.blog

A while back I received a very surprising and welcome phone call from a friend with whom I had not spoken to in a very long time. As we spoke our conversation drifted from the earthly, to the divine; to science, to superstition. Somewhere along the line our conversation drifted to luck. My friend, the ever skeptical pragmatist, doesn’t believe in luck; you really make your own luck through your own effort.

Now, I am a firm believer in things unseen; one of those being luck. So we had a bit of discussion on it. I certainly feel lucky and often the feeling is related to objects that I might find (a penny facing heads up) or something that I wear (my lucky shoes). It occurs to me, that feeling lucky is more of a frame of mind or an attitude of spirit that you find your self in. Since that conversation and realization, I’ve decided to focus more on putting myself and others in that lucky attitude of spirit. How can i do this?

I try to look around for what feels good. A pen that just feels right in hand, a pendant or necklace that feels right when worn. These are lucky items. Pickup a stone that feels smooth in your palm and fits well in your pocket… that is your lucky stone. What about the pocket knife someone gave you? That’s a lucky knife. These little things that we find around that feel right can change the outlook of your entire day and shift feelings from unluckiness to luckiness, from pessimism to optimism.They put you in a lucky attitude of spirit. With that spirit, you really are making your own luck.

It is possible to spread that good fortune around. Perhaps, with a lucky token, pass it on to a friend or someone special and make sure they know what it means… It will pick up significance simply because you passed it on. Want to pass it on to a stranger? If you find a penny facing tails up… flip it. Someone else will eventually come along and find that same penny heads up, and it could change their day.

Yesterday i caught the decision by US District Judge Judge Vaughn Walker (a conservative appointee) striking down Proposition 8. It was decided that Prop 8 violated due process and the equal protection clause. Marriage and the ability to choose who you are going to marry is a fundamental civil right.

Whether or not you agree with a traditional definition of marriage you must agree that this ruling is a good thing for civil liberties. The majority of people voted to make an already exercised prerogative of a minority illegal. A legal right should not be left to the whim of public opinion. Score one for civil rights.

Download the decision from Scribd

A week or so ago I caught some news that the UN Human Rights Council has passed a new resolution banning the defamation of religion saying that defamation violates human rights. What made me take notice of this is that the story was followed shortly by another which seemed to imply that the Pope was implicate in a cover up of sexual abuse cases. These accusations against the Church and the Papacy have since been continuing news.

It strikes me that these news agencies should be mindful that defamation of religion does not only concern Islam. Any implication that the Pope was complicit in the appointment of a Pedophile Priest or participated in some covered up is now a violation of Human Rights according to this new “defamation of religion” resolution. In Catholicism, the Pope has a special position in the Faith as successor to Peter, the Prime Bishop and the Vicar of Christ (as are all Bishops). Because of this, maligning the Pope and his office clearly defames the faith of all Catholics.

If the Defamation of Religion resolution passes and stands, well.. where will freedom of speech stand again? Everyone should be concerned.

I happened to use Gmail’s “Open as a Google document” in Gmail the other day to open a form that I had received in Microsoft document format. When I did this I received an email from The Google Docs Team informing about my use of the service. One thing they said caught my eye, namely:

“Know that your documents are safe. Since your content is stored on Google’s secure servers, even if something happens to your hard drive, your documents are protected.”

I understand that they are probably just talking about physical safety but it’s important to know that the safety of your content, any content, that you run through Google’s services is not guaranteed. Within their terms of service you will find items that should give pause, such as this one:

By submitting, posting or displaying the Content you give Google a worldwide, royalty-free, and non-exclusive license to reproduce, adapt, modify, translate, publish, publicly perform, publicly display and distribute any Content which you submit, post or display on or through the Service…”

They do not make this clear when you open a link with Google Docs. They also don’t make it clear that you are going to open the document on their server before you do this. On first glance you would think that they’d store the document in a temporary location and use a program to display it, much like pdf’s are handled with most browsers. It’s only after you open it and use the service are you notified that you’ve saved a document on their servers and they have held an editable version with google docs for your convenience. Not to worry, you can know that your document is safe with Google…

As I’m sure most out there have, I’ve been reading a lot in the news about Iran’s disputed elections and the protests and it got me wondering just how different their election process is from what I’m used to. I’ve read a little bit about it and it seems that after the results of the popular vote are shuffled through their Interior Ministry they are verified by a Guardian Council and then finally approved by Ali Khamenei who has constitutional authority to overturn the vote of the people if he chooses.

Compare this process to that of the US. We have a popular vote which doesn’t really mean anything on the federal level. Most states use the popular vote to determine the members of the Electoral College and by extension how their Electoral votes will go. The Electoral College generally consists of elite members of each the Democratic and Republican parties. The vote of each states Electoral College is verified by that that states Governor and turned into the President of the Senate who then presents the results to both houses of the Congress. The person with the clear majority is declared president.

