King Aardvark's Kick in the Nuts

Work is seriously kicking me in the nuts

2010-02-12T16:51:00.004-05:00

With the wide away for a week visiting family, I thought it'd be a great time to catch up on tv, sleep, blogging, and video games. But noooooo...

There's a very very big highway bridge project that my company is doing down in the States¹. I wasn't assigned to this project originally, as I'm already swamped with other work. Then last week one of the engineers on the job enexpectantly headed back to China for a family emergency; he's probably not coming back. So I'm suddenly thrust into the fray.

The problem: a very rapidly approaching deadline (today, in fact). As in, I have had less than a week and a half to get up to speed and start delivering calculations for two bridges I'm completely unfamiliar with, ruled by design codes that I don't know, and using five new software packages that I've never seen in my life. Oh, and the lead engineer on the project, the guy who's supposed to be helping me catch up to all this, left yesterday on a three week vacation. And another one of the engineers on the project left for a three week vacation last week, so any hope for assistance was gone.

So I'm in the office working Saturday and Sunday, Wednesday night, and all of Thursday night through to Friday, taking a quick 20 minute nap under my desk. I drank a lot of Coke and ate way way too many chewy peach candies. It's pretty damn tricky learning completely new things under incredible time constraints and sleep deprived.

Fortunately, through perseverance, I can say that I got my work done on time (for this submission anyway), though I can't guarantee anything about the correctness of the calcs.

I honestly have no idea what's going on around me right now. I drove past my house today after work.

And it's only going to get worse in the coming weeks as the rest of the submissions come due and other jobs start up again. Maybe I'll have time for sleep in the summer.

Early Valentine's Hatred

2010-02-07T19:14:00.001-05:00

I was at the mall today getting an early jump on my Valentine's Day shopping - not because I'm keen but because I have an assload of work to do this week and will likely not have time to shop again before the big day.

So I'm in the mall and I take a detour into Chapters and buy myself a discount copy of Victor J. Stenger's God: The Failed Hypothesis for $7. Sweet. Then I go across the hall to the Carlton Cards and start looking for the obligatory Valentine's Card and I remember my card requirements (expressed to me through forcefully implied statements by my dutiful wife) - no cheap cards, no funny cards (because our relationship is important and serious and if I joke about it I devalue our relationship ... or something like that), and it must be something with good, flowery words in it expressing a loving message, but not too thorough a message because I need to write at least a paragraph expressing something loving and flowery but personal as well. So I look for a bit and find a good one and look at the price: $7.

I think to myself, WTF? On one hand, I just bought a book, a culmination of years-worth of thought and effort put into it by author and editors, almost 300 pages of quality paper and a hard binding, with dust-cover art and everything. On the other hand, a reasonably-sized sheet of cardboard, some tissue paper, and 16 lines of lame-ass poetry. Same price.

At that moment I experienced an epiphany: "Why not just substitute the Valentine's card with God: The Failed Hypothesis?" What a great idea! I could just scribble a paragraph of lubby-dubby stuff on the first page and draw a big heart and presto! Instant card. They've both got paper and writing and cost $7. Why not?

Then I realized that I don't like having my head torn off and my gonads stomped on by an angry asian woman, so I bought the damn card.

I'm No Longer 1/10th Goth

2010-01-16T14:32:00.006-05:00

My old fingernail - most of the dried blood has been washed away by this point, so it's not as black as it once was

My awesome black fingernail has finally come off. Hurt from a slash to the finger during a rec league floor hockey game, this blackened fingernail has been a constant companion for about three months. In a way, it's become a part of my identity.

I'm going to miss it.

What I'm not going to miss is these last couple of weeks. The damn thing has been half off for a while, still attached at the tip of my finger but detached near the base of the fingernail and I've been too lazy to cut the detached part down. So it got caught on things a lot, basically whenever I try to take my keys out of my pocket. And it hurt like a bitch.

Over the past three months, plenty of people have wondered if I was wearing nail polish, only to be grossed-out as they got a closer look. Or, as my brother put it, I looked 1/10th goth. I did have fun with it though. I was checking out at the grocery store and the cashier, a small highschool girl, yelled at one of her work colleagues to check out her fancy new fingernail polish (dark with white decorations). I said to her, "You think your fingernails are nice, check out this," and showed her my finger.

"Oh my god, that's disgusting! Why are you showing me that?!"

Now all that is over and I'm left with a malformed partial fingernail for a few more months. So farewell old fingernail. I'll remember you fondly.

Explosive Duck Penises

2010-01-16T14:28:00.002-05:00

Explosive duck penises.

You know you want to click, don't you?

This damned year is almost over. Merry Christmas!

2009-12-20T19:59:00.006-05:00

Well folks, this year was a weird and troublesome one.

It started with my wife unemployed and me recovering from the brain-melting travesty that was the Alpha Course.

Work was busy and made needlessly complicated by numerous architects, government agencies, and architects working for government agencies, but I did manage to design several structures that are starting to be constructed in the local area. I haven't crushed anyone to death in a pile of steel and concrete. Yet.

My father-in-law suddenly passed away, leading to much hardship for my wife's family. This resulted in a horribly busy summer for me, filled with constant commuting back to my hometown to visit my wife, zero help around the house and less time to do it in, and a guargantuan overgrown garden out back.

In the fall, my wife was back so things resumed a bit of normality. Highlights of this time include a trip to Las Vegas, a trip to Pittsburgh, accidentally breaking a girl's nose in a rec league floorhockey game, and getting my fingernail crushed at another floorhockey game.

So things are starting to settle a bit as the year wraps up. Not only that, some good things are starting to happen: I just got a sweet raise, so I now make significantly more money than my brother again; he just defended his masters thesis, mostly successfully, so the end is in sight for a 3+ year nightmare of absentee profs and lack of money; I just won a nice door prize at the company Christmas potluck; and we just took the plunge and bought a Christmas tree.

Fake Tree. Pretty sweet - it's almost like we're real people now.

One thing I have noticed is that I'm getting older. It wasn't that long ago that what I wanted for Christmas were big fun things, like TVs, computers, video games, etc. My big list item this year: new bathroom faucets. And I'm damn excited about getting them, too.

Man, I am getting freakin' old.

So things are looking up, other than the "getting old" thing. However, the year ends with the prospect of further dread. My mother-in-law will be moving in with us for the next few months (that means no more walking around in my underwear). My wife's still unemployed. And that fingernail I mentioned earlier in this post is going to come off soon.

Gross.

So have a Merry Christmas and we'll talk in the new year, m'kay?

The Purpose Driven Life for my Wife

2009-12-13T18:12:00.002-05:00

Given all the talk on Pharyngula and elsewhere right now, I had to reflect on Rick Warren's The Purpose Driven Life. Unfortunately, my life, purposeful or not, is not immune to his dreck. My wife has recently started working through the book with her sister. Both of them are currently unemployed and feeling listless right now so I guess they figured it's a good time to do it.

I've tried to stay out of it as much as possible - a year later and I'm still burned out from attending the Alpha Course with my wife. Any more immersion into the loony Christoworld and I fear my brain will collapse (and with it, any bridges I'm currently designing). So any analysis I have on TPDL will be superficial by necessity.

Based on simply the book cover, the damn thing is almost certainly preying on the boring housewife demographic. Purple background, gold accents, elegant flowing scripts, definitely for the "feeling" crowd. Then again, I'm very surprised it doesn't have the typical "photo of the author smiling in a suit" cover that most self-help books have. So kudos to Warren for that.

Overhearing my wife and her sister talking about it, it is certainly very God focused. You can't go a paragraph in it without encountering a bible verse or a statement about how God wants humans to behave and think.

Last year, another one of my wife's sisters read TPDL and for some damn reason she was telling me about it. So I asked her, having just finished the book, what the purpose of her life was. She said "It's a great book, it explains how God has a purpose for everybody." So I asked again, what God's purpose for her was, and she said "God has different plans for everybody and has gifted us with different skills and abilities to serve that purpose." Great, I said, and asked again what skills and purposes she has. She said "all these skills are what God wants us to do." This went on for a minute or two until I gave up. So my conclusion is a) my sister-in-law has terrible reading comprehension, b) Rick Warrens book is mainly religious fluff that doesn't actually address its topic beyond "do what God wants you to do", or c) a little of column (a) and a little of column (b).

If I hear anything else from my wife, I'll let you know, but just a warning, I'm not going to torture myself over this.

On Doubt

2009-11-30T07:31:00.000-05:00

In the Alpha Course and weekend retreat, there was quite a bit of discussion on the role of doubt in Christianity (namely, there should be NONE, and any doubt is Satan trying to mess you up). I've tried many times to get Christians (including my wife) to understand the positive power of doubt. I've mainly failed, but it's worth a try.

Along those line, here is an excellent post by Akusai of Action Skeptics explaining exactly how important doubt is to a healthy human mind.

Lost in Pittsburgh with no place to stay

2009-11-21T12:15:00.005-05:00

I just got back from a family trip to Pittsburgh with my wife, dad, and brother. We go on these trips fairly regularly to indulge in nerdly things (while my wife comes along to humour me). Points of interest this time we were specifically targeting were a Penguins game (because unfortunately it's just not possible to watch NHL hockey in Ontario anymore), the Carnegie Museum of Natural History, the Andy Warhol Museum, and a place that sells rare replacement parts for Jaguars (the cars, not the animal, though that would be interesting if they sold prosthetic limbs and hip joint replacements for jaguars - really, my dad has three old Jags that are always breaking down so he needs the parts).

Because I'm lazy, I'll summarize interesting tidbits about the trip in no particular order:

- The Carnegie Museum of Natural History is much better than the ROM in most ways. Exhibits are more educational and interactive. For the most part, the dinosaur fossils are better (except for ceratopsians - the ROM has an excellent collection of triceratopses and the like). However, the Carnegie does not appear to have any aardvarks in its exhibit, while the ROM does. For shame.
- There is something inspirational about looking at a towering statue of rock and understanding that 66 million years ago this thing was a mighty living beast munching on some unfortunate and tasty critter.
- Photography is allowed in the museum but posting of photos in a public place is not, so while there was a mastodon butt, I sadly cannot post a picture of it here.
- The Warhol Museum did not just have Andy Warhol stuff. There was also a large number of works from some guy with an unhealthy obsession with Andre the Giant. We unanimously agreed that this was awesome.
- Tried hard to get tickets for Saturday's Pens game vs. Boston, but failed. Ended up with tickets for the game vs. Anaheim on Monday. The Anaheim game was ok. It was a sellout and the Penguins won so the place had a great atmosphere, but it wasn't a terribly exciting game since they put the game away early. Unlike the Saturday game which the Pens tied 5-5 with 0.4 seconds left on the clock to send the game to overtime, then won on a breathtaking goalie giveaway early in OT. Watching it on the tv in our hotel room, the play-by-play guy called it the most entertaining game he'd seen all year. Dammit.
- Speaking of the hotel, we didn't bother booking a hotel in advance because who the hell would go to Pittsburgh in November? Answer: when the Steelers play, the local university team plays, and the Pens play twice, all on the same weekend, just about half the state shows up. We had to stay in a hotel in Steubenville, Ohio.
- The road system in Pittsbrugh is even worse than in Quebec. In Quebec, the ramps from the highway appear without warning on either side of the road. In Pennsylvania they do the same, except there's very little highway and lots and lots of ramps. Arguably, once you're inside any town in the general Pittsburgh area, it's basically ALL RAMPS. And you cannot get yourself to where you want to go by pointing yourself in that direction and just driving there. Inevitably you will take a ramp that will spin you around in the opposite direction. Our GPS was frequently confounded by all the multi-level ramps and roads. It was a complete nightmare of driving frustration. We're really spoiled in Ontario.

"recalculating"

- I have to give kudos to the gift shop at the Carnegie Museum of Natural History. Fully half of the books in the store were entirely about evolution and not a Behe in sight. Unfortunately, that was about it for science books in the city. There were an awful lot of books about guns though.
- My brother lamented that we were far enough south that, other than hockey, the only Canadian culture we'd be likely to see would be Nickelback. To his surprise and delight, a guy in the Jaguar place was spotted with a Tim Hortons coffee. Apparently, there was one right down the street in Steubenville. Unfortunately, that was the last Canadian thing for the trip except for the inevitable Nickelback. Bleh.

Alpha Retreat Sermon 4: How Can I Make the Most of the Rest of My Life?

2009-11-16T08:23:00.000-05:00

This was the last sermon of the Alpha Retreat and it's also the last sermon recap I'll post for my Alpha Course series. Short and sweet.

So, Mr. Gumbel, what should we do with the rest of our lives? Gumbel starts by saying that we should break with the past and make a new start. We do this by no longer conforming to the pattern of the world.

Specifically he says the first thing is to be nice to people and be positive. Strangely, though, the second most important thing he mentions (and the one he spends the greater amount of time on) is to follow biblical sexual morality. Gumbel said that he's never heard of anyone saying "I wish I hadn't waited for my wedding night."

Obviously, he's been talking to the wrong people.

So how do we make the change to being anti real world? According to Gumbel, it's an act of will that requires sacrifice. We need to turn our whole bodies (our eyes, ears, mouths, hands - not to mention our noses, throats, and pancreases) over to God. We have to give him our sexuality ('natch), our time, our ambitions, and our money ('natch).

We do this because God has planned for our future and he loves us and has done a tremendous amount of sacrificing for us and is merciful. Gumbel reiterates that God loves us even more than any parent loves their children. Which is of course why he wants our money. Damn freeloading uberparents.

And that's it. All purpose and meaning in life boils down to believing in God; following a combination of vague, anal, and nitpicky rules given to you by your clergy because you think that means loving God; and letting the Holy Spirit guide your actions and thoughts.

Of course, by this point you know my opinion of all this, as it's getting more and more obvious the more immersed I'm getting into the culture. This is the mental equivalent of putting on a blindfold and running at top speed into a forest full of trees.

The session ended with the church elder (yes, the one I had the fight with) leading a very emotionally draining and heartfelt prayer along the lines of what Gumbel mentioned about giving over control of everything in your life to God. He talked about how he lost much in his life (career, money, etc.) and his trust in God pulled him through. He lead the group in pledging that they would turn over everything to God, going into excruciating detail into the body parts being listing (I can't remember if he turned over his fingernails to God, but it wouldn't have surprised me - it was a detailed list). He also pledged his family, his work, his house, his hopes, etc. There were a lot of tightly closed eyes and lots and lots of tears from the congregation. I just sat and observed.

Alpha Course Day 11: What About the Church?

2009-11-09T08:17:00.000-05:00

You know, one of the problems with being crazy busy at work is that you don't get a chance to finish up what you've been writing about on your blog. This leads to over half a year passing since the last post in the Alpha series. This leads to the unfortunate fact that I can't recall all the details anymore, and by this point when I was taking the classes my enthusiasm had dropped-off tremendously so I was taking less detailed notes. Apologies. I'll do my best.

This sermon was the last official session that we held. The last sermon in the course manual is "How Can I Make the Most of the Rest of My Life," which we did at the end of the Alpha Retreat. The final day of this fall's Alpha Course was the Christmas dinner, which had the same generic Christmas sermon that I've mentioned before.

Dinner: You know, I can't remember. Usually, I wrote down what dinner was. This day I neglected to do so.

Part 1: Sermon

I think this sermon wasn't so much a discussion or an argument for a particular point of view. Alpha is in large part a tune-up for Christians and a bootcamp for new Christians, so in that way, this sermon can be viewed as a briefing for leaving the course and joining the active Christian community, which, as Gumbel emphasizes at the beginning of this sermon, is what 'church' in the broader context means. Of course, he just can't come out and say that, he has to drone on for about 20 minutes to do so. (Actually, I might be being harsh on him for this. I went to a Catholic highschool and the point that 'church' was the whole community of people - not the building or the services or the clergy - was drilled into me incessantly, so this is old hat for me but might be new for some people.)

At least Gumbel started off with a good joke. A quote attributed to Abraham Lincoln: "If all the people who well asleep in church were laid-out end to end, they'd be a lot more comfortable."

Gumbel talked a bit about baptism, how it was "a visible mark of being a member of the church," though how a temporary activity can be a 'visible mark' is beyond me. He also said that baptism signifies "cleansing from sin," "incorporation into Christ's death," and "sealing of the Spirit," among other collections of words that don't really make any sense when strung together in sentence form.

He said that there were about 1.9 billion Christians in the world today (I don't know if he includes Mormons, Catholics, etc., and it's hard to tell what to do with people who pay lip-service to being Christian, but as far as I know the number is in the generally accepted ballpark). He mentioned how the church is growing in the developing world while in the civilized west it's shrinking. Told of 3 Ugandan missionaries who came to Gumbel's university (Cambridge) to convert the English heathens. Disappointingly, he did not address why large numbers of people in the civilized world were letting go of God. He just wanted us to be more like the Ugandans.

The middle of sermon just talked of trivial things like how the church provides local communities with small tight groups that provide support of people, or is the center of celebration services, or that the church is a mechanism for bonding the community into a 'family.'

Gumbel does mention in passing that there are a lot of denominations and sects. He calls this disunity 'absurd' as there is only "one spirit." "The church has split for every conceivable reason, and every inconceivable reason, too." Again, when a problem is encountered, he brings it up but just says something to the effect of "we really should be better," says something humourous and proceeds on his way, never caring about it again. Understandable given his goals, but disappointing from my perspective.

By this point, Gumbel was talking about how the church was "a Holy Temple, built on the foundation of the apostles and prophets, with Jesus as the cornerstone and indwelt by God's Spirit." Which is another way for me to say that at this point I nodded-off for a while.

Then he said something creepy about the church being "the Bride of Christ" and I woke up. Seriously, what's with all these churchmen wanting to marry Jesus?

Part 2: Small Groups

Discussion time was cut short by a short talk from a "special guest," who had been much hyped before dinner. He turned out to be the church's small groups pastor. Which surprised absolutely no one. Especially since we had noticed him lurking outside in the hallway. He mainly talked about opportunities in the church, what services they provide, etc.

The real discussion just focused on the feelings of each person in our small group regarding what they learned/realized/found important in the course re: Christianity/the church/themselves. Surprisingly shallow actually, again all regarding feelings, or blanket statements about how important it was to love God and let him control your life. When pressed, I said I learned that Christians cry a lot. Seriously, that was the best thing I could say; everything else I learned was more negative than that.

I'm very glad the course is almost done.

Pessimism is a Winning Proposition

2009-11-07T14:12:00.002-05:00

I won a 50/50 draw at the office this week! We had a guy running the New York marathon to fund raise for a charity in Africa. He organized a bunch of fundraising activities, such as mini putt, paper airplane competitions, and pizza days, and this draw was one of these activities. The objective was to guess his time, each guess was $1 with the winner getting half and the charity getting the other half.

Apparently he runs marathons frequently and he planned on doing a 4 hours 15 minutes. Me, being the pessimistic type, figured he would get a cramp or something. So I guessed 4 hours, 42 minutes, and 36 seconds. I was actually 26 seconds too optimistic, with our man running it in 4 hours, 43 minutes, 2 seconds.

Hooray for the powers of pessimism!

(ok, the prize wasn't all that it was cracked up to be - only $19 - but I generally don't win anything, so this is a huge deal for me.)

The Amazing Disappearing Geotechs

2009-10-21T17:31:00.001-04:00

Obligatory preamble: long time no post, busy real life, kicking blog in nuts, etc.

The other day at work I sent some requests for quotes to three geotechnical consultants for a pedestrian bridge job we're doing. Sometimes we just send out the letters to the companies as a whole and start with "Dear Sir/Madam:" but that's always very unsatisfying and we hate doing that. So we went the extra mile and dug up our company contact lists and found the names of the person at each company who actually runs the geotechnical investigations (two men and a woman). Very nice job, I thought.

So I followed up with the contacts at the three geotech consultants two days later to make sure they received the letters and found that man #1 no longer works at his company. Great. So I have to track down the replacement new guy.

So I checked man #2 at the second consultant's office, and it turns out he's away from the office until the day before the quote is due. Fantastic timing, eh? So I have to pester some people until I find the name of the guy who'll be taking over for the job, some Bob guy (not his real name). So I send him an email saying, "Hey Bob, I hear you're taking over for man #2 while he's gone, etc..." I get a reply from him, and "Bob" is actually Dr. Bob, company president. Hmm, maybe a little more formal, respectful tone would have been helpful.

So on to woman #1 at the last consultant's office. Guess what: she's away from the office, too. Strangely, she's away also until exactly the day before the quote is due, just like man #2. Hmmm. I wonder, is there a secret cross-consultant illicit geotech affair going on? (Nah, probably just a geotech conference or coincidental vacations or something, but this is funnier.) Anyway, I had to track down yet another replacement person.

Geotech consultants aren't exactly making my life easy.

On the pros and cons of drinking

2009-09-29T23:37:00.003-04:00

Wow, almost a month since my last post. Really doesn't feel that long. So what's up?

The other day I was at a friend's birthday party. After a long night of merry-making with ample beer, he discovered a Texas mickey of whisky. Like a sign from heaven it was, as I counted in my head that it was 10 years almost to the day (perhaps the day? I don't remember) since the first and last time I drank whisky from one of those behemoths. I decided to humour my friend and drink his whiskey. He pulled out three glasses for those who were partaking and proceeded to make us rye and Cokes. Don't get me wrong, I love rye and Coke, but this was the end of a birthday party and the implication was that we would be having WHISKY, not Coke. Drink it straight, like a man.¹ Of course, to rectify this, I quickly finished my rye and Coke to replace it with a full glass of the pure stuff.

So this goes on until 4:00 am. The next morning, my wife and I have to get up for the company golf day. Once there, I realize that not only am I really tired, I'm still quite drunk. Man, that little ball is hard to see, let alone hit.

After that, we went back to visit my wife's family in Kingston. Her house is right next to the university and really close to the street where they have that big street party for homecoming. Apparently, the school and the city are sick of having to deal with the illegal party so they cancelled homecoming but the party continues. We went to check it out, what with the big ruckus and police presence and all. There were hundreds of police with riot gear and horses and paddy wagons to control the drunk students that showed up to party.

Because trying to intimidate drunk teenagers is such a great idea.

Also a great idea: pushing to the ground and arresting a non-drunk, non-partying ~48 year old alumnus who was watching the event from the sidewalk across the street because he didn't clear out quickly enough when police told a group of standers by to clear the sidewalk. "Quickly enough" being 2 seconds.

Because the best way to disperse a drunken teenage party is to arrest an old guy who isn't part of it.

I'm not much of a partier (my friend's birthday being a rare exception) and I'm kind of meh on the idea of out of control street bashes, so I wouldn't mind the elimination of this unsanctioned event. But these certainly aren't the strategies and tactics I'd use. It'll probably work in the long run, as the party is gradually replaced with police confrontations, but for a generation of kids (and one old guy), opinions of police are probably worse than they need to be.

¹Incidentally, in residence I was given a nickname: King "Chasers are for white people" Aardvark. It was based on a supposed quote that I never actually said. And I'm half white anyway.

Ramble On

2009-08-31T07:18:00.002-04:00

I'm getting the impression that some people don't think I should spend all my blogging complaining about my garden, which is truly kicking me in the nuts. I feel like I need to prove my plight. Recall that for the past two months I've had to fight this monster by myself, and I have no weekends to do it in:

My backyard, my bane of existance.

I was talking to my neighbour the other day. He was saying that it's not that bad. In all sincerity and benevolence, he said to "Just do a little weeding, rake up the dead leaves and branches, put in some decorative stones, and there you go. Easy."

To put his helpful suggestions in context, I'd like you to compare his backyard with mine:

A backyard full of shut the hell up, you stupid neighbour!

He's got zero plants out back and about six plants out front. Those six plants are new and small and his wife takes care of them.

---------------------------------------------------------------

The garden is my enemy. It is invading my mind and ruining my life. I cannot find contentment at all; even if I have free time it's in my thoughts, reminding me that true freedom is impossible and I will never be happy.

I've decided on an appropriate allegory for my garden situation. It's dark and terrible and undeniable. Behold:

The Evil One is on my borders, watching and waiting...

There are definitely similarities. Like Gondor, the non-garden portion of my backyard is a safe haven. Battles are waged on its borders between the forces of light and darkness and, though bloodied, it continues to hold. Indeed, if it fails, the rest of Middle Earth (my house) is lost. We fight the good fight, but my forces are being worn down and slowly the influence of Mordor is spreading as weeds and plants start to overgrow and slow-growing, nice-looking trees are overwhelmed. All is not well. We are slowly losing this war of attrition.

Deep inside the garden is like Mordor. In Mordor it is dark and scary and if you're in there, you're likely to be attacked by orcs. My garden is exactly the same: it's dark and scary and if you're in there, you're likely to be attacked by orcs.

There are even geographical similarities:

Ephel Dúath, the impenetrable mountain range on the border of Mordor.

This rock is my entryway to the thick jungles of plants. I actually have a decent time controling the plants around this area. It's sort of my Black Gate:

The Black Gate. I half expect an army of orcs to come marching out.

Closer in, it's even scarier:

Holy Crap! Is that a mûmak?!

You can see the waves of death creeping over as some formerly healthy, happy trees are felled by the influence of evil, an overgrown towering and twisted tree/shrub I consider to be my Barad-dûr.

The tower of the Dark Lord spreads destruction...

Uh-oh, Sauron's freaky eye is about to look at me!

Ahhhh! It burns!

Life is kicking my blog in the nuts

2009-08-16T21:36:00.006-04:00

To the two or three of you out there wondering where I've been and what's up with my blog I must apologize for my lack of writing. (To those two or three: why? To the countless others who don't care: be more like those other two or three people.) However, I have excuses:

1) Father-in-law

First and foremost, and this is not a joke, about a week after my last post, my wife's father passed away suddenly. It's been very sad and hard on us, as it was extremely unexpected. He was up and about painting houses and fixing roofs earlier that week. My mom (the doctor) speculates that his general high level of physical activity masked his very serious health problems (diabetes, blood pressure, cholesterol, etc.). Because of this, my wife has been back home helping to look after her mom for the past two months. It's been hard being away, and I've had to go home every weekend to visit my wife and lend my support. But that's very hard, too, because I lose every single weekend to travel. That's added a buttload of kilometers to my car (I also managed to neglect changing my oil for over 8000 kms). The death of a loved one is always hard, but there are some weird things that take place among a family that's half not religious and half very religious, and that deserve a post of their own.

2) Garden

Colleagues have asked if I've been enjoying the bachelor lifestyle since my wife left to go home. I've had to explain to them that I've not been living the bachelor lifestyle in any way. I thought I would; I had planned for video games, tv, blogging, sitting outside in the sun and drinking beer. I have not been doing any of that (except for the drinking beer - I may be turning into an alcoholic). Since I go home every weekend, I only have four evenings each week. One evening is spent playing for my company's softball team. So three evenings. Those three evenings are all spent trying - in vain - to prevent my giant motherfucking garden from taking over my backyard and burying my house. The previous owners were a retired couple who enjoyed spending all their time maintaining the stupid thing. I am no such person, nor do I have any time. The garden deserves a post of its own, too, but suffice it to say, this takes up all my free time.

(Speaking of garden, my wife's rich brother's family was just on tv on a home and garden/landscaping reno show. They are extremely busy so they completely tore down and reconstructed their back yard to make it much lower maintenance and easier to enjoy. I'd do that, but I don't have any money and my wife has vetoed my chainsaw/slash and burn suggestion.)

3) Work

Work has also lined up my nads and delivered a solid blow. I missed a week of work helping out my wife's family and came back to a huge backlog on my desk.

I've always relied on my relative laziness and close proximity to my office to provide me with sufficient time to write, but recently I've had to do the 1+ hour commute into Toronto to work at another one of my company's branch offices. This office needs my help on a large design job, requiring long hours and a lot of hard work (that will all likely be shelved by the slow-moving municipal client and be for naught). The other office is much better than my own (free coffee, big windows, colours instead of grey, plants, and large cubicles), so that was enjoyable.

I typically first visit my own office at 9am, setting off for the other office around 9:40am, thus avoiding the worst of the traffic. I work until around 7:30pm then drive home to avoid the worst of the traffic again. Man, how do all those regular office-working, suburb-dwelling people do it? They have to get up around 6am and either catch a train or sit in hours of stop-and-go traffic to get from the suburbs to downtown, and they have to do it every day. They don't get to wait for the lower traffic periods like I do. I had to do it for a couple of weeks and it killed me. Anyway, this does not deserve it's own post, but it did contribute to the whoppingly overdue oil change.

Now that I'm done making excuses, I will promise to write at least one more post during the month of August. I will eventually get back to the Alpha Course review and a few other things, but likely that will be in the fall. No one cares about blogs in the summer time anyway.

------------------------------------------------------------------

This weekend was the first one I've had at my house in two months. It has been a nice change (my first chance to sleep in in two months). My wife was up and we golfing with a bunch of people from our badminton club. I am very good at hitting the ball in the center of the fairway ... the adjacent fairway.

We could all use some protection

2009-05-23T11:38:00.003-04:00

Occasionally in the office we have external suppliers come in and give lunch and learn presentations so that we'd hopefully specify their products in our designs. I love these lunch and learns; the content and quality of the presentations vary wildly but I'm a sucker for free food, so I always go.

On Monday, we're having a presentation on Cathodic Protection of Concrete Structures:

For those who don't know, the big problem with concrete, especially near road surfaces in places where snow and ice is a problem, is the corrosion of the steel reinforcing bars (rebars) inside. Concrete is permiable, so dissolved chlorides come in and cause the steel to corrode. Concrete is also really strong in compression but really weak in tension. There are two main problems with this: 1) that rebar is there to give the concrete strength in tension, and if you remove some steel, then your concrete structure isn't as strong anymore, and 2) rust takes up more space than the original steel, so this results in tensile stresses within the concrete as the rust tries to expand, which will cause the outer cover of concrete to spall off. Very bad stuff.

Now there are a few ways to combat this. The main thing we do now that we didn't do in decades past is use much more concrete cover (thickness of concrete between the exposed surface and the rebar). This will greatly delay the ingress of chlorides. Other options are coating the rebar with epoxy so that the chlorides can't get to it or using stainless steel.

Cathodic protection is another method. In an electrochemical cell, the anode corrodes and the cathode doesn't. So if you connect a block of metal to your steel that has a higher electrochemical potential than steel, this will act as a sacrificial anode, itself rusting while pushing more electrons into the steel and preventing it from rusting. You can also used impressed current cathodic protection, which uses a power source.

However, the email notice for the lunch and learn said Catholic Protection.

With recent news out of Ireland, I guess it would be a good idea to have protection from Catholics.

Chain Letter Fail

2009-05-12T21:42:00.003-04:00

This email was forwarded to me by my wife's younger sister. It demonstrates very clearly a helpless attitude towards life that I find very self-defeating. Oh, and if you routinely forward chain letters, you suck.

---------------------------

To: YOU
Date: TODAY
From: GOD
Subject: YOURSELF
Reference: LIFE

This is God. Today I will be handling All of your problems for you. I do Not need your help. So, have a nice day.

I love you. And, remember... If life happens to deliver a situation to you that you cannot handle, do Not attempt to resolve it yourself! Kindly put it in the SFGTD (something for God to do) box. I will get to it in MY TIME. All situations will be resolved, but in My time, not yours. Once the matter is placed into the box, do not hold onto it by worrying about it. Instead, focus on all the wonderful things that are present in your life now. Should you decide to send this to a friend; Thank you. You may have touched their life in ways you will never know!

Now, you have a nice day.

God

God has seen you struggling, God says it's over.

A blessing is coming your way. If you believe in God, please send to ten people (including me) please don't ignore this. You are being tested.

YOU HAVE 20 MINUTES TO TELL 10 FRIENDS THAT YOU LOVE THEM (INCLUDING ME)

I LOVE YOU! GO!

Alpha Course Day 10: Does God Heal Today?

2009-04-27T07:47:00.002-04:00

Dinner: Really really mild chili, to which I added a lot of crushed chilies. Side salad. Coffee cake. Pretty plain day for food, actually. At least it was edible.

Part 1: Sermon

Gumbel starts with a long story about a powerful session of faith healing at his church in Brompton. An American preacher named John Wimber came in. He was loud and boisterous and un-British; Gumbel claimed to be suspicious of him, as he was too obnoxious for the restrained British types in the church.

Google searching reveals nothing substantial in the way of skeptical criticism of Wimber's healing act. No allegations he's like Peter Popoff. That isn't to say that there isn't any criticism of Wimber, but all of it is from other Christians who disagree with some or all of his hyper-charismatic views (calling him a charlatan and a blasphemer). From their articles, I can't really tell if they think Wimber's manifestations of the gifts of the spirit (ie. healings) are real (but demonic) or phony.

Of course, it can be very hard to debunk the specifics of each claim when the faith healers themselves, who claim to help heal thousands of people, tend to avoid giving out names and dates. The fact is, even many Christians have seen Wimber in action and have not been impressed.

Some (who are also critical of Alpha) attack Wimber for being too influenced by the New Age movement.

If you have 30 minutes, here's a video of John Wimber in action. Action starts at around 2:50. Note his use of "words of knowledge," which are what Wimber calls the supernatural epiphanies he receives from God regarding each ailment in the audience: pictures, sympathy pain, words, etc.

Anyway, Wimber was also, in his pre-ministry career, a producer and occasional keyboardist for the Righteous Brothers, who went on to record a few songs that made it to the soundtrack of the movie Ghost. Food for thought.

Importantly, Gumbel's accounts of the healings were like a damned infomercial. First is the disclaimer: man is healed mainly through modern medicine, in fact, nearly all healings are due to medicine. There are very few miracles, he says, and that, when you pray for healing, healing doesn't always - or even usually - happen. Only then does Gumbel go on to talk about his parish's experiences with Wimber, and how in every case, he was able to both identify and heal - Every. Single. Ailment. - in the room. It's almost sickening.

After this long sales pitch, Gumbel goes to explain that healing is in the bible both in the Old Testament and the New.

The New is where most of the focus is. Apparently, 25% of the Gospels focus on Jesus's healing works. There is also mention that much of the time healing is preceded by anointing the sick with olive oil. What is that about? Does God need someone to be greasy in order to heal them? Kind of nonsensical. Anyway, Gumbel also explains that when we pray for healing it is not us that heals the sick, it is God. So this comes right back to the silliness of praying for a specific outcome: either God's a dick who wants you to beg, or your prayer isn't really doing anything since God's going to heal or not heal depending on his wishes, not yours.

Gumbel explained that until the redemption of our bodies after the 2nd coming of Jesus, not everyone will be healed. Right now, God's just teasing us with only occasional healing. This segment of the sermon was full of fanciful descriptions of how wonderful everything will be once Jesus returns.

Even the work of modern faith healers are held to be biblically supported, as the disciples are commanded by Jesus to go out and heal. There are a couple of funny implications to this. First, the bible makes it seem that healing is almost guaranteed if the prayer is righteous enough. So any real pastor of disciple should be able to heal a consistently high percentage of the time, not this rare healing stuff. Secondly, the bible says that the healing of the sick is intended by God to be evidence of his power and the coming of the Kingdom of God. If healing as supposed to be evidence for the skeptical, then why aren't scientific studies into the effectiveness of prayer healing effective?

He also says that if you pray and the victim is not healed it's not due to you having not enough faith, despite what the bible implies. He finishes with an odd call to persevere: “The reason I go on praying is not so much that I've seen masses of people healed, but because Jesus commanded us to do it. And that's why I would go on doing it even if NO ONE was healed”

I guess the theme of today's sermon is 'mixed messages.'

Part 2: NOT Small Groups

There was no small groups time after this sermon. Instead, there was a special healing session. Lights were turned low and some crappy Christian soft pop music was put on in the background. Little enclosures (resourcefully made out of cubicle walls and dividers) were set up. The group leaders each sat behind each one and every person who wanted to be prayed over due to an ailment could go join one of the group leaders within the enclosure and pray about their ailment. Many people, I'd hazard a guess of about 60%, partook in the private healing sessions, including my wife for a minor skin ailment.

The next week, no one came running in proclaiming that they were healed. I know my wife's problems haven't improved at all.

I'm not surprised.

Like a rotten egg

2009-04-25T15:06:00.003-04:00

The weather is getting better and that means gardening. With my wife out of town for work, that means I have to do it. The nice old couple who sold us the house told us we had to spray certain trees and bushes with this 2-in-1 protective formula that you have to mix from two separate bottles yourself. One is just a sulphur solution, ripe with the smell of rotten eggs. The other is some chemical that I didn't bother reading up on too much.

So I'm mixing up the concoction in a bucket, 2 parts sulphur to 1 part the other stuff, and it occurs to me that I have no funnel and no ready to go spray bottle. I have to cannibalize a half-empty bottle of Fantastik and make a funnel out of junk mail and Scotch tape. So I get large quantities of the sulphur and chemical mixture everywhere and the spray bottle is leaking all over my hands. I decide to read the label on the side of the sulphur bottle. It says: if ingested, induce vomiting. "Good to know," I think to myself. It also says that it's okay to be sprayed on any deciduous tree. After spraying my Japanese maple, I decide to read the label of the bottle of the mystery chemical: if ingest, do NOT induce vomiting. Goody. It also says: Do not use on Japanese maple.

So I probably just killed my tree and I stink like sulphur and have likely poisoned myself since I can't induce vomiting nor suppress it. And, you know, I don't think it matters because it's great BBQ weather right now and I feel pretty damn good. I decided to get reacquainted with an old friend, otherwise known as reading outside soaking up enough sun to get skin cancer, which I did a lot back in grad school (the reading, not the getting skin cancer part) but haven't had much time to do since starting work. I would probably go to the waterfront to read and bring a chair and sun myself except that the waterfront doesn't have beer.

No longer concerned with stinking of sulphur and poisoning myself with gardening chemicals, I am content to poison myself in other ways. Alcohol-related ways. So I'm now sitting in the backyard sucking back a couple of Grolsches, BBQing up some pork chops for lunch, and reading a popular history book that seems unduly concerned with emphasizing just how gay Alexander the Great was. Aside from being flaming gay (or at least strongly bi), Alexander was a notoriously hard drinker and I'd like to think that the great man would strongly approve of my afternoon plans. So crack open the BEvERage of your choice and enjoy that sunshine.

How does God fare on the Ten Commandments?

2009-04-20T08:17:00.000-04:00

I was recently at an Easter church service with my wife. On a typical Easter, the typical pastor will say typical things about why we need salvation. This guy was typical. So what did he say?

Succinctly, he posed the rhetorical question, 'Why do we need salvation?' His answer, 'Because we fall short of the glory of God, silly.'

We all fail, we all sin. And how do we sin? At the very least, look at the 10 Commandments (the popular one, not the actual one). He will guarantee that we in the audience have broke at least one of them (hopefully not murder, hehehe - actually, this shows that they can tell that not all sins are created equal, even though they say that to God, any sin = 100% evil). Therefore, we are sinners and cannot approach God's perfection.

Is this fair, though? Is God really perfect compared to us using just the 10 Commandments as a guide?

I don't think so.

Firstly, many of the commandments just don't apply to God. For instance (1) have no God before me and (2) no idols. These make no sense since God knows for sure there are no other gods nor does he need to pray. Also (5) honour thy father and thy mother makes no sense as God has no father and mother (though good ol' Jesus does honour his father, so good on him, though his father is also himself. (3), which is to not wrongfully use the name of God, also makes no sense if you are God. I suppose God could steal from people (8), but that really doesn't make a whole lot of sense either.

So right away, half of the Ten Commandments are not applicable to God, so he's on a relative easy street compared to humans.

What about the rest?

(4) Keeping the Sabbath holy? Well, God did set the standard by resting during the creation in Genesis. However, I'd classify God's work as listening to and responding to all those prayers on Sunday. Perhaps, though, Sabbathing only strictly means taking one day in seven to rest and pray, as I've heard some pastors say. Does that mean God doesn't respond to prayers one day a week? That would result in some messed up Christians, eh? Partial PASS.

I don't recall God bearing false witness against his neighbour (9). Not sure. God does lie and trick to a certain extent, but spreading lies about people? I'll give it a PASS, unless one of you provides a better example.

(10), which is to not covet anything belonging to a neighbour. Well, he wants sacrifices in the OT, but I'm not sure if he covets them in the strict sense of the word. He's also a jealous god, wanting the attention and prayers of the humans to himself, but again, this isn't really a possession he wants. God does want 10% of your money, though. Partial PASS.

How about (7) adultery? Well, was Mary married before God impregnated her? That's unclear but I say FAIL for putting it really damn close.

(6) Murder? You bet - turning people into pillars of salt, destroying towns, flooding the earth, killing the first born of Egypt. Massive, massive FAIL.

So, by my count, God himself is only actually passable on three of the Ten Commandments - and even then, only barely - and he even gets to bail on five of them. What chance does a human have?

King Aardvark has been Kidnapped!

2009-04-01T07:42:00.000-04:00

No, this is not an April Fool's joke. Well, it could be, but it would require my mom to have a better sense of humour than I give her credit for.

Here is the email I received from my mom this morning:

Hi KA:

I dreamt last night that you have been kidnapped. Please email me back ASAP that you are not.

Love, mom

This is worrisome. She's usually a practical person who wouldn't care about such irrational fears. I had to email her back and tell her that I had was fine.

If I had been thinking more clearly I could have made some money out of this. I need it.

Confession: I LIKED Passion of the Christ

2009-03-30T07:53:00.002-04:00

The post I did the other day on Christianity, torture, and crucifixion got me thinking about Mel Gibson's snuff film, The Passion of the Christ.

My wife made me go with her to watch it when it was released a few years back. I wasn't keen, but I wasn't too unhappy. I was curious, and I went in with low expectations (Low expectations are key; with low enough expectations, you can go into the crappy Matthew Broderick Godzilla movie and come out not satisfied).

And it turned out that I quite liked it. Why?

First, there were no trailers or ads. I hate those, there were none, so I was happy. Production values were decent, so that's a plus, too.

But more importantly, by treating it not as a serious spiritual experience¹ but as a dark comedy, I had a great time.

For instance, for those of you who haven't seen The Passion but have seen the Simpsons episode where Ned starts making hyper-realistic biblical films, it's EXACTLY like that. Completely hyperviolent. The devil is covered in hyper-creepy-crawly things. It's great fun.

When Pontius Pilate offered Barabas to the mob to try to get them to pardon Jesus and they all chose to kill Jesus anyway, he had this wonderful "what the hell are you idiots smoking?" look on his face that was comedy gold. Not as good as Biggus Dickus, but still good.

It was funny in a cute way when Jesus was having a flashback to making a tall modern table. His mom was so confused.

When the Roman soldiers where nailing Jesus to the cross, one soldier complained that the other was doing a crappy job, gave him the boot and took over. (Sounds like my mom.) Still funny.

And of course, the torture was fun, too.

I'm messed up. But it was great. I laughed out loud several times. The rest of the audience probably thought I was nuts.

And, because it was mainly a snuff film, despite the subject matter, there was hardly any religious content.

I would not protest too much if I had to see it again.

¹ Some of my Alpha Course group members were discussing it and saying how "spiritually uplifting" it was. I'm messed up for thinking torture is funny, but they're even more messed up than me!

The Big Alpha Fight

2009-03-21T20:33:00.001-04:00

Finally, here it is. The event you've been waiting for, that I've been promising for four months: the big fight I had with the church elder at the Alpha Course weekend retreat. Events that follow are from hurredly-scribbled notes I took after we got back from the weekend. Hopefully, not too many of the details have been lost or corrupted in the retelling.

Sorry to say, but I did not behave in a very respectable, high-road manner in this argument with the elder. Fortunately, I did not have an audience other than my wife. In general, I blame the complete lack of sleep. More specifically though, I blame the fact that I had been there for a couple of days already, surrounded by nothing but mind-numbing Christian talk, and told that finally here was the wise man - the one who knew so much more than the regular Alpha group leaders - who would have the very best most convincing answers for me. Then this old, well-spoken, seemingly intelligent person sits down and begins to speak with the mind-blowing wisdom that I've waited two months for with bated-breath:

"What about the eye?"

Fuck.

I just went off the handle. I hope you can forgive me.

-----------------------------------

For some time, my wife had been very, very eager for me to speak to the church elder who'd be present during the Alpha retreat weekend. Both she and our group leader had wanted me to write down all my questions to ask him, if not during the large group discussion, then whenever I could get a moment to speak to him in private (I didn't bother). I had been told several times by the group leader that he was wise, and that he had cleared up a lot of the questions she had when she first started getting serious about her religion. I had my doubts, but when the course started I was curious and somewhat looking forward to the opportunity to match wits with a church elder. But as the course dragged on, my enthusiasm waned. I really had little interest in the discussion anymore. By the Alpha weekend, things had not changed. The large group discussion further reinforced these apathetic feelings, as the elder just gave canned answers to inane theological questions.

While I really didn't feel like talking to him , he did make some comments I wanted him to clarify; it sounded like he was a biblical literalist but he was still essentially making shit up with respect to solving the "what to do about the deaf-dumb-blind guy who can't reasonably be expected to hear of Jesus" problem (see the end of the large group discussion post linked above). That said, I didn't care enough about it to seek him out and sit through a chat with him.

My wife, though, thought my curiosity about this question would be a great excuse to get me to sit down and talk to the elder (and hopefully be converted, I'll bet).

So immediately after games night had ended, she hunted the elder down and told him that I wanted to talk to him. Sigh. So he came to me and the three of us found an empty restaurant-style booth (conveniently located in the main rec room for such occasions) in which to sit (FYI, the table at the booth was covered in apologetics books they were trying to sell), me facing him with my wife beside me. I was on the inside. Trapped.

So I asked him to confirm his views on the deaf-blind-dumb guys, and how he thought God would come to them in some way when we couldn't, thus giving them a chance to accept or deny God. He said he's sure God is good and that he would do this for people Christians couldn't reach. I said "But that's not in the bible." He said that of course the bible is the most important thing in determining what it means to be Christian, but he wouldn't say exactly how his idea fit into this.

I asked him if he was a biblical literalist. He said that he essentially was. I decided that I really didn't care about his answer to the original question that much anymore. As long as I was here, I was going to go with other, more interesting questions, especially since he was just avoiding the problem of his idea not meshing with the bible anyway.

We established that he was a Young Earth Creationist. I didn't have a problem with that, but I wanted to explore the implications of his views, ie. living in a scientific world and the subsequent disagreements between his biblical literalist views and the scientific knowledge re: the age of the earth, evolution, geology, etc. So I asked him that question. He replied with a counter question about my beliefs. "Well I ask you this: How do you think the world came to be?"

I was game, so I explained evolution in a nutshell, from the common descent of humans and apes from an earlier ape ancestor, to a 4.5 billion year old earth with life arising somewhere around the -3.5 billion year mark, right down to the self-replication of chemicals in a nod to the problem of abiogenesis.

He then said, "Well look what you said. You said 'chemicals'. Now, how do you explain the chemicals?"

"No no no no no," I said, finger waggling nay-nay. "I know where you're going with this, some argument about the origins of the universe, cosmological, first mover 'Who made the chemicals?' stuff. I've heard it before. And honestly, I'm willing to accept a little lack of understanding. Scientists are working on it, and we may never know, but I accept not knowing as a possibility. But we weren't talking about that. I wanted to know about you reconciling YEC with modern science."

"Where do you get the 100s of billions of years-"

"About 4.5 billion for the earth, 12-14 for the universe," I interjected.

He continued,"-the billions of years you need for evolution. Scientists thought it was a few thousand, then a million, then a few hundred million, then billions," insinuating that science was untrustworthy. I got annoyed and went on a tirade about the powers and achievements of science in the very short amount of time since the scientific revolution, and how without it, we'd likely all be dead from disease right now.

He said, "But many scientists, you'd probably heard of them, believe in creation." I told him I didn't need to hear his list, but I suspect it was the same one as Nicky Gumbel listed in his Alpha introduction video (mainly pre-Darwin, pre-Hubble, guys like Newton, etc.); if so, it's amazing how they act like the Alpha attendees are so stupid or inattentive that we can't remember the basic course material. Sadly, for many of the attendees, this seems to be true. I hand-waved it away, asking for the actual evidence, not just the fact that there are scientists who are Christian.

He said that scientists have discovered a lot of new evidence that points back toward God. I said that was unlikely. He replied:

"What about the eye? What good is half of one?"

At that, MY eyes rolled so far that I almost ended up with half an eye.

I merely replied, "The eye????" and turned away with a big theatrical sigh.

Realizing that I had to say something instead of just getting up and leaving (remember, sitting in the inside seat of a booth), yet wanting to leave, I continued by saying, "I don't have time to teach you all of biology starting from grade 1 up to the university level."

"Look, you said your piece, now let me say mine." Then he went on regurgitating his beliefs ad nauseum. He followed that by accusing me of dodging questions, especially regarding the origin of chemicals.

I got offended. I told him that he never did answer about how he reconciled science and creationism, other than saying he felt science was wrong just because scientists have changed their conclusions over the centuries. I would like for him to read more science texts to gain a better understanding of the method and the evidence, and maybe a little of Carl Sagan's Demon-Haunted World. I'd like to think that it would help, but somehow I doubt he'd be that open-minded.

We yelled a lot and talked over each other. Then I got really annoyed and shut it down. We had stopped looking at each other when we spoke. I had my arms crossed and let out a loud, frustrated sigh of exasperation. Eventually, I said we should calm it down and switch to another topic. He agreed.

My wife volunteered that I was really interested in history. Figuring that was as good a place to go as any, I said that one of the main failings of Christianity for me was how poorly supported it was historically. I wanted extra-biblical evidence for the events of the Gospels.

He gave Tacitus and Josephus as examples. I cut him off and said that they were not adequate contemporary evidence for the historicity of Jesus. They weren't written during the events in question and were probably written based on what Christians were saying about Jesus, not on any other historical documents.

He looked angry and frustrated. "I can't be responsible for your preconceptions."

"My preconceptions can't be responsible for your horrible arguments."

His turn to sigh. Slowly, deliberately, he said "Well, I'm probably not as smart as you."

Make no mistake, this was not an admission of being beaten in an argument, rather, I'm pretty sure it was a set-up to an argument to prove my intellectual failings. I countered, saying that I didn't think he was stupid and really couldn't say if I was smarter than him, for he seemed like an eloquent and well put-together person. (This was a little modest, since, while he did appear pretty smart, I'm fairly certain I am much smarter than him - that's the conceit of having a Masters of Applied Science and twice getting the highest average in my highschool without really trying.)

I think he was trying to maneuver into a "my mind is down here" (holds hand about a foot off the table) "and yours is up here" (holds hand about 2 feet off the table) "but God's mind is way up there" (pointing at the ceiling) "so who are you to make decisions as to what God can and can't do" argument (similar argument to the degree of goodness argument), but I think the modesty/counter-modesty battle derailed his point as he got distracted and went onto a different topic.

He told me that I should read the bible, because people read the bible and then they believe. He mentioned CS Lewis, and asked if I had heard of him, because CS Lewis, the great author, started as an atheist, but he read the bible and it made him into a Christian. He spoke as if I either never heard of CS Lewis or never heard the story about him coming to Christianity. It's amazing that someone whose arguments come directly from Alpha doesn't seem to realize that almost every Alpha sermon mentions CS Lewis and his conversion.

I said that it sounds fair, and I'll consider reading the bible once I had some time and energy. I added that he should read some science books and that I'd be happy to recommend some.

The elder ignored that and went back to CS Lewis. "I want you to think about something. CS Lewis said that Christianity, if true, is of utmost importance, and if false, it's of no importance. But if it's of the utmost importance, shouldn't you learn as much as you can about it?"

I asked, "How do you mean? I consider it to be of moderate importance due to the societal and cultural impacts. Are you considering that?" The elder then made it clear that he just meant as a religion, not as a piece of culture.

Anyway, I said, "Well, how is that any different from any other religion? You can say the same thing about Islam, or Hinduism, or Zeus, so how is this an argument for Christianity?" He replied that it's not proof, just something for me to think about. "Why bother saying it then?" I exclaimed angrily. "I'm here at Alpha already, so obviously I'm trying to learn something. We're supposed to be talking about evidence."

At about this time, the energy was sapped from the table. I realized how sore my throat was from an hour of nearly screaming at the supposedly wise ignoramus across from me. I was sweaty. He looked rundown.

I felt like I'd just spent the past hour swinging a baseball bat at a reinforced concrete wall - a big, well-meaning, but dumb reinforced concrete wall. It really went nowhere and made me tired and frustrated.

Angry and mutually given-up, the two of us agreed to end the argument there with a strained handshake. I thanked him for showing patience and taking the time to talk. As we were getting up, he tried to get in the last word, reminding me to read the bible. I told him again to read some science as I turned and left, with my wife quickly following me.

The elder and I each made an effort not to speak to or look at each other for the rest of the weekend.

Conclusions:

I don't think I did a very good job in the argument. In large part, I think it was due to not really expecting the argument and therefore not really having a plan. I didn't know what points I wanted to make, what level of confrontation to employ, how much contempt or respect to show, etc. Hell, at several points, I couldn't decide whether or not to even bother staying in the discussion. Was I supposed to nonjudgmentally pick his brain? Was I supposed to engage in a heated logical debate? Was I supposed to remain calm and try to convert the old bastard? Was I supposed to just yell at him for his ignorance? I could never decide, and as a result, I did a little bit of each, and rather ineffectively at that.

All the while, my wife was great. Though she didn't say a word during the discussion, she was solid, sitting there with me, not interrupting or judging. She never got emotional. Afterward, she listened to what I had to say about my anger, frustration, and disappointment with the elder.

I think, those who most Christians regard as "elders" or "those who are much wiser" have exactly the same crap arguments as the religious neophytes who unthinkingly parrot those crap arguments. They have no greater understanding, no better arguments, no more balanced or rational thinking. When it comes to why they believe, they are no better than any other bible thumper; they are just older and more eloquent.

Final thought:

St Augustine said something to the effect that a Christian who knows little about a subject better stay silent about it, lest any unbelievers around won't pay him any mind when he starts proselytizing, as the unbeliever will think he is as full of crap regarding Christianity as he is with whatever other topic he was talking about.

I guess my point here can be best summarized as, "Hey! Old Guy! St. Augustine says you should shut the hell up."

Obama Reopens Embryonic Stem Cell Funding

2009-03-10T01:07:00.002-04:00

Maybe it can cure the brain-wasting diseases of those opposed to embryonic stem cell research.

Good for Obama for bringing the US back to the 21st century with this one.

There is still a lot of messed up thinking about the issue of embryonic stem cell research. I was reading the comments on a yahoo news article and there was some crazy there. About 75% was pro-embryonic stem cell research, 15% opposed, and 10% waffling. One waffling response got me annoyed. The basic gist was telling people to "just admit that these are complex issues and there are good reasons for being on one side or the other. It is not just bible-thumping vs. bible-bashing."

I beg to differ. What, pray tell, are the good reasons for being against embryonic stem cells? Huh?

There are no good non uber-conservative theotard reasons for being fundamentally against embryonic stem cell research in the form being debated right now in the US. On balance: Clumps of cells with nothing resembling sentient thought + just going to be thrown in the biohazard waste bin anyway vs. very promising research into curing all manners of diseases and crippling injuries. Tell me again the non-dipshit reasons for being against this research?

I hate to be dismissive about this yahoo commentor. He probably doesn't even know he's being a dipshit. He's probably thinking that he's going to be the prudent ideological moderate, building bridges and fostering consensus, etc. He is not, and he is wrong.

This commentor has likely bought into the idea that virtue always chooses the mean (it does not - just sometimes, and not this time), that religion gains automatic respect, that language is more important than content, and other seemingly wise and tolerant anti-intellectual horseturd.

Christianity is torture

2009-02-22T17:28:00.002-05:00

Crucifixions vs. mediaeval tortures, who wins?

The other day I was watching a series on the Discovery Channel about various torture and execution devices from a number of different era.

The first featured ancient devices (including wicker men) but focused on crucifixion. The show mentioned that crucifixion was extra horrible and painful due, strangely, to the way the victims are stretched out on the crucifix, which causes compression of the diaphragm. This encouraged victims to try to push up with their legs and create room for their lungs to breathe, but that only put more pressure on the ankle nails; hence victims control their own intense pain. Pretty neat.

But the followup mediaeval show had much more crazy stuff, including iron maidens, racks, pears¹, and thumb/head screws. These are dementedly thoughtful and intentionally painful, and the show didn't even mention some of the even more painful methods.

Crucifixion does have advantages in that it is pretty much a 'fire and forget' device. That said, the extra effort the mediaeval devices required enabled executioners to play on the minds of their victims, letting them anticipate the agony, thus making the torture that much worse. This isn't to deny that crucufixion wasn't horribly painful - it certainly was - yet when you hear most Christians talk about it, crucifxion usually "the most horrible, painful punishment" that humans have ever devised. Why is it that so many Christians deny the even more painful later inventions?

I have two guesses:

1) Christians always like to make their god-related stuff superlative - God is unstoppable; omnipotent-scient-benevolent; loves us like a parent, but to a greater greater extent than any parent, etc. So they make it sound like Christ's crucifixion has to be the most painful thing ever.

2) They ignore the mediaeval execution devices because these were the creation of other Christians. So they are conveniently neglected.

I have a third guess that, depending on how you look at it, is either less or more charitable: they simply don't know much about mediaeval torture. Maybe they just aren't as twisted as guys like me, who love this stuff (and gave a speech about it during a grade 8 public speaking contest).

¹Sadly, the mediaeval pears are not thought to be able to break jaws or kill people; they are merely painful gagging devices.

Phelps, pot, and overzealous police

2009-02-17T21:02:00.004-05:00

Depending on how you look at it, the good news for today is that South Carolina police have decided not to pursue drug charges against competitive swimming superstar Michael Phelps.

As a former competitive swimmer, I kind of feel like I should weigh in on the Phelps bong photo issue. I don't view the world through rosy enough goggles to seriously entertain the notion that Phelps wasn't properly enjoying his bong. I doubt many others don't either. So we'll go with the assumption that Phelps is occasionally 'doping,' in the 'up' sense, not the performance-enhancing way.

You'd have to think that if Phelps was Canadian, we'd happily turn a blind eye to the incident. Remember Olympic gold medalist snowboarder Ross Rebagliati who was temporarily stripped of his medal for having marijuana in his system? We all supported him. I'm not sure though if our support was due to a more permissive attitude towards drugs in Canada or to the fact that we're so desperate for gold medals that we're willing to let a lot slide. Certainly though, we'd be willing to overlook a lot for a guy like Phelps who wan more gold than Canada in the last summer games.

You have to wonder about how much this situation hurts the camp of the war on drugs. "Kids! Don't do drugs or else you'lll never be one of the greatest athletes the world has ever seen. Oh, wait... shit."

FYI: The ten most successful potheads on the planet cool enough to admit it

Actually, speaking of Ross Rebagliati, there may actually be a performance enhancing aspect to marijuana for athletes of a certain psychological disposition. Some people get too tightly wound-up in pressure situations, too aggressive, and it causes them to tighten-up, lose control, and make mistakes. My wife is that way, and I've often joked that if she toke a little before a big game, she'd perform better. Perhaps in a smooth and rythmic sport like snowboarding slalom, the weed gave Ross an advantage.

Note: I'm not a recreational drug user, and don't encourage it, except for copious quantities of alcohol - and even then I don't get truly wasted as I tend to prefer keeping my mental faculties intact. It just seems that in a society that accepts tobacco and alcohol it is congongruous that marijuana would be stigmatized. There are many, many other more important things to worry about the mild drug lives of young adults.

Happy XXXXXX Day!

2009-02-17T21:00:00.001-05:00

Nothing new here. Just pointing out that three of my last five posts have had "Happy [some special day] Day!" as the title. I'd better get to some real posts, eh?

Happy Valentine's Day!

2009-02-13T18:14:00.001-05:00

Have a heart!

Happy Darwin Day!

2009-02-12T01:12:00.003-05:00

I guess in commemoration of the event, the National Geographic TV channel was having a bunch of evolution-themed programming over the weekend. Specifically, they had three episodes of the show "Evolution" featuring whales, birds, and bears, respectively. They were pretty interesting, though I had many peeves.

First off, they used language with heavily Lamarkian connotations. An animal "decides to push its boundaries" or a feathered dinosaur "attempts to leap to a branch that's just out of reach." That's not what it is at all, rather, certain microraptors found they could leap and glide farther than their colleagues, thus outbreeding them and passing on the genes that allow for improved flight characteristics to their offspring.

Secondly, they did a really poor job in portraying evolution as occurring within a single individual instead of the gene pools of populations.

Third, too much filler graphics and not enough content.

National Geographic followed this up with a program called Darwin's Lost Voyage, which was an interesting program covering the Beagle voyage. Good show, but the title makes no sense. In what way has Darwin's voyage been "lost?" I already have three books on the subject. There is tonnes of info on the internet. Hell, Darwin gained fame as a popular writer for publishing an account of the Beagle's adventures upon his return to England. The only place where the voyage is being lost is deep in creotard territory where they are actively suppressing Darwin.

Anyway, happy Darwin Day. May you not come down with any horrible, vomit-inducing mystery diseases like Darwin did.

Alpha Retreat Sermon 3: How Can I Be Filled with the Holy Spirit

2009-02-07T16:25:00.002-05:00

This sermon started with going over the five types of responses the apostles encountered when preaching to others about the Holy Spirit. Some immediately longed for the Holy Spirit (Acts 2:2-4), others were receptive to the idea but weren't as certain as the first group (Acts 8:14-17), others were hostile towards them (Acts 8:17-19), some were uninformed and had no clue what they were talking about (Acts 19:1-6), and some were skeptical (Acts 10:44-46). Gumbel explained that all those in the audience also fall into these categories. The way he's structured the talk, it's painfully clear that he wants you to be in one of the first two categories, and casts a negative light on the others.

The funny thing is that he gives bible verses as references to these 5 groups, but only the receptive and the uninformed are actually unambiguously represented in the verses. The longing group were the first bunch at Pentecost, who we will see later; however, no real mention is made of longing and the second group didn't seem to be any less longing than the first group. Both groups were generally receptive. The hostile verse is actually the sorcerer who really wants the power to lay on hands and manifest the Holy Spirit but just doesn't understand the real point to it. The the unlikely group is actually not outright skeptics; rather they were Jews who didn't think the Holy Spirit should have been given to the gentiles.

What? Twisting the Bible to push another point? No way!

I'm really interested in the story of the Holy Spirit coming at Pentecost:

1When the day of Pentecost came, they were all together in one place. 2Suddenly a sound like the blowing of a violent wind came from heaven and filled the whole house where they were sitting. 3They saw what seemed to be tongues of fire that separated and came to rest on each of them. 4All of them were filled with the Holy Spirit and began to speak in other tongues as the Spirit enabled them. 5Now there were staying in Jerusalem God-fearing Jews from every nation under heaven. 6When they heard this sound, a crowd came together in bewilderment, because each one heard them speaking in his own language. 7Utterly amazed, they asked: "Are not all these men who are speaking Galileans? 8Then how is it that each of us hears them in his own native language? 9Parthians, Medes and Elamites; residents of Mesopotamia, Judea and Cappadocia, Pontus and Asia, 10Phrygia and Pamphylia, Egypt and the parts of Libya near Cyrene; visitors from Rome 11 (both Jews and converts to Judaism); Cretans and Arabs-we hear them declaring the wonders of God in our own tongues!"

That would be some pretty amazing proof. Actual, visible, tangible flame tongues; everyone able to understand everyone else regardless of the language being spoken. Pretty funky indeed. I don't know about you, but I'd be pretty damned impressed by this if it ever happened around me. Yet God doesn't see fit to provide this evidence anymore. Too bad.¹

Also, in a lot of the early cases during the Acts of the Apostles, it was required that an apostle lay-on hands for someone to receive the Holy Spirit. WTF is that about? The rules just keep changing.

The most important thing according to Gumbel here is that the Holy Spirit automatically comes into every person the moment they accept Jesus as their lord and saviour. The problem is that most of the time, the Holy Spirit comes in only a small quantity. ie. you are unfilled. Gumbel used the analogy of a pilot light in a fireplace. The Holy Spirit is the pilot light. It's up to you to turn the gas on 'high' and get filled with fire.

Anyway, the rest of the sermon had to do with explaining what happened when you received the Holy Spirit. First, you "experience the power of the Holy Spirit" - a surprisingly vague statement that seems to encapsulate the general warm, excited feeling you get, but also the other "fruits of the Spirit."

Second, you are "released in praise," which basically means lots of emotional, spontaneous praying and worship.

Third, you "receive a new language" ie. speaking in tongues. Despite the biblical precedent, Gumbel went on to explain, like the good lawyer he was, that your results may very. According to him, not all Christians speak in tongues, it's not necessarily a sign of being filled with the Holy Spirit, you aren't less of a Christian if you can't speak in tongues, and it's not the most important gift.

Despite this, he then went on at length explaining about speaking in tongues. It's an angelic and human language that transcends language barriers (despite not making any sense to us), it's a form of prayer, it strengthens the individual, and it's under the control of the speaker. Apparently you can also sing in tongues.

And apparently we can receive this gift if we eagerly desire it, ask God, be cooperative with the Holy Spirit, believe, and persevere. The three most common hindrances are doubt, fear, and inadequacy. Certainly seems like those who can't speak in tongues are lesser Christians, doesn't it?

The way the sermon was supposed to be done, they were supposed to follow it immediately with a call to receive the Holy Spirit and people were supposed to start dropping to the ground in ecstasy and speaking in tongues, etc. To my great disappointment, the elder and group leader didn't even try. The elder simply lead an group prayer about praying to be filled with the Holy Spirit and that was it.

Damn, I wanted to hear some crazy ravings!

¹ Note that this isn't plain glossolalia, it's more xenoglossy. Though, for what it's worth, there are plenty of "friend of a friend" examples, including one from my wife, who claims her sister apparently once had her pastor tell her to "be quiet, don't interrupt" in her family's obscure Chinese dialect. So make of it what you will.

Yes, I work with concrete

2009-02-05T01:12:00.002-05:00

A friend on my floor hockey team was talking with my wife about their respective crappy job situations. He'd been temporarily laid-off for a week and was really hoping to get into a government job for which he had been turned down once already. My wife is just starting a 3 month contract job, but long term prospects are weak.

I'm not paying attention to the conversation too much, but my friend turns to me and says, "What about your job? Is it concrete?"

"Yes," I say, "I work with concrete. Also structural steel a lot, but mainly concrete."

"Um, what I meant was 'In this current poor economic climate, is your job stable?'"

"Oh. Ummm. Yes, very stable and busy, thank you."

Happy Groundhog Day

2009-02-03T00:35:00.002-05:00

Note that I have nothing interesting at all to say about groundhogs. All I know is that regardless of the groundhog outcome, this is Canada, and it will be damn cold for a long time yet.

I've still been way too busy to finish my Alpha Course posts or even read my favourite blogs. Too much work. Too much extracurricular activities.

I did, however, wear a tie to work (for a client meeting) for the very first time in my professional career, so that's got to count for something. Or not.

That is all.

In the news...

2009-01-27T07:41:00.000-05:00

Sorry I haven't had a chance to continue the Alpha Course postings. The thing is, those require actual work to put together (not the least of which is deciphering my own crappy handwriting from the hurried notes I made in the course book during the sermons and discussions). And I have no time at all right now.

"What? King Aardvark is actually doing real work?!"

Shocking, I know.

Anyway, I'm going to post two quick links today of news articles that interest me. The first is about the rising atheist movement in Indonesia, of all places. In a country as fiercely Muslim as Indonesia, the few atheists are turning to the tools of the internet to find each other and communicate. Interesting stuff from my mom's home country (FYI: I believe my mom's parents followed traditional Chinese ancestor worship of some sort; they certainly aren't Muslims.) One thing the story notes is how "belief in "one God" is the first tenet of the official national ideology of Pancasila." The Indonesian political ideology of Pancasila is an interesting little history lesson. When Indonesia was first gaining independence from the Dutch, president Sukarno, the country's first leader, tried to come up with an ideological framework to base the new country on. It was four relatively straightforward items - just and civilized humanity, unity of the country, democracy based on the deliberations of representatives (though this one didn't work out so well for many decades), and social justice - plus a fifth, belief in "one God," I suppose as a homage to Indonesia's Muslim religious background. Sukarno did not originally considered it as quite as important as the other four. But Sukarno was a crafty little bugger when it came to politics; he knew that a strong and growing communist party was looking to gain a commanding political presence in Indonesian politics, so he needed the also strong Muslim party on his side. Hence throwing the bone of "One [surprisingly unspecified] God" as the most important of his 5 principals.

The second story is about a car thief in Nigeria who tried to escape capture by a group of vigilantes by using black magic to turn himself into a goat. Police, though disregarding the mystical as a source of evidence, do have the goat in custody.

Alpha Retreat Group Discussion

2009-01-18T19:04:00.000-05:00

After the end of weekend sermon #2, the whole group of 60+ people moved over to the big chapel attached to the main building at the bible camp. There, in a big circle of seats, we started into a discussion about what was being shown in the sermons and any holy spirit/salvation questions anybody had. The discussion was lead by the church elder. I didn't contribute to any of the discussions.

One thing I've realized about Alpha is that the group leaders are provided with suggestions for leading questions to ask to get the discussion going. These questions are always the most inane, grade 3-style fluff questions imaginable. For instance, the elder started by asking "is the Holy Spirit available to all?" immediately after a sermon in which Nicky Gumbel said, "the Holy Spirit is available to all; every Christian has the Holy Spirit." This is not helping my opinion of the average Alpha attendee.

After this, we moved into a tangent. Many people didn't like that really bad people such as mass murderers could become Christians and get into heaven. The elder reminded them that repentance is a core belief of Christianity; as long as you truly believe in Christ and say sorry and try, not necessarily succeed, to not continue with your evils ways, then you're good. Still, a couple of guys would have none of it.

This segued nicely back to the topic of the Holy Spirit and how you receive it. Many people in the group, though very strong, emotional Christians, had not felt anything they would describe as "being filled with the Holy Spirit," and this was worrying them to no end. This question would actually be the main concern of the discussion; how do I know if the Holy Spirit is within me?

The overwhelming majority of the group hadn't had these manifestations of the Holy Spirit; no speaking in tongues, no overwhelming burning feelings or falling down in elation, no visions, voices, etc. And they were wondering, "why not?"

Grasping for answers, many of these people fixated on (what they felt were) their sins and if these were holding them back. As one woman said, these people struggle with their sins, but don't feel like they can be forgiven. I feel that many of these people have adequacy issues, failure issues, and concern themselves unhealthily with justice and guilt. However, the elder had a different theory: he said that Satan was placing within them doubts about the ubiquitousness of forgiveness to cause them to doubt God. Oh, goody. That's helpful.

Time for the next leading question from the elder: what is "born again?"According to him, it's when you accept Jesus and and ask for and receive the Holy Spirit. So how can you know if you actually have received the Holy Spirit? Some people experience a lot of change right away while others can't even notice. According to the elder and several group members, this is because God a) only gives you the Holy Spirit when he chooses and b) fills you with the Holy Spirit only so much as you can handle. So, according to them, the group members who haven't felt anything since becoming Christian are just wimps.

So this brings us back to the main question, "how can you tell?" I recorded several people blurting out "you just know" or "you feel it" while the more articulate members of the group explained that it was a unique feeling full of anxiety and an adrenaline rush. The skeptic in me says that this seems like a very physical, biological response that we should be able to analyse. The skeptic in me also says that it sounds like a perfectly normal biological response to any other highly emotional, new, and exciting occurrence. But I'm utterly materialistic, so what the hell do I know?

Anyway, they conclude that the stereotypical little old lady falling down on the floor, convulsing and speaking in tongues is unnecessary for the reception of the Holy Spirit. You can have your doubts, just "give them to God," and he will remove them and give you the Holy Spirit (What the hell does that mean? If you have doubts, just pretend that they don't exist and everything will be okay?).

Next, the guy in my group obsessed about the question of deep African tribals and other people who honestly never get a chance to hear about Jesus and what happens to them asked the same question again, this time with the twist of a deaf, dumb, and blind kid who does not have the tools to learn about a complicated abstract thing like religion. Here, the elder I think pulls something completely out of the ol' ass, and explains that he's sure God somehow contacts those that Christians fail to evangelize to, be it deaf, dumb, and blind kid or jungle-dwelling tribal, explains the Jesus deal to them, and allows them the same choice as the rest of us. Sounds nice. But why do they get God proselytizing to them while I have to make due with a terribly flawed system of Alpha sermons and discussions. That's not fair. And it's not really biblical, either. I decided I would have to ask the elder about that if I ever got a chance to have an argument with him (hint hint).

There was one line of discussion that I think illustrates the emotionality of the Christian thing, at least for some believers like the elder. He had a rhetorical question and answer with himself Q. Who is God? A. He's the king of kings, the greatest king. Q. What happens when we accept Jesus as our saviour and receive the Holy Spirit? A. We become the children of God. Q. What are the children of kings called? A. Princes and Princesses. So we (meaning Christians) are all princes and princesses. "Doesn't that feel good?" he exclaimed. "When people are getting me down, I can say, "Hey!" as he points confidently at his chest, "I'm a prince!" That makes me feel great." Now, to their credit, most of the group members just thought that this was hokey.

As time was winding down, a bunch of questions were quickly asked but with very little discussion or resolution:

We know suicide is bad, probably lands you in hell. But what of suicide before the age of reason? Consensus was that it's probably treated similar to the non-suicide death of a little kid, whatever that is (heaven? limbo? whatever the thought of the day is).

Someone cheerily explained that God's way of thinking is very anti-"human thinking." Which is not very helpful, eh?

Why did Jesus come to Earth during a credulous age instead of during a more skeptical time?

Becoming children of God also comes with responsibility. "You will be attacked." Man, they really have a persecution complex. I also note that it's the elder who brings this up. The stronger and older the Christian, the fiercer the persecution complex perhaps?

Finally, they returned once again to people who are still worried about not feeling filled with the Holy Spirit. A couple of people said that they've asked for the Holy Spirit but haven't felt changed, and this has led them to be worried and doubtful about the existence of God. The elder reiterated that doubts come from Satan. "Satan attacks you because you've selected God!" He also reiterated that there are less dramatic manifestations of God. One recent convert explained that for him, his change was realizing that he now behaves differently: "Wow, I would never have thought/acted that way before receiving Jesus!"

{snark} Wow, that's so compelling! A few months ago, I never would have bothered keeping plants in my house, but now I've got seven. Must be the Holy Spirit changing me! {snark} Well, no. People change and mature, and develop new priorities and ways of thinking based on their influences and experiences. It's not magic; it's life.

Come on, Holy Spirit, where are the tongues of flame that you exhibited back in the bible?

Back from Christmas Vacation + Popeidolia

2009-01-11T22:45:00.004-05:00

Hi All,

I'm back from my Christmas vacation and ready to continue my series on the Alpha Course. Of course, I actually only took one week off, but recovering from that week has taken a further two weeks. You know how it is; visiting family - several families, actually - day in, day out is more exhausting than work.

Anyway, as an after Christmas present, here is a picture of a large bird of paradise plant we got for my mom. We wrapped it up in a protective bag that we hurredly tried to decorate in a half-assed manner in order to prevent my mom from seeing it before we opened the presents. To no one's surprise, she was not fooled. However, as we were sitting and having dinner, she exclaimed that we had a holy presence in the room:

We had the freakin' foliage pope with us, giving a sermon to the corner.

Or not.

Bonus Christmas Rant: Toronto Sucks

2008-12-19T19:12:00.004-05:00

I just had to drive back from North York during what I would call a mild snow storm. Listening to the Toronto media describe it, it was the worst winter storm in years. They issued an "essential driving only" warning. To hear them, it was a total whiteout, and, gasp, 10-15 cm of snow!

Visibility was, well, diminished, but you could still see to the horizon most of the time. There was snow on the ground, but who cares? This is Canada; there is always some snow on the roads. It took me almost two hours to get back to my office when the usual time is more like 35 minutes. Why? Surely not because the snow itself. Why, then?

Fucking moron Toronto drivers.

Toronto drivers drive 50 km/h on reasonably well-plowed, sanded roads. They get stuck on tiny little snow drifts. They lose control of their cars at the slightest slipperiness.

I've got a freakin' two-wheel drive car with summer tires on, yet I am having absolutely no problems with this fucking snow. Back where I'm from, a mere 200 km east of Toronto, we'd laugh at this weather, go joy riding in it, wear shorts, etc. Toronto drivers are useless. Here, though, I get stuck behind morons who drive at a walking speed, can't hold their lane, and make me hours late. I so want to kick all of them in the nuts.

When I finally got back to my office, I discovered that the crybabies had closed up shop and gone home hours earlier. Yet I had to remain and finish a fucking report until 5:45, which I could have easily finished before our normal closing time if Toronto residents could drive in the winter.

The Inuit have hundreds of words for snow. What's the Inuit word for snow that isn't slushy, isn't icey, isn't oily, and results in basically no impediment to driving? Furthermore, what's the Inuit word for fucking Toronto wusses?

It's an Alpha Christmas

2008-12-19T01:27:00.003-05:00

Merry Christmas, all! I'll be going away for a week (or more if I'm lazy), but before I go, I'd like to let you know that, while I'm a few weeks behind posting the rest of the Alpha Course, in real life Alpha just wrapped up. We finished with the Christmas celebration dinner. This isn't really part of the course, in actuality, it's a recruiting tool: Alpha participants are strongly encouraged to bring family, friends, colleagues, etc, and try to get them to join Alpha next term. There's a video by Nicky Gumbel that is essentially "highlights" (I use the term loosely) of the first 3 sermons but with an added Christmas twist.

I encourage you to read a post I wrote a year ago when I was first brought to this Alpha Christmas dinner by my wife. It was essentially the same thing this time, except the food was much, much better and my wife again brought the two friends she is trying to convert.

A new 6 random things meme

2008-12-17T07:15:00.000-05:00

A few days after Carlo tagged me with the 5 things meme, Eamon Knight tagged me with the 6 random things meme. Wow, no memes for months then suddenly two at once. Sorry for the delay writing this, Eamon, but I’ve been mondo busy recently. Finally getting to it now. You know, I have participated in a couple of “random things” memes before: (1) and (2) for those of you who want to peruse the old answers.

Here are the groud rules, as stolen from Eamon Knight:

1. Link to the person who tagged you. [see above]
2. Post the rules on your blog. [well, you're reading this, aren't you?]
3. Write six random things about yourself. [below]
4. Tag six people at the end of your post and link to them. [below - not!]
5. Let each person know they’ve been tagged and leave a comment on their blog. [nope]
6. Let the tagger know when your entry is up. [more YYIGATI]

Here goes the random crap:

1) I love Greek food: lamb kleftico, moussaka, gyros, tarama salata, saganaki, spanikopita, baklava. The thing is, it’s really, really hard for me to pronounce many of the Greek words with the correct emphasis: MOU-suh-KAH instead of mou-SAH-kuh, BAH-kla-VAH instead of bahk-LAH-vuh, etc. It’s not that I can’t pronounce them correctly; it’s that my brain rebels when I try to pronounce words in a way that my normal Canadian English brain thinks is wacky.

2) When playing hockey I’m more of a shooter than a passer. This is partly because my passing sucks. Also partly because I’m not skilled enough to stickhandle and look around at the same time; since I’m rarely aware enough to spot the open man, I might as well just shoot somewhere in the vicinity of the net. I typically miss the net by at least 3 m during the early stages of the game before I get my bearings.

3) I have never seen a Staedler white eraser that, through normal use, has shrunk to less than 75% of its starting size.

4) As of this evening (December 16, 2008) I have done exactly ZERO Christmas shopping. My wife, for some insane reason, wants me to get her clothes for Christmas, despite the fact that every article of clothing I have ever bought her she has absolutely despised.

5) Of all the late night talk shows, I prefer Craig Ferguson’s. I can’t for the life of me fathom why anyone would inflict Letterman on themselves anymore; he just wastes time for an hour.

6) At one time, my wife and I had a mattress set up in our living room. We’d eat dinner, then flop down on the mattress and watch tv, not getting up until it was time to go to real bed. Man, did I get fat. It was awesome.

I sure as hell ain’t tagging anyone with this. If you want to do it, drop a link in the comments section and consider yourself tagged.

Alpha Retreat Sermon 2: What Does the Holy Spirit Do?

2008-12-15T07:09:00.001-05:00

We had a very short break between Weekend Sermon 1 and Weekend Sermon 2 on Saturday morning. This was leading to a severe Gumbel overload. Too much too early on a Saturday morning with too little sleep. It was just as long as your typical sermon, yet, in the course manual, it only took up two pages as opposed to the four pages a typical sermon takes. That means that there was a lot of fluff. I barely wrote any notes.

The basic gist is that the Holy Spirit makes us born again, this time into the family of God. Why there needs to be a Holy Spirit to do this doesn't make any sense to me. Anyway, the six points Gumbel emphasised are as follows. The Holy Spirit:

I. Makes us Sons and Daughters of God.

This gives us a relationship that implies forgiveness, privilege, community, etc.

II. Develops our Relationship with God.

The Holy Spirit ("He") helps us to pray. He also enables us to understand God's word. This one was quite baffling; what Gumbel actually said was that we have to believe in order to understand. That seems irrationally backward. He actually used the "leap of faith" in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade as a reference for this one.

III. Gives us a Family Likeness.

IV. Gives us Unity to the Family

These two seem exactly the same as I., but I found they emphasized the Us vs. Them mentality that can make religion really dangerous, though I'm sure it wasn't Gumbel's intention.

V. Gifts for All God's Children

ie. all the physical supernatural abilities God promises in 1 Corintians 12:4-11. This includes speaking in tongues and prophesy.

VI. Grows the Family of God

Meaning it (sorry, He) empowers us to witness for Christ, do the missionary thing, engage in service to the church, etc.

To conclude, Gumbel said that the most important thing, according to him, here is that the Holy Spirit automatically comes into every person the moment they accept Jesus as their lord and saviour. The problem is that most of the time, the Holy Spirit comes in only a small quantity. ie. you are unfilled. Gumbel used the analogy of a pilot light in a fireplace. The Holy Spirit is the pilot light. It's up to you to turn the gas on 'high' and get filled with fire.

I guess to some people in the course, this was a very important session. In the subsequent group discussion, many people were worried about Gumbel's last point, ie. do they have the Holy Spirit or not, are they filled or not. Personally, I just didn't care.

Alpha Retreat Sermon 1: Who is the Holy Spirit

2008-12-10T07:29:00.000-05:00

This was the first real sermon, first thing in the morning on Saturday. I was extremely tired due to excessive heat in the rooms. I think everyone else had similar problems; there was a lot of yawning.

Though it was priefly mentioned in the Intro Sermon, Gumbel's first order of business was complaining about how "the person and work of the Holy Spirit has been ignored and misunderstood," taking a backseat to God the Father and God the Son, and been called the "Holy Ghost" by Catholics in particular, and "It" rather than "He" in general. Also, that Christians even tend to resist the Holy Spirit because they think it will take control over their lives.

It is true that most Christians neglect the Holy Spirit. Just about the only time a Christian concerns himself/herself with the Holy Spirit is when crossing himself/herself, and he/she gets to the cross's horizontal member. Gumbel is very unhappy with this, and, if I were a concerned Christian, I could see why he'd want to rectify this. However, I agree with the Alpha Course's critics that it's madness to focus so much on the Holy Spirit in a supposed introduction to Christianity class. As far as being bothered by "ghost" and "it", that strikes me as Gumbel having a rather large anal retention disorder.

Getting back to the sermon, Gumbel wanted to show that the Holy Spirit was there from the beginning, being involved in the Creation, "the Spirit of God was hovering over the waters" (Gen. 1:2). I dunno. Anyone with more knowledge of ancient hebrew and access to the oldest bible scraps want to tell us if this Spirit of God is actually intended to be the Holy Spirit as understood by Christians?

Gumbel also wanted to show the the Holy Spirit came upon certain people in the Old Testament when God needed them to perform particular tasks, giving examples of Bezalel, Gideon, Samson, and Isaiah.

But rather than focusing on these Old Testament examples, he told a few quick anecdotes about one of his introductory points: that people resist the Holy Spirit because they don't want to give up control. To do this, instead of giving examples of reluctant Christians who let the Holy Spirit direct them in their lives and have their lives improved, he bashes atheists. His typical story involves some atheistic person whose life is full of failures and addictions and is generally unfulfilled, with unhappy relationships to boot. Then they suddenly accept the Holy Spirit and have their lives go down crazy, but good and joyful, holy paths.

Gumbel then made a point that the Holy Spirit was promised to all people by God, not just important people like in the Old Testament.

Also said that John the Baptist linked the Holy Spirit with Jesus. Weirdly, he made mention of Jesus receiving power through the annointing of the Holy Spirit at his baptism. This is odd because it's a strongly adoptionist verse. I was surprised any modern Christian would emphasise this.

Finally, Gumbel said that Jesus predicted the Holy Spirit's presence and coming for all of his followers, culminating in the Holy Spirit coming upon the disciples at Pentecost.

During Acts, this receiving of the Holy Spirit was said to look like tongues of fire (Acts 2:3). WTF? Must be extra special Holy Spirit mentioned here, for I've never heard of a visible Holy Spirit coming at any other time. This is crazy stuff.

Alpha Course Day 9: How and Why Should We Tell Others?

2008-12-08T07:32:00.001-05:00

Dinner: They finally unleashed the Indian guy, and we had curry. Again, not enough meat and kind of tame - they were really worried about burning the taste buds of the old boring white people in the group - but good flavour. Also shrimp chips, salad, green beans actually cooked properly. Dessert was mini cheesecakes with syrup, powdered sugar, and fruit slices, so also pretty good. Hooray.

Part 1: Sermon

A lot of sermon time was taken up with people from the group giving testimony about their experiences at the weekend retreat. One woman said she had a big experience. She had prayed to give her life to God on Monday, but felt ill at ease the whole week and through the weekend up until one discussion when she realized her problem was that she didn't like accepting gifts. Once she understood this, she felt emotional, became physically shaky, and felt flushed.

Another girl said she had prayed the same prayer. Two months ago, she lost her job, so she wanted to feel like God had chosen to take her job away and that there was a reason God wanted her to be unemployed. There was lots of crying.

I tuned-out some more emotional testimonies and crying and waited until the video started.

Gumbel explained that the reason why Christians should tell others was that people are looking for meaning, Christianity has the answers, and it would be irresponsible not to tell them. I understand this point of view, even if I don't think it does have the answers.

According to Gumbel, there are 5 P-words that detail how Christians are supposed to tell others: Presence, Persuasion, Proclamation, Power, and Prayer.

Presence means that you have to act well and be a good example for others while letting them know you are a Christian. He gave the example of William Wilberforce (19th century abolitionist leader) and Millard Fuller (started Habitat for Humanity).

Persuasion means reasoning and arguing with people, knowing the bible, knowing the answers to common skeptical questions - like the problem of evil, what about other religions, etc. Gumbel maintains that Christianity does not require a "blind leap of faith" but only a reasonable faith. Of course, I disagree with that too, and feel sorry for wannabe evangelists who encounter a knowledgeable skeptic. Based on the answers provided by Alpha, these guys would get torn up.

However, Gumbel doesn't seem to want to go up against real skeptics. He told a story of a seminar he was at where he and another pastor were challenged by a hardcore skeptic who went on for 20 minutes of questions attacking Christianity - history, biology, physics, ethics, theology. Gumbel was overwhelmed, but the other pastor just asked "if I could answer all your questions would you become a Christian?" "No," the skeptic replied. Looking around at everyone else in attendance, the pastor said, "Are there any other questions?"

Proclamation is about telling your story. Gumbel wants everyone in Alpha to write down and memorize their testimonies about their journeys into faith. As he said, there is no answer to that; "they can't say, 'no, that didn't happen to you.'"

Power means doing and telling and performing miracles. Not much advice was given to as to accomplishing the miracles part.

And Prayer, which is pretty self-explanatory. You pray for your potential converts to see the Truth. You pray to make yourself feel better.

Hmm. Pray for potential converts? That sounds strangely familiar. Like what my wife prays for every single night (in my presence, too). But not only that...

Part 2: Small Groups

...It turns out that a bunch of other people in my group are praying for my conversion, too. One even had a dream about me in that regard. It was really creepy.

Basically, most of the small groups time was about me. One guy started by asking if I'd changed my mind and started accepting Christianity at all. I said no and explained why not. Then everyone started piling on with how they were praying for me. The main tactic was them telling their testimonies and then trying to compare and contrast with what happens in my life.

I realized that they think I live, and have always lived, some sort of worry-free blessed life with youth, wealth, health, good looks, a beautiful wife, house, and a rewarding job. And the fact that I've never been down and desperate is why I don't feel the need for God. It's funny to me since I've never considered myself to have such a blessed life, though I do recognize that my life has been pretty good the last few years since I finished undergrad. But I still see myself as the nerdy socially outcast guy I was in my younger days, and to a certain extent still am now. And I'm not rich or privileged. "I drive a 2002 Nissan Altima," I exclaimed in exasperation. I still work 9-5^* every day in a cubicle, ie. there is CERTAINLY more to life than this, to borrow Alpha's catch phrase.

The difference, I think, is that I'm comfortable with my place in the universe due to my knowledge of science and history, but more than that, I don't have the anger, depression, and forgiveness issues that the rest of my group seem to have. Sure, I have had my problems in the past and have been faced with crappy situations, and I've let them eat me up for months or even years before. But I've learned to not get down, not hold grudges, and ride-out rough patches without the need for a watchful father-god because, for the most part, bad situations don't stay bad forever. And if they don't improve, well, human beings are very adaptable and can either make the best of a bad situation or even do something to make the situation better.

Most of them, though, had become Christians in response to some form of extreme trouble in their lives. To me, though, entering a faith when under duress is like grocery shopping when starving. You buy crazy things that you have to live with even after you're no longer hungry, like ten Salisbury steaks that will reside in your freezer forever.

The session ended with the lawyer guy magnanimously assuring everyone that I'd become Christian sometime...

^* It really should be 8-5, but I've been an hour late for work a lot recently due to exhaustion and poor sleep habits.

PZ Myers: the "chance and lack of purpose" problem

2008-12-07T22:13:00.005-05:00

PZ Myers has a post up about the difficulties in marketing evolution. One of his main points is that it's really human evolution that really bothers people.

The second objection is to chance and the lack of purpose. People really, desperately want there to be a personal agency to causality — they become utterly irrational about it all if you try to imply that no, fate, destiny, and ultimate cosmic purpose guided them to their mate, for instance. It couldn't have been just chance. I suspect this is a consequence of the first contention: people want to believe that they are important agents in the universe, and one of the implications of evolution is that they aren't.

Holy crap that is accurate. One item of major importance to my wife is that God was answering her prayers/had a special plan when He brought the two of us together in a relationship, especially since she prayed for someone who had many traits that I have.

In fact, whenever we get into an argument about religion, she'll bring up how God answered her prayers miraculously in bringing me to her. Whenever I answer that (a) she has a higher chance of ending up with me because she's actively looking for someone with my traits, and (b) there's a lot of dumb luck involved and something has to happen so why not me? she get's very, very upset. Very.

I have no idea how to counter this argument and liberate people from this "personal agency" mindset. For now, I will steer any God vs. chance arguments away from our relationship and hope for the best.

Dalai Lama Sex

2008-12-06T21:52:00.000-05:00

The Dalai Lama sounds like he's in need of a good lay.

Alpha Retreat: Intro Sermon

2008-12-04T07:55:00.000-05:00

The first of Nicky Gumbel's video we watched was on Firday night and served as an introduction to the weekend series of videos about the Holy Spirit.

First, I'd just like to say that Gumbel's focus on the Holy Spirit is a little weird and intense. For instance, the Alpha Course has three sermons on the Holy Spirit and only two on Jesus. The self-proclaimed "highlight" of the course is the last day of the retreat when participants are encouraged to invite the Holy Spirit into their lives (sometimes resulting in manifestations such as speaking in tongues, seizures, etc). In fact, if you search for "Alpha Course and criticism" on Google, the bulk will actually be from other Christians criticizing Gumbel's Holy Spirit-oriented, aka "charismatic", views.

For reasons that escape me, because it didn't have anything to do with the Holy Spirit, Gumbel started off with an amusing story about a criminal in a church. A suspect on the run from police is seen entering a church during a service. The police discretely flag down the pastor and tell him that a criminal is sitting with his congregation, and that they're going to have to storm the place looking for him. The pastor doesn't like this idea, and gets the police to agree to another scheme. The pastor asks all members of the congregation and all their guests to come to the front to witness a baptism. This leaves just one guy sitting down, who the police pounce upon and take away. It is later discovered that he wasn't the criminal, instead, he was just a poor guy coming to church for the first time.

Finally getting into the meat of the sermon, Gumbel started to explain what the Holy Spirit was. He explained that the Holy Spirit, not "Holy Ghost", was a "he" not an "it" and he thinks, grieves, etc. From this perspective, the Holy Spirit is typically neglected.

The Holy Spirit was "sent by Jesus from the Father." Huh? That's one thing I really, really hate about Christianity the more I have to listen to it - how they have to get all three parts of the trinity involved in everything. It's meaningless. Hell, most of the time Gumbel uses "Jesus" and "Holy Spirit" seemingly interchangibly.

He said he thinks that everyone has a "cosmic loneliness, a homesickness for God." This has been hammered home many times, and I'm sick of this one too.

Finally, Gumbel got around to explain a little more about what the Holy Spirit is all about. It (sorry, not a He) is described by the Greek word paraklatos, which means "one who comes alongside." He told the story of a guy in a little airplane. The pilot suddenly died of a massive heartattack. The man was able to steady the plane and radio for help. Fortunately, a flying instructor was listening and scrambled up to help. Conversing on the radio with the troubled man, they established that he didn't have a clue how to land a plane. So the instructor flew alongside him and told him to just do what he (the instructor) did. This way, the instructor was able to guide the man down to a safe landing. "Thank God," said the man. "You're welcome," the instructor replied. Totally missing in this story was the irony that it really was a skilled, human good-guy who saved the man, not God at all. Don't expect your average Alpha attendee to notice.

Alpha Course Day 8: How Can We Resist Evil?

2008-11-29T14:24:00.000-05:00

Dinner: A little better this week. The salad was wilted, but the beef stirfry with onions and mushrooms was nice and tender; a little watery but with good flavour. Non-asians almost always overcook bok-choy, turning it to mush. Dessert was little store-bought ice cream cups with the little wooden scoops again, but also a few mini cupcakes.

Part 1: Sermon

It’s about THE DEVIL!!! Scary!

Wow, most of this sermon uses the Garden of Eden snake and the apple as its basis. I just can’t take this at all seriously.

It started with warning us of the "reality of spiritual warfare" with the forces of Satan, who is in active rebellion against God and leads a multitude of demons who will attempt to turn us away from God.

Gumbel explained that the existence of Satan is reasonable because it makes sense of the evil in the world. And it's also supported by Christian tradition and scripture. And we shouldn't underestimate his power. And that many of us have mistaken views about Satan, either an unhealthy interest like the occult, horoscopes, palm reading, etc, or total disbelief. Wooo. I'm so impressed. (yawn)

His tactics are to blind people to God, tempt people to do wrong, and, most importantly, to cause people to doubt God.

As for doubt, Gumbel claims it's always the starting point, and that Satan's favourite thing to do is to undermine faith in either God's existence or God's power and benevolence.

As for temptation, Gumbel talked about Adam and Eve in the garden. Seriously, what the fuck is that forbidden tree doing there in the first place? And why allow a rebellious angel who wants to ruin your creation into the garden to tempt humans in the first place? Is God a retard?

One more thing: Gumbel pointed out here that temptation is not sin. But what of what Jesus said, ie. whoever is angry with his brother commits murder, and whoever lusts after another woman has committed adultery? I have no strong opinion here, not being a theologian or biblical scholar, but it seems odd to me.

Gumbel then explains that our position is that Christians are on God's side, that Jesus has defeated Satan via the resurrection, and that Christ's disciples have authority over demons. Likewise, Christians are called to fight on God's side against Satan, to "wear the armor of God."

Part 2: Small Groups

I have a confession: I’m starting to have a really hard time participating in the small group discussions, to the point where I haven’t actually asked anything during the past two weeks. The first few weeks I dominated the discussions, introducing topics, challenging the group members, and complaining about the failures in their thought processes. Recently, I really don’t want to talk anymore. Over the past few weeks, I’ve come to appreciate just how “out there” the rest of the group members are wrt religion. There is nothing I can say that can get them to change their minds, or even engage in meaningful discussion. That one non-Christian person in the group, who I was promised existed, has yet to make an appearance (I have a hunch who it is, but he has yet to say anything substantial to substantiate that hunch). It’s gotten to the point where I just don’t care about these people; sure, they’re nice, and I’d be happy to call most of them friends, but in this environment, they are lost causes.

Then again, maybe I still DO care, but I’m worried that if I start to talk, my sense of overwhelming frustration with them will manifest itself in a never-ending barrage of screaming insults related to their incredible mental denseness.

“DON’T YOU KNOW IT’S THE 21ST CENTURY?!! WHAT’S WRONG WITH YOU PEOPLE? FRICKIN’ IDIOTS!”

This is especially likely given that I’ve already flown off the handle at one of these halfwits before (retreat fight with elder link).

Anyway, back to the discussion. You know, for a discussion about a sermon focused mainly on Satan, nobody really mentioned Satan during the discussion. When they felt they must refer to supernatural evil, they said “evil forces,” but usually, they talked about human failings as evil. This implies to me that most of them really don’t view the devil as theologically necessary; they view evil as a problem of humanity’s failings, not of necessarily an external, supernatural tempter. The exception is that, while they view most evil as purely human, they were all convinced that the occult, evil, satanic powers, existed. Oooooh, fortune tellers are bad, horoscopes are bad, voodoo is bad. And they’re all true, powered by the Devil! Scary.

Bunch of retards. (See the all-caps rant above, which I almost blurted out in the session save for an effort of superhuman will.)

We’ve got space telescopes and Mars rovers and they’re still worried about the demonic forces involved in freakin’ horoscopes. Hell, I even heard one priest count Magic 8-Balls among the tools of demonic evil. I see at least one tool, but it sure as hell ain’t the 8-Ball.

I have become convinced that a comprehensive course about understanding science and how it impacts modern life must be taught in our highschools. Carl Sagan’s The Demon-Haunted World should be required reading for everybody, lest we get stuck with a large percentage of our population still living in the dark ages.

God's Facebook Page

2008-11-26T07:34:00.000-05:00

God is borrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrred lol

You wrote on Adam's Wall

"yo man, hows it hangin?"

Adam wrote on your Wall

"kinda lonely. nbd. maybe make somthing
I can stick this thing between my legs in?
I think I want to do that"

Read the rest at God's Facebook Wall

If link doesn't work, go here:
http://www.bspcn.com/2008/11/12/gods-facebook-wall/

Alpha Retreat : Wha' Happened?

2008-11-24T20:16:00.001-05:00

An integral part of the Alpha Course is the weekend retreat. During this, everyone participating in the course spends a weekend together at a bible camp, watching sermons by Alpha headman Nicky Gumbel - all having to do with the Holy Spirit, having large group discussions, eating, playing games, etc. In this post, I'll write about what exactly went on over the weekend. I'll write about the contents of each video and the discussions (plus my fight with the church elder) in other posts.

It should be noted that not all Alpha programs actually go away for their weekend. Some are lame - well, lamer than others - and don't actually go anywhere, instead spending the whole weekend at the church where their Alpha is normally held. Also, not everyone in our group was able to go. I almost didn't, just because the thought of spending a whole weekend with all the god-bots disturbed me.

(As an aside, have you ever noticed that, once you take them out of regular, secular society, these god-bot people cease to speak of "thinking" about a problem, and instead "pray" about their problems. Ie. they are perfectly normal most of the time, but surround them with other church people and they turn all religiousy.)

The bible camp where the Alpha Course retreat was held was located near Bancroft, Ontario, so we headed out after work (actually I skipped out half an hour early). I had never driven out that way before, and it was dark and rainy, but we still made it there in good time, in about 2:55.

The camp was located about 8 km outside town in some backwoods area at the end of some really narrow, windy roads. The were pretty big, having come into possession of over 400 acres in the area around town, and in the summer time have canoes, a beach, hiking trails, etc. We were given our room assignment, my wife and I together in a room that turned out to be quite nice, like a new but low-end hotel. Unfortunately, like the old Christian houses that I noted before, the decor was decidedly grannyish. One interesting feature was that the doors could only be locked while you were in your room; when not in your room, the door would be left unlocked. This left us susceptible to lame pranks from our group leader who thinks she is funnier than she actually is. We got a very fake-looking rat in our bathroom, another person for earthworms in the shower, another person got a plastic snake in her bed, except she wasn't the one who found it; her boyfriend discovered it and he's terrified of snakes. That at least went well.

There were a handful of different "motels" as they called them, each built at a different time. Ours was the nice new one. The married couples and the single women were housed there. Another one housed the single guys. Later on we heard from a guy in our group that their building was horrible and he gave us a tour. It was really old and rundown, with a bathroom coated in mildew, small, flat, musty beds, and it smelled like my grandfather's old cottage. Pretty gross. Glad I was married.

The place had other facilities in addition to the lodgings: a lounge/presentation room, a dining hall, a large chapel, and a gym.

After settling in on Friday night, we headed back to the group area for the introductory video. They were very disorganized and technologically impaired, and we ended up watching 20 minutes of the wrong video before my wife noticed the error.

After the video, we were introduced to the church elder who would be helping out with the weekend by leading discussions and prayers and by introducing each video. He was actually not officially a church elder, as the church has a term limit that he has already far exceeded, so I guess he's an elder emeritus or something. He was a friendly old bearded guy and I had been told by both my wife and the group leader that he'd be a good guy to talk to about all my theological questions that I'd stumped them on, as he was much older, knowledgable, and wiser. Little did I know I'd be having a big fight with him, and that the Christian version of "wise" just means spouting the same old crap as every other Christian but more eloquently.

After meeting the elder, we were all called to introduce ourselves by giving our stories of why we were here. I said that I was only here because my wife had "strongly encouraged" me to be here. That drew a hearty laugh from everyone else.

Around 10:00 pm, the official part of the night ended. A large group of this went to play floor hockey in the gym. My wife and I play in a league, and we completely dominated all the other chumps there, who weren't as athletic or skilled. After each scoring 5 goals in the first 10 minutes (no one else scored any), we stopped counting goals or trying so hard, at least until players on our team started to leave due to fatigue, putting us down by 3 players. We played for over 3 hours and I ended up losing a lot of skin from my hands due to the old, frayed wooden sticks, and needed to bandage them up the rest of the weekend. I would have slept well due to fatigue except the thermostats in the rooms seemed to be nonfunctional and the heater was on full-blast the whole night.

Waking up late after a night of little sleep, we made it late to breakfast. Mmmm, bacon.

After breakfast, we had the first of the weekend sermons about the Holy Spirit, called "Who is the Holy Spirit?" I noticed that it wasn't just me who slept through large portions of it. We had a brief break, then head right into weekend sermon #2, called "What does the Holy Spirit Do?"

We then broke for a big group discussion in the chapel involving all the Alpha participants, about 40 people. The discussion was lead by the elder. Man, it was an unpleasantly long hour discussing nothing of much importance. I believe it was supposed to be discussing the sermons, but it only did that barely.

We then had lunch, which was a nice roast chicken breast with sweet potato fries with greek salad. Food was looking good. Dessert was just cookies.

We had a couple of free hours after lunch before the afternoon sermon. We just walked around the grounds a little and played ping pong. The afternoon sermon, weekend sermon #3, was called "How Can I Be Filled with the Spirit?" I think this is where there was supposed speaking in tongues or other bodily manifestations of the Holy Spirit, but nothing ever happened.

After the sermon was dinner, which was a rather poor roast beef with a bun meant to simulate yorkshire pudding and a salad that was very wilted and unpleastant. Dessert was just mint-chocolate chip ice cream. Food quality took a nose-dive with this meal.

After dinner, we took a nap due to excruciating fatigue. We ended up being half an hour late for Fun Night, which was an evening of games lead by the group leader, and including pictionary, cherades, a few other things I can't remember. It was fun, but not great.

After fun night was a free evening of snacks and just hanging out. It was during this time that my wife volunteered me to go speak with the elder, which I will discuss later. Right now, I'll just say that I got very pissed-off at his intellectual dishonesty and frustrated at his self-assured ignorance.

After I had cooled-off a bit and hung out a bit, we played more ping pong and went to bed, ensuring that we opened the window first so we wouldn't roast overnight.

The last morning, we were again late to breakfast, which was disappointing. The only thing worth eating were freshly made cinnamon buns, which they took away entirely too early so they could package them up and try to sell them to us. Way to stay classy.

We had a brief group discussion, which was essentially a way for the elder to recap his points of view from the previous day's discussion. Then we had one more video sermon, actually the last sermon from the Alpha Course, "How Can I Make the Most of the Rest of My Life." Aka, more fluff.

We had lunch, which were sandwich wraps in the style of fajitas. Also known as a way for them to use up the leftover chicken and beef from the previous meals. Again, way to stay classy. Then it was time to leave.

Damn, it snowed. About 10 cm. And I forgot my snow brush.

Some nice guy cleaned the snow off our car for us and I was out of there as fast as I could go.

A new 5 things meme

2008-11-21T08:16:00.000-05:00

Wow, it’s been a while since I’ve been tagged by one of these. Thanks Carlo.

5 things I was doing 10 years ago:

1. Invading my brother’s Computer and Business Communications class during my 4th period spare while the teacher was away to play euchre.
2. Being overly-immersed in Baldur’s Gate.
3. Becoming a slower competitive swimmer than I was the year previous.
4. Enjoying all the freedoms and privileges associated with driving a crappy 1984 Nissan Micra with the muffler dragging on the ground.
5. Seriously slacking off during my last year of highschool, thus ensuring that I would not receive a scholarship from any credible university (though the University of Western Ontario still offered me several thousand dollars).

5 things on my to do list today:

1. Organize/put away/throw-out all the crap sitting in my garage from when we moved into our new house back in May (note: this has been on to do list for a very long time).
2. Buy alcohol.
3. Write an environmental assessment report for a bridge project and design a pedestrian bridge (instead, I am writing blog posts).
4. Document my ongoing trials and tribulations regarding the Alpha Course that I’m currently involved in.
5. Antagonize more church elders.

5 snacks I love:

1. Nachos.
2. Ice cream.
3. Crispers.
4. Chocolate.
5. Do cows classify as a snack?

5 things I would do if I were a Millionare:

1. Quit my job (after getting my P.Eng licence). Ah, retirement.
2. Get a PhD just so I could walk around calling myself “Doctor.”
3. Buy a Porsche/Jaguar/BMW.
4. Pay speeding tickets for the above.
5. Move the hell out of the Durham region. Seriously, what a boring place.

5 places I have lived:

1. My dad’s run-down, flooded, insect infested old home.
2. A big, grey university residence.
3. My first apartment: a dark, dank, tiny basement crap-hole.
4. My wife’s (then fiancée’s) family’s student rental property that I’m sure is below any standard of housing acceptable in this country.
5. A nice apartment mired by the location: next door to a trailer park and close enough to the train tracks that you could hit a passing freight train with a rock from my back porch.

5 jobs I've had:

1. Busser/server at a really crappy, by hicks-for hicks banquet facility.
2. Instructor for my university’s elementary school enrichment mini courses.
3. Ministry of Transportation engineering student seat warmer (seriously, I was a waste of taxpayer money while I was supposed to be learning bridge engineering).
4. TA.
5. Structural design engineer-in-training. I do bridges now, but for the first 1.5 years I mainly designed sewage treatment plants.

(2) People I'll tag:

1. CL Hanson
2. Heathen Mike

Alpha Course Day 7: How Does God Guide Us?

2008-11-19T18:36:00.000-05:00

Dinner: I think they’ve just stopped trying. Dinner today was a completely insufficient quantity of store-bought egg rolls (they ran out before everybody got one), a watery stirfry, and rice. Dessert was little store-bought ice cream cups with the little wooden scoops.

Part 1: Sermon

This talked all about how God guides his followers. Relevant information includes:
1) That God promised to guide his followers in scripture.
2) God has a plan for our lives, and he’ll guide us as soon as we’re ready to be lead (humble and all that jazz).
3) That we need to consult God – by praying, of course - before making major decisions.

As for the actual methods God uses to guide people are:
1) Commands found in the bible. Note that these are more general instructions
2) Compelling spirit. Ie. You suddenly feel like you should do a particular thing that you may not have felt like you should do before, especially if you’ve been praying about it. However, Gumbel also allows for other, more obvious and supernatural compellings, such as prophesy, dreams and visions, angelic visitations, and the audible voice of God. Spooky.
3) Common sense. I fail to see how this is God guiding.
4) Counsel of saints. Ie. Gumbel thinks it’s very important to listen to the advice of Christians who have gone before.
5) Circumstantial signs. This is explained as God nudging probability to show you something, or to open new doors and close old ones. Gumbel also warns that sometimes God wants us to persevere despite circumstances, which in my view seriously compromised circumstantial signs as a form of communication. However, it remains that this is the big guiding method that everyone in the group talked about and that Gumbel focuses on in all of his stories. I’ll discuss a bunch of his circumstantial stories now.

Gumbel lead off the sermon with a story about the founding of the British suicide counseling hotline, the Samaritans. So goes the story, a busy country vicar had the idea for the Samaritans but was unable to pursue it because he was too busy. So he prayed that God would make available to him the services of a less busy urban vicar to institute this program. A little while later HE suddenly got offered a transfer to a less busy city vicar job. So he took this as a sign and accepted the job, thus enabling him to start the Samaritans. He then wanted to get an easy to remember, somewhat meaningful phone number, so he thought of one and set about trying to acquire it from its current owner. So he called the phone company from his near derelict new church and asked if he could get it. The phone operator then asked him what his current phone number was, so he scraped the dust off the old phone and saw that the old city church already had the number that he wanted. He took this as a big deal, that God had this plan for him long before he himself had thought of it.

Gumbel told another story of a Christian friend of his who was getting serious with his non-believing girlfriend but wanted strongly for her to turn Christian before they could get married. He prayed that she’d become Christian before the end of the school term. The day came and she was still undecided, so they set off on a drive together with her giving out random directions until they suddenly found themselves at a church graveyard with row upon row of crosses. She took it as a sign and became Christian just before midnight.

Gumbel also spoke of many instances where he was thinking about a particular problem he had, when, suddenly and repeatedly, he’d be bombarded with many similar bible passages addressing the problem.

Of course, I think all these coincidences are just that: coincidences. Any extra meaning is put there by the person’s own mind. For instance, my dad was considering buying a cool early ‘80s Jaguar sedan. I had never paid much mind to this particular model of car before, but once he mentioned it, I was seeing them everywhere. A friend of mine had the exact same circumstantial experience when he was thinking of buying a new (different model of) car himself.

I have also been thinking of a problem, and then suddenly find myself bombarded with tv shows, magazine articles, quotes