church, the New Israel, with the United States. It's mere idolatry.

Reao Island

2009-07-06T12:19:00.000-04:00

In the age of the internet, you can read books online and benefit from Google Maps at the same time. Some books assume so much understanding of geography, an understanding that would have been very difficult for readers of but a half generation ago. Jules Verne's 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea is one such book where a detailed knowledge of geography can help understand the story. I was particularly fascinated by this passage about some circular shaped islands. Below is an extended excerpt and a Google Map of the region.

Sailors' luck led the Nautilus straight to Reao Island, one of the most unusual in this group, which was discovered in 1822 by Captain Bell aboard the Minerva. So I was able to study the madreporic process that has created the islands in this ocean.

Madrepores, which one must guard against confusing with precious coral, clothe their tissue in a limestone crust, and their variations in structure have led my famous mentor Professor Milne–Edwards to classify them into five divisions. The tiny microscopic animals that secrete this polypary live by the billions in the depths of their cells. Their limestone deposits build up into rocks, reefs, islets, islands. In some places, they form atolls, a circular ring surrounding a lagoon or small inner lake that gaps place in contact with the sea. Elsewhere, they take the shape of barrier reefs, such as those that exist along the coasts of New Caledonia and several of the Tuamotu Islands. In still other localities, such as Réunion Island and the island of Mauritius, they build fringing reefs, high, straight walls next to which the ocean's depth is considerable.

While cruising along only a few cable lengths from the underpinning of Reao Island, I marveled at the gigantic piece of work accomplished by these microscopic laborers. These walls were the express achievements of madrepores known by the names fire coral, finger coral, star coral, and stony coral. These polyps grow exclusively in the agitated strata at the surface of the sea, and so it's in the upper reaches that they begin these substructures, which sink little by little together with the secreted rubble binding them. This, at least, is the theory of Mr. Charles Darwin, who thus explains the formation of atolls—a theory superior, in my view, to the one that says these madreporic edifices sit on the summits of mountains or volcanoes submerged a few feet below sea level.

I could observe these strange walls quite closely: our sounding lines indicated that they dropped perpendicularly for more than 300 meters, and our electric beams made the bright limestone positively sparkle.

In reply to a question Conseil asked me about the growth rate of these colossal barriers, I thoroughly amazed him by saying that scientists put it at an eighth of an inch per biennium.

"Therefore," he said to me, "to build these walls, it took . . . ?"

"192,000 years, my gallant Conseil, which significantly extends the biblical Days of Creation. What's more, the formation of coal—in other words, the petrification of forests swallowed by floods—and the cooling of basaltic rocks likewise call for a much longer period of time. I might add that those 'days' in the Bible must represent whole epochs and not literally the lapse of time between two sunrises, because according to the Bible itself, the sun doesn't date from the first day of Creation."

When the Nautilus returned to the surface of the ocean, I could take in Reao Island over its whole flat, wooded expanse. Obviously its madreporic rocks had been made fertile by tornadoes and thunderstorms. One day, carried off by a hurricane from neighboring shores, some seed fell onto these limestone beds, mixing with decomposed particles of fish and marine plants to form vegetable humus. Propelled by the waves, a coconut arrived on this new coast. Its germ took root. Its tree grew tall, catching steam off the water. A brook was born. Little by little, vegetation spread. Tiny animals—worms, insects—rode ashore on tree trunks snatched from islands to windward. Turtles came to lay their eggs. Birds nested in the young trees. In this way animal life developed, and drawn by the greenery and fertile soil, man appeared. And that's how these islands were formed, the immense achievement of microscopic animals.

View Larger Map

Christian comedy only the Devil could laugh at.

2009-06-29T06:42:00.001-04:00

Through Itunes, I found a podcast in the category of "Christian comedy." I listened to the first episode I downloaded. The speaker had attended the funeral of an atheist. He pointed to the irony that some Christian songs were played at the non-believing man's funeral. He also pointed out how the selection of songs played at one's funeral has no bearing on one's salvation. Fair enough.

The problem was that it wasn't just ironic, but a source of great offense by the comedian. He even said, "Now don't go do that." I on the other hand can think of three reasons to praise God that songs with evangelistic content would be played at a funeral:

The living persons in the room will hear the gospel
The deceased may have arranged for it secretly because he was, all along, a believer.
The deceased may have arranged for it secretly because he had a late-in-life conversion experience unknown to the comedian.

I might add that I've been to too many funerals in my life, and I don't think I've ever heard pop evangelical songs being played.

But the comedian didn't let it stop there. As part of the "comedy", he rewrote the song that was playing, "I Can Only Imagine". Instead of having some religious meaning the song was now about how boring it was to be a corpse pushing up daisies.

Martin Luther spoke of how there was a conflict in the church between two theologies, a Theology of Glory and a Theology of the Cross. I think that too much of what the TV preachers like Jerry Falwell were about was Theology of Glory. A Theology of the Cross might involve a focus on your sins and Christ's work. Too much of the preaching in a Theology of Glory is about either mocking folks who've chosen the wrong spiritual "football" team, or positing criticisms of the actions of your team as the cross you have to bear. Other folks could call these criticisms "calls to repentance."

Let's imagine the open-minded non-believer, and use male pronouns out of laziness. Last week, he heard the same group of Christians mock the idea that there was anything to repent of in how society treats the poor and planet-- there was only government regulation to fear. This week, he hears this song mocking atheists. What can be had but hardened hearts? The philosophical base starts out with the idea that the elect are to be protected from criticism. Hopefully, non-believers (and believers) reject this.

What would actual evangelistic Christian comedy sound like? Here's my take, and it starts out with C. S. Lewis' Mere Christianity

For the trouble is that part of you is on his side and agrees with his disapproval of human greed and trickery and exploitation. You may want him to make an exception in your own case, but you know at bottom that unless the power behind the world really and unalterably detests that sort of behavior he cannot be good.

Is there a way that Jerry Seinfeld could read this chapter, maybe throw in some modern observations from NY City life, and have us all chuckling and tingling with fear and joy at the same time?

You see, the problem is that too many modern evangelicals have taken "greed and trickery and exploitation" off the radar screen of sin. That is what an unbelieving world finds unbelievable.

Health care debate

2009-06-22T20:26:00.000-04:00

Here's a debate between Jim Wallis of Sojourners and Tony Perkins of the Family Research Council.

Jim is kneejerk liberal. Even though I probably agree with him 80% of the time, I often find him unconvincing. But even more disappointing is the response from the one allegedly picking up the mantle of evangelicalism and biblical conservatism. The only thing that Perkins brings to the table is a fear of government takeover. I think it's an unfortunate use of language, and could just as easily be applied to all the baby-step approaches to providing health care that Perkins was in favor of.

Is this the mantle of the 19th century, bible-believing evangelicals, the ones who were as much social reformers as evangelists?

Animated textures and spaceship construction.

2009-06-21T20:18:00.000-04:00

Just goofing around.

The spaceships are made in povray. I got some interesting effects without calling any threshold in the blob.

The Truth Project

2009-06-14T19:59:00.000-04:00

I had set up a "Truth 'versus' Love Project" about five years ago to decry the fact that so many Christians tell us we have to choose between theological orthodoxy and compassion, that a theology of the cross and a bleeding heart are incompatible.

Some conservative evangelicals have now set up The Truth Project to decry the fact that only nine percent of Christians have a biblical worldview. Interestingly, this statistic comes from a Barna Group Study, A Biblical Worldview has a Radical Effect on a Person's Life". It says that a half percent of Catholics hold to this view while still only 13% of evangelicals do. The article makes a fascinating read. The Barna Group study defines a biblical worldview:

For the purposes of the research, a biblical worldview was defined as believing that absolute moral truths exist; that such truth is defined by the Bible; and firm belief in six specific religious views. Those views were that Jesus Christ lived a sinless life; God is the all-powerful and all-knowing Creator of the universe and He stills rules it today; salvation is a gift from God and cannot be earned; Satan is real; a Christian has a responsibility to share their faith in Christ with other people; and the Bible is accurate in all of its teachings.

Hey, I got no problem with that! Interestingly the article goes on to mention a very strong correlation between the biblical worldview and positions on some touchstone conservative issues like abortion and gambling. (And as they are stated in the poll, I have no problem with either).

I've been very bothered by reports that evangelicals are more likely than the average American to oppose the moral positions of the human rights and humanitarian groups. Things like torture-- evangelicals are more in favor of it. They supported the war. Ronald Sider even wrote a whole book about this-- entitled Scandal of the Evangelical Conscience. Sider pointed out how evangelicals did everything from getting divorced more often to being less likely to give to effective AIDS relief programs. This blog is full of "let me off the bus" stories about how the evangelical movement as a whole is not nice (but at the same time that you should be an evangelical).

Here's where it gets really interesting. I would LOVE to see the Barna group ask some more questions, like on torture. Who are these evangelicals that are more likely to support torture-- are they also the 8% of Baptists who have a biblical worldview? My earnest prayer, and sociological hunch, is that they are not. I bet that the small fraction who believe in the bible to Barna's degree are not the Sean Hannity and Glen Beck fans. That's because I think those pundits tap in to a nationalistic spirit that is very carnal and antinomian. I always wondered with The New York Post, with staunchly conservative political coverage, always had to have a bikini shot somewhere within the first three pages.

Barna, please do another poll. I'd love to meet and organize with Christians with a biblical worldview who are also nice people.

What an extremist, reverse-racist judge will mean to America

2009-06-12T20:00:00.000-04:00

Seen at dailykos.com, from the SCOTUS blog:

"Other than Ricci, Judge Sotomayor has decided 96 race-related cases while on the court of appeals.

Of the 96 cases, Judge Sotomayor and the panel rejected the claim of discrimination roughly 78 times and agreed with the claim of discrimination 10 times; the remaining 8 involved other kinds of claims or dispositions. Of the 10 cases favoring claims of discrimination, 9 were unanimous. (Many, by the way, were procedural victories rather than judgments that discrimination had occurred.) Of those 9, in 7, the unanimous panel included at least one Republican-appointed judge. In the one divided panel opinion, the dissent’s point dealt only with the technical question of whether the criminal defendant in that case had forfeited his challenge to the jury selection in his case. So Judge Sotomayor rejected discrimination-related claims by a margin of roughly 8 to 1. (emphasis added)

Oh wait, um.....WS

Pixar's work finally slides into the Uncanny Valley

2009-05-31T20:13:00.000-04:00

There's a hypothesis in animation called "The Uncanny Valley".. It states that something featuring live characters becomes more realistic, it for a while becomes more enjoyable. Then it suffers from something called The Uncanny Valley, where becoming more realistic makes it more creepy.

Pixar's work was always the coolest to me because I thought it successfully stood atop the "stylized" peak right before the Uncanny Valley.

*micro spoiler alert*

There are dog crowd scenes in the new movie, Up. They have one main character dog who is very stylized in construction (and featured in the TV commercials). But there is a plot conflict between this dog and a crowd of other dogs, many of which are much more photo-realistically constructed.

When there's one photo-realistic dog on the screen, emoting, it seems pretty cool. But there are scenes when they show a dozen, and because they are photorealistic, they look like zombies. I think there are both creepily over-acting dogs and creepily wooden dogs in a few scenes in the movie.

I've always bristled in animation when critics demand photorealism. I think that these critics don't understand the Uncanny Valley hypothesis.

Pixar UP Full Length Movie Trailer - HD High Quality - The best bloopers are here

Space Drama!

2009-05-30T07:46:00.002-04:00

Here's a video from a young man who's just like me, in that he's making movies for the web and wondering if there's a business model in it. Only he's half my age, doing video, per se, and has talent. I found his blog very interesting.

Draft of IRTC pre-round entry

2009-05-28T17:44:00.001-04:00

Draft of IRTC pre-round entry, originally uploaded by pterandon.

This isn't quite finished-- notably the hands of my main character are undergoing a major revamping. I was almost about to post this to the IRTC web page as it is.

Conservatives' one-sided citation of tradition makes tradition look bad.

2009-05-25T08:50:00.004-04:00

On this Memorial Day, when we honor those who have sacrificed for our country, I've already seen on the internet two conservative Christians cite classic texts from church tradition to diss pacifism. As if the only lesson we get from the church historic, from church tradition, is that you shouldn't be a pacifist. I'll take the risk of offending my pacifist brethren by saying that I don't think there's a whole lot in the tradition of the church to support a pacifistic view.

At the same time, I think it's a bit tragic to take some of these classic texts and only quote one side of it. Not only have we received some very good reasons not to be pacifist, we've also learned why warmongering is bad. Sometimes the two lessons come in the same epistle or tract. To only quote one message is to reduce the witness of the church to propaganda. The saint who comes out to silence Caesar's critics, but doesn't challenge Caesar is something of a court prophet. All mouths are to be silenced, for all have disobeyed.

I've often seen conservatives quote Martin Luther's "Whether Soldiers, Too, Can be Saved." But they only quote the parts that attack pacifism. Here is one of them. (I'll also admit that this document from Luther helped me see the problems with pacifism):

The complete text of "Whether Soldiers" can be found if one searches the Table of Contents of this document at Google Books.

"As proof, I quote John the Baptist, who, except for Christ, was the greatest teacher and preacher of all. When soldiers came to him and asked what they should do, he did not condemn their office or advise them to stop doing their work; rather, according to Luke 3 [:14], he approved it by saying, "Rob no one by violence or by false accusation, and be content with your wages." Thus he praised the military profession, but at the same time he forbade its abuse. Now the abuse does not affect the office. When Christ stood before Pilate he admitted that war was not wrong when he said, "If my kingship were of this world, then my servants would fight that I might not be handed over to the Jews" [John 18:36]. Here, too, belong all the stories of war in the Old Testament, the stories of Abraham, Moses, Joshua, the Judges, Samuel, David, and all the kings of Israel. If the waging of war and the military profession were in themselves wrong and displeasing to God, we should have to condemn Abraham, Moses, Joshua, David, add all the rest of the holy fathers, kings, and princes, who served God as soldiers and are highly praised in Scripture because of this service, as all of us who have read even a little in Holy Scripture know well, and there is no need to offer further proof of it here. Perhaps someone will now say that the holy fathers were in a different position because God had set them apart from the other nations by choosing them as his people, and had commanded them to fight, and that their example is therefore not relevant for a Christian under the New Testament because they had God's command and fought in obedience to God, while we have no command to fight, but rather to suffer,endure, and renounce everything. This objection is answered clearly enough by St. Peter and St. Paul, who both command obedience to worldly ordinances and to the commandments of worldly rulers even under the New Testament [Rom. 13:1–4; I Pet. 2:13–14]. And we have already pointed out that St. John the Baptist instructed soldiers as a Christian tteacher and in a Christian manner and permitted them to remain soldiers, enjoining them only not to use their position to abuse people or to treat them unjustly, and to be satisfied with their wages. Therefore even under the New Testament the sword is established by God's word and commandment, and those who use it properly and fight obediently serve God and are obedient to his word.

At the same time, there are also some pretty resounding denunciations of rushing to war:

At the very outset I want to say that whoever starts a war is in the wrong. And it is only right and proper that he who first draws his sword is defeated, or even punished, in the end.

Wait until the situation compels you to fight when you have no desire to do so. You will still have more than enough wars to fight and will be able to say with heartfelt sincerity, "How I would like to have peace. If only my neighbors wanted it too!" Then you can defend yourself with a good conscience, for God's word says, "He scatters the peoples who delight in war." Look at the real soldiers, those who have played the game of war. They are not quick to draw their sword, they are not contentious; they have no desire to fight.

Let this be, then, the first thing to be said in this matter: No war is just, even if it is a war between equals, unless one has such a good reason for fighting and such a good conscience that he can say, "My neighbor compels and forces me to fight, though I would rather avoid it." In that case, it can be called not only war, but lawful self-defense, for we must distinguish between wars that someone begins because that is what he wants to do and does before anyone else attacks him, and those wars that are provoked when an attack is made by someone else. The first kind can be called wars of desire; the second, wars of necessity. The first kind are of the devil; God does not give good fortune to the man who wages that kind of war. The second kind are human disasters; God help in them!

Our conclusion on this point, then, is that war against equals should be waged only when it is forced upon us and then it should be fought in the fear of God. Such a war is forced upon us when an enemy or neighbor attacks and starts the war, and refuses to cooperate in settling the matter according to law or through arbitration and common agreement, or when one overlooks and puts up with the enemy's evil words and tricks, but he still insists on having his own way. I am assuming throughout that I am preaching to those who want to do what is right in God's sight. Those who will neither offer nor consent to do what is right do not concern me. Fearing God means that we do not rely on the justness of our cause, but that we are careful, diligent, and cautious, even in the very smallest details, in so small a thing as a whistle.

On this Memorial Day, let us honor and remember those who served, even those who died in wars we may regret undertaking.

Roadside stand near Birmingham, Alabama (LOC)

2009-05-25T08:15:00.001-04:00

Roadside stand near Birmingham, Alabama (LOC), originally uploaded by The Library of Congress.

This beautiful image is from the Library of Congress' Walker Evans collection at Flickr. Taken in 1936.

It is interesting that one could apparently make a living selling fish caught from rivers. Just one potential setting to remember for my time machine, when I get one.

Outrageous quote of the day

2009-05-21T19:24:00.000-04:00

"Humanitarianism is the expression of stupidity and cowardice."
Adolf Hitler: Mein Kampf.

I just saw this quote at the blog of Rev. Matthew Harrison, Executive Director of LC-MS World Relief and Human Care. (He of course was painting it as an ugly thought.)

I guess this is the exact opposite of my worldview, and how convenient for it to be expressed by Hitler. I would say that courage is being humanitarian even when it seems to go against your interests-- your long-term interests are almost always served by being humanitarian when mocked by those who wear their courage on their sleeve. Hitler's view here is exactly what is wrong with "conservative" nationalism.

The other day, I was listening to a story featured on NPR Story of the Day podcast. It featured an interview with- more a lengthy editorial by-- a psychologist who had been involved first in training U.S. military personnel to resist torture. Some of these psychologists then went on to perform "enhanced interrogation" techniques. Two things particularly bothered me about the psychologist's remarks:

He summed up the whole interrogation program with the example of bugs. If you know someone is afraid of bugs, lock him up with a bug. That doesn't sound so bad does it? The problem is that this one tactic is probably the least offensive of the techniques used, which ranged from breaking bones to sexual humiliation to waterboarding. To poo-poo concerns about the whole program by bringing up one of the least offensive measures is an exercise in propaganda. I find it interesting that Tony Blankley, in a recent Left, Right and Center program, also engaged in similar mocking of the concerns about torture as being about "putting a bug on someone's shoulder."
The psychologist said, "I was not there to be concerned about the mental health needs of javascript:void(0)terrorists. I was there to gather information to protect the country I love." [quote from my memory]. I wonder how many other people find that the problem with this psychologist's remarks is that they sound too much like Hitler's view of humanitarianism.

ADDENDUM: The American Psychological Association has a statement against torture. The statment lists many proscribed acts in this statement against torture, which of course includes "exploitation of fears". If the Association has a "zero tolerance" of these acts, I wonder if there are any penalties for going on the radio to defend passionately placing a bug on someone's shoulder? Given the above, I'm also convinced that the reporter in no way did her homework. I found that statement in 15 seconds of googling.

Excellent album for driving in car on sunny afternoon

2009-05-20T18:56:00.000-04:00

This album by Jamendo's Professor Kliq is Creative Commons licensed. If you use it in derivative works or distribute it, you merely have to give credit to the artist and provide the same license to the subsequent works. You may of course download for personal use as well.

Who will remain standing in day of Judgment?

2009-05-19T18:57:00.001-04:00

I originally sat down at my computer to vent with outrage at how the Religious Right was misusing Scripture to rationalize the aims of the Right in certain geopolitical military exploits. I had just read the dailykos article, Outrage Over the Publication of Rumsfeld's Christian War, which discusses this GQ article. Apparently someone has found some material where former US Defense Secretary had prepared scripture quotes to pep up the morale of troops fighting in Iraq. One of the passages was Isaiah 5:28:

28 Their arrows are sharp,
all their bows are strung;
their horses' hoofs seem like flint,
their chariot wheels like a whirlwind.

I wanted to learn more about the passage, because out of context I wasn't sure whether it were in fact a passage describing bad people or the actions of God's agents. Wouldn't it be like the Religious Right, I presumed, to misuse a passage by describing America's troops with biblical language meant to describe God's enemies? Anyway, while googling up the passage, I ran across the Skeptic's Annotated Bible. They had this to say in their commentary on Isaiah 5:28.

God will kill those who despise his word and fail to follow his laws. Their carcasses will be "torn in the midst of the streets."

This actually bothered me more than Rumsfeld. The writers of this commentary were trying to point out how stupid and mean and silly it was to follow a text where it is said that God will slay those who do not follow his laws. I believe this is based on a (very flawed) view of God's law as (what Luther described as) "nominal and childish sins." In this view, the laws are all about spoiling our fun, completing boring ceremonies, following the secret handshakes of the club: the law has nothing to do with man's inhumanity to man.

C.S. Lewis, on the other hand, in Mere Christianity once summarized the reasons for God's wrath as "greed and trickery and exploitation." What if God's law had the smallest iota of relevance to greed and trickery and exploitation? Why, there might be at least some kind of justice to the idea of an angry God, if He were also mad at those A.I.G.? What about all those other people who exploit the poor? What about you! What about me?! Indeed, according to Luther's Explanation to the Ten Commandments:

The Seventh Commandment.

Thou shalt not steal.

After your person and spouse temporal property comes next. That also God wishes to have protected, and He has commanded that no one shall subtract from, or curtail, his neighbor's possessions. For to steal is nothing else than to get possession of another's property wrongfully, which briefly comprehends all kinds of advantage in all sorts of trade to the disadvantage of our neighbor. Now, this is indeed quite a wide-spread and common vice, but so little regarded and observed that it exceeds all measure, so that if all who are thieves, and yet do not wish to be called such, were to be hanged on gallows the world would soon be devastated and there would be a lack both of executioners and gallows.

Who could remain standing? That is the proper understanding of God's law and wrath. It is not a reason for mocking the idea of accountability to a higher power; it is surely NOT a reason to go punching those who have committed slightly fewer sins than yourself.

Too often I feel that fundies & atheists agree on more than they disagree. Maybe the Religious Right and the less-well-read "skeptics" of Christianity would agree that sin is merely a list of a few nominal and childish vices. In that view, for God to have "wrath" over it is is both mean and stupid. But if however His law were more about lifting up the sheet and showing all the bloody ways we've exploited, harmed, and killed each other, then perhaps God's law is a reason to shudder. And seek the shelter that can only be provided by the cross.

Procedurally generated landscape -- land and sea

2009-05-18T21:47:00.002-04:00

Here's yet another procedurally generated landscape. It shows some densely packed islands by the sea that starts out in complete chaos, but eventually establishes a more stable form, but never stops "bubbling".

This is also one of the first times I've tried blip.tv's embeddable player.

Click to play

Electrons on parade

2009-05-17T19:24:00.000-04:00

I originally found this post at boingboing.net. It's a cool video explaining electronics from the 1950's.

Martin Luther's "Concerning Councils"

2009-05-16T19:12:00.000-04:00

"My friends, the Antinomians preach exceedingly well-- and I cannot but believe that they do so with great earnestness-- concerning the mercy of Christ, forgiveness of sin, and other contents of the article of redemption. But they flee from this inference as from the devil, that they must tell people about the Third Article, of sanctification, that is, of the new life in Christ. For they hold that we must not terrify people and make them sorrowful, but must always preach to them the comfort of grace of Christ and the forgiveness of sin. They tell us to avoid, for God's sake, such statements as these: 'Listen you want to be a Christian while you are an adulterer, a fornicator, a swill-belly, full of pride, avarice, usurious practices, envy, revenge, malice, etc., and mean to continue in these sins?' On the contrary, they tell us that this is the proper way to speak: 'Listen, you are an adulterer, fornicator, miser, or addicted to some other sin. Now if you will only believe, you are saved and need not dread the Law, for Christ has fulfilled all.' Tell me, prithee, does not this amount to conceding the premise and denying the conclusion? Verily, it amounts to this, that Christ is taken away and made worthless in the same breath with which He is most highly extolled."

--Martin Luther, Concerning Councils, as quoted in Walther's Law and Gospel.

Everyone's got something they are Antinomian about.

If you'll notice above, I have highlighted and colored various sins in the above lists that caught my eye. Christianity seems to be divided into camps where one is against the red sins: adultery, fornication, chemical revelry, on one hand and the blue sins: miserliness, avarice, usurious practices on the other. It's hard to find someone whose witness to Christ has a balanced approach to all of these sins. On one hand, I've met some conservatives on the internet or listened to sermons of LC-MS pastors who seem to have a wonderful grasp of confessional Lutheran doctrine when the sins are red ones. But mention the blue items as something for which we are all worthy of reproof, and they start calling you a heterodox liberal-Protestant, say that you will "offend the Christ in them," etc.. On the other hand, I've seen some other Christians engage in a tireless campaign against the violations of human decency found in those blue sins. But they seem to bend over backwards to find any basis for their campaign as long as the source is something other than confessional Lutheranism and the sin-death-cross-repentance story in scripture.

I call this controversy in Christianity the Humanitarian Question.

How to make one-pass 3D anaglyphs in povray

2009-05-15T18:51:00.001-04:00

This requires the Megapov patch of povray

1. Give all your objects a pigment which is of the form rgb < n , n , n > , where n is between zero and one. In other words, black and white.
2. Make up two camera_view pigment patterns in povray, which are identical in every respect, including the look_at vector, except that the locations of the camera are separated by a few pov-units.
3. Make up three subsequent pigments:
i) one that makes use of your left pigment and goes from black to 3*red
pigment{function{left_camera_pigment (x,y,z).red} colour_map {[0 rgb 0][1 rgb <3,0,0>]}}
ii) one that makes use of your right pigment and goes from black to 3*green
iii) one that makes use of your right pigment and goes from black to 3*blue.
4. Set up an average pigment which combines the three with equal strength.
5. Set up a box that fills the camera (see my earlier povray posts) and has the pigment in #4 as its texture.

Now, when you render, you will be automatically creating red-cyan 3D anaglyphs in povray.

Enjoy

Fundies & secularists agree on one thing.

2009-05-14T19:35:00.001-04:00

A recent episode of "This American Life" featured an interview with a southern judge. The judge had come up with a creative sentencing program for shoplifters. He sentenced them to carry a sign in front of the store saying that they had shoplifted. For the record, I'm neutral or slightly in favor of this sentencing program. I think the program was a well-balanced piece, and was ultimately sympathetic to the judge. But one part of the segment stuck in my craw.

The interviewer thought the sentencing program were a bit extreme and uncompassionate. The interviewer asked if it weren't a bit "biblical", and the judge agreed. What bothered me was that both the (apparent) nonbeliever and the (apparent) fundamentalist agreed on a definition of "biblical" that tied it to a brutish way of dealing with your neighbor.

This is another version of the Humanitarian Question. Nonbelievers use the brutality of Christianity as a reason not to believe. Fundamentalists use the brutality of Christianity as a reason to be brutal. I say let me off of both of these buses, because they are both wrong.

Anselm! Anselm!

2009-05-13T19:13:00.001-04:00

I remember being in discussion with some folks a few years ago whose views I thought were a bit towards the Liberal-Protestant side of the spectrum. (BTW, there ain't nothing wrong with being either a liberal or a Protestant, but being a liberal-Prostestant. Liberal-Protestantism can be defined as "Scholars who incline strongly to a non-dogmatic reconstruction of the Christian faith, usually concentrating on its ethical and humanitarian aspects.")

Anyway, they had a really strong beef with Saint Anselm's view of the atonement. I never really understood what it was about.

I just ran across An open letter to the Bishop-elect of Northern Michigan, by a self-described scholar of Medieval Christianity. The article makes rebuts none other than the Bishop-elect of Northern Michigan, Kevin G. Thew Forrester. Forrester had written a piece called Approaching the Heart of Faith, where he quotes someone who said that Anselm's theory of the Atonement gave support to the Crusades.

The Open Letter makes a very good case for how Anselm's theory of the Atonement is in no way to blame. If there is a focus on the shedding of blood, it's explicitly at the same time, a focus on the one-time sufficiency of Christ's sacrifice. It does not call us to go and shed the blood of whomever is unlovely around us. If someone is going to be a fool and a cretin, they'll find a way to do it, with or without the backing of the traditional doctrines of the church.

Once again, I believe that what we are faced with is another version of the Humanitarian Question. Do we have to choose between theological orthodoxy and compassion? Do we have to give up an iota of Pauline or Johannine scriptural doctrine, of the writings of Augustine or the Book of Concord, lest we become some kind of uncaring brute? Does all talk of social injustices have to be seen as a distraction from the business of the church? I say there is no need to turn our backs on either Truth or Love.

Inside joke for povray enthusiasts

2009-05-12T20:20:00.001-04:00

threed14de07, originally uploaded by pterandon.

This red-cyan anaglyph was made in povray. It makes a little inside joke for those familiar with how blobs work. All four characters are essentially the same "blob" construction, they vary only in the threshold. So when I put the same negative strength cylinder cutting them like a bullet hole, it has much more effect on the skinny one, the one with the higher threshold.

I guess some jokes are made even worse by explaining them.

Voodoo scientists attack all religion.

2009-05-10T19:50:00.003-04:00

The April 2009 podcast of IEEE Spectrum Radio featured a segment entitled, "Superstition: Belief in the Age of Science". It featured a lengthy interview with Robert L. Park, a writer that was bothered by the harm that superstitious belief places on society. The problem was that in an attempt to debunk bad science, IEEE devoted itself to an unscientific, philosophical rant against all belief.

Among Park's repeated complaints was that "90% believe." He was bothered that 90% of Americans express belief in some kind of God. He said that this was "disproven", but the main evidence was in reference to creation. Surely, most of what "Young Earth Creationism" is about can easily be disproven. Yet there are at least three ways that Christians approach the concept of "God created the heavens and the earth." One is the stereotypical Young Earth Creationism. But there are other varieties. Some folks believe in a Young Earth but one with Appearance of Age. Others are Old Earth Creationists. Still others, like John Paull II, could be described as Theistic Evolutionists. So many flavors, so many nuances. Have all of these been disproven? Some are actually un-disprov-able! Failure to fully investigate the sociological nuances of his subject makes this piece by Spectrum Radio merely bad philosophy.

He did make a reference to prayer. I think he was critiquing a Gospel of Prosperity moreso than the traditional view of Christianity. This underscores my hunch that to many nontheists, the gospel of prosperity, theology of glory is held the correct view of Christian faith and the bible. Rubbish.

He decried the necessity to "compartmentalize" one's belief, between science and religion. I'm wondering if scientists themselves ever do this. Isn't it said that quantum mechanics and gravity are incompatible? How about particle and wave nature of photon & electron? Scientists have to compartmentalize beliefs all the time. I don't insist that the wave nature of photons explains every phenomenon that I run across.

Hey IEEE, why don't you provide some balance here? You made a philosophical rant with little science followed by an altar call to nontheism. How about you invite an Old Earth Creationist to give a little rant (with some scientific tidbits added) and follow up with an altar call to a personal relationship with Jesus Christ?

Pollster.com ad on party affiliation

2009-05-09T22:41:00.000-04:00

I don't have much to say about this poll. I just thought it was cool that I have a blog where I can make use of embed tags!

Baby sea turtles victimized by plastic debris.

2009-05-09T21:17:00.001-04:00

Let's be careful out there with plastic litter.
Found these at the The Sea Turtle Restoration Project

Loggerhead turtle hatchling trying to eat a floating strip of plasticNational Geographic Digital Motion

procedurally generated cities

2009-05-08T23:07:00.001-04:00

Here are some instructions on how to make a procedurally generated city in povray.

1) There are mathematical functions which vary between 0 at 1 in space. They are smooth, in that any two points close together are likely to be similar, but random, in that any two points far apart are unlikely to be similar. Here is a black and white representation of one such "noise function". There are millions of ways to make the noise-- you can have ones where the gradations are steeper or more jagged or more linear or whatever.

2) One can take this noise function into some 3D programs (here, povray) and view the isosurface-- where every point of dark and light responds to some degree of elevation:

3) One can even "terrace" the isosurface. I set up a step function here were every value below a certain threshold is a constant value, whereas the surface varies proportionally to the value above that limit.

4) And then texture it to make it look like a landscape.
I made the flat area like a sea, gave the "shorelines" a sandy texture, and put green mountains at the highest values.

5) Why not make some cities! Take the same isofunction and terrace it a bit differently:

6) Then texture it like a city, with pools, stone terraces, blue windows, and rooftop gardens. This is what I think is quite cool.
It is an interesting exercise, in that it allows one to design a living space that completely conforms to the geometry of the landscape without knowing the landscape beforehand. Couldn't you imagine some loony millionaires or students at progressive college campus wanting to live like this?

Enjoy.

Fox News lying through cropping.

2009-05-07T22:08:00.000-04:00

Fascinating.