There is no Constitutional requirement that I am aware of that requires the popular vote to be used in a certain way and it is very possible to win the popular vote and lose in the electoral college. This happened in the Gore / Bush elections of 2000. Gore won the popular vote by over five-hundred thousand in that election but the political elite of electoral college declared Bush the winner… Like Iran, we had riots also but you didn’t see those in the news.

Neither the United States or Iran have direct democracy. Both of our democracies depend on the will of the political elite and their consideration of the popular vote. That’s minus one for democracy in my book. democracy–

I was reading the news today and ran across the headline, ‘Idol’ Upset: Kris Allen Beats Adam Lambert. Now I understand that this is a prime-time talent show but when did this start to become real news? This story actually beat out anything on the the new credit card law or even bombings in pakistan. It is a talent show and just entertainment. Entertainment, as we all know, goes toward the back just before the classifieds, opinion articles and comics. How did this entertainment piece get to the front page?

How did this happen? Well, I get my news via google news and the placement of that news is based on a computer algorithm that sorts the news based on frequency of appearance in over 4500 news sites. So for a news story to make it to the top it needs a strong showing in a large segment of online news. The fact that this piece has such a strong showing over and above real news affecting real people reflects a huge shift in our morality i think and it’s not for the better

I don’t know if you’ve read the recent discussion about the ethical implications of “Designer Babies” ( cbs story here ). If you haven’t it is really interesting and for me it is eye-opening to see how far we are getting with technology. This technology does beg the question on whether it would be ethical for the Christian. Is there anything in scripture that prohibits the use of this technology?

On what authority does man exercise control over his natural environment? God has given man dominion over the world since the beginning (Gen. 1:28 – 30). This is especially asserted in Psalm 8:6:

You made him ruler over the works of your hands; you put everything under his feet

So it is with authority that man can change the physical world. It is with the authority that man does research into genetics, even if it involves embryo research. The stronger religious objection results from the idea that a person is a person at the moment of conception. That life begins at the moment of conception is inferred from Psalm 51:5 and Jeremiah 1:5.

Surely I was sinful at birth, sinful from the time my mother conceived me.
…
Before I formed you in the womb I knew you.

The problem here is that scripture does not assert that every embryo is human. If you read Jeremiah then it is clear that God knew us before we were formed in the womb. According to scripture, human life is identified as something other than this human body and our existence in time is eternal but our state in time is changing and subjective. As a Christian I know that even if I die and my body deteriorates I will still be human and I will still be alive.

I do not believe that equating human life with an embryo is sound hermeneutics nor sound reasoning. While it is true to say that all humans were once embryo’s I do not see any evidence to support the assertion that all embryos are or will become human. On the contrary, it is not the human form that makes us human and gives us life but it is the breath of God (Gen. 2:5, Eze 37:5, Acts 17:25). Consider especially that we will soon have the knowledge and ability to grow our own embryo’s from non-embryonic stem cells. We will soon have the technology to create a full human body. Will we consider our creation human?

So we see what Scripture does not positively assert. Let us look in the other direction. Scripture positively asserts that God is Omnipotent and Omniscient. It also asserts that he is unchanging and completely good.

Is it evil to create a human only to allow it to be destroyed in the embryonic stage? Are miscarriages evil? Are abortions evil? If you accept that in each of these instances the victim is human then yes. But this position forces us to call into question God’s culpability. He allowed a human into that situation. He knew that innocent baby, not even fully formed was going to be destroyed. Even if you do not allow for human intention (an unintentional miscarriage) this idea still seems to offend my conscience.

Indeed, even David was held accountable for murder when he allowed his soldier to be in a situation where his death was inevitable. Shall we charge God with Murder? This whole perplexity is side-stepped if you take the simpler position that scripture does and assert that human life is something other than an embryo. If you take the other position, that human life begins with every embryo, then you have a lot to work out.

So, with the belief that a human being cannot be defined as any part of the human body, embryo or otherwise and that man has a divine-given authority to exercise dominion over creation I do not see how this could be declared unethical for a Christian. It may offend our western familial senses but I do not think that it is immoral.

I’ve finally gotten around to reading “The God Delusion” by Richard Dawkins. M4tt recommended this book to me some time ago. I think i’m about one third of the way through the book and have decided to post some thoughts on it as i go along.

The first thing that Mr. Dawkins addresses is this supposed separation of Theology and Science. He argues that Theologians have no exclusive claim to Theology or things of that nature (such as the study of creation or ontology). I am inclined to agree with him. I believe that there is a huge problem with most Schools of Theology today. Most Theologians are not Theologians in the proper sense but really Bible Scholars. They likely have a firm understanding of biblical languages (Greek and Hebrew) but don’t know College Calculus. I wouldn’t call these people trained in the Study of the Divine. In my opinion, if you cannot understand Gravity then how can you expect to understand God? So I think that this is a misguided attack by Mr. Dawkins and is not really relevant to his topic.

He also speaks of the Great Prayer Experiment. This basically deals with the problem of evil. That is, if prayer is effective and if God is a supernatural God, then why does he allow evil to persist in the world and why does he allow suffering.

This is a difficult problem and one that I often wrestle with. Currently my thoughts are this that God gave dominion of Creation to Man. If there is suffering, if there is evil in Creation, it is there because Man who has dominion over Creation and allows it through either direct action or inaction.

Is God then guilty in allowing evil to exist through his permissive will? An omnipotent and omniscient God must be ultimately responsible for everything that occurs within his creation. This is something to struggle with but I think that ultimately guilt lies solely with those who are responsible for the act. One man is cannot be responsible for anothers guilt. We cannot assign guilt to God, a totally different entity, for we are not God and he is not responsible for our actions. Evil occurs within our own dominion and by our own doing, therefore we are responsible, no one else.

The problem of evil and its relationship to Free Will is difficult for my mind to grasp. Certainly we could not have Free Will without the possibility of doing what is not aligned to God’s will (Evil). Am I denying the reality of suffering or evil? I do not think that I am. Suffering is terrible. Evil is widespread and shocks me to the deepest levels of my faith. But I know that this suffering and evil I am witnessing is in the dominion of Man and that God has given us the power to fix it.

I am also not sure if we understand temporal suffering. When I was a child I remember being in trouble for this or that. My parents more than once grounded me and made me stay inside my room all day. I remember at the time that I often felt that my life was over and the suffering unbearable. I could not have understood then that the temporal sufferings of a child in that manner were nothing and indeed not real sufferings or evil. Are we enlightened enough to know that these sufferings are indeed evil and true sufferings and not childish temporal and fleeting? If we indeed are eternal beings, created in the image of God, then what will we think of our present temporal sufferings one-thousand years from the resurrection, when our bodies will be made incorruptible and in similar manner to Christ, who is the first-born among many?

It is difficult for me to see how Science can prove or disprove God at this point. Science does not exclude God. Science is only the culmination of human experience. When we base our expectations on Scientific Laws and Theory we are saying that we expect this to happen because It has happened that way through repeated experience and this is how we understand it to be. That’s fine. But nothing in Science precludes the divine or the supernatural. this is why we call a miracle is a miracle and God is worthy of reverence. If we could explain either through science, we would cease to call it a miracle and God would not be God but a natural phenomenon and unworthy of our devotion. Belief in God is based on faith, even after examining the evidence for or against. For some, it is reasonable to believe in God. For others it is not. For some it is reasonable to see the cup as half-full, while others see it as half-empty. I believe in God, I believe in Science (and in evolution as a process) and the cup is always half-full.

the US Supreme Court ruled that Guantanamo Bay prisoners have a right to file for habeas corpus relief. This is a very good thing and ensures that these prisoners have the right to appear before our Courts to challenge their incarceration. The Presidential Candidates are in sharp contrast here. McCain called it “one of the worst decisions in the history of this country.” while Obama called it “an important step toward re-establishing our credibility as a nation committed to the rule of law and rejecting a false choice between fighting terrorism and respecting habeas corpus.”.

How fundamentally important is the right to file the Great Writ and protect it from abuse by an overzealous Executive Branch? Allow me to quote from Justice Kennedy’s opinion:

Officials charged with daily operational responsibility for our security may consider a judicial discourse on the history of the Habeas Corpus Act of 1679 and like matters to be far removed from the Nation’s present, urgent concerns. Established legal doctrine, however, must be consulted for its teaching. Remote in time it may be; irrelevant to the present it is not. Security depends upon a sophisticated intelligence apparatus and the ability of our Armed Forces to act and to interdict. There are further considerations, however. Security subsists, too, in fidelity to freedom’s first principles. Chief among these are freedom from arbitrary and unlawful restraint and the personal liberty that is secured by adherence to the separation of powers. It is from these principles that the judicial authority to consider petitions for habeas corpus relief derives.

Our opinion does not undermine the Executive’s powers as Commander in Chief. On the contrary, the exercise of those powers is vindicated, not eroded, when confirmed by the Judicial Branch. Within the Constitution’s separation-of-powers structure, few exercises of judicial power are as legitimate or as necessary as the responsibility to hear challenges to the authority of the Executive to imprison a person. . . The laws and Constitution are designed to survive, and remain in force, in extraordinary times. Liberty and security can be reconciled; and in our system they are reconciled within the framework of the law. The Framers decided that habeas corpus, a right of first importance, must be a part of that framework, a part of that law.

It is important that the nations chief executive understand this and decides to defend not only American Life and Soil but the Liberties that make America America.

According to this article from CNET, the New York Attorney General as made and aggreement with major broadband providers that would shut down access to Usenet for their customers. Time Warner Cable will cut it off completely while Sprint will get rid off the alt.* Usenet newsgroups and finally Verizon’s plan is to eliminate some “fairly broad newsgroup areas.”

My initial thoughts about this are that the agreement is going to infringe on the the freedom of expression of thousands of legitimate newsgroups and I would even consider it an attack on the right to assemble. It’s all just a little disturbing and very ineffective as far as policy goes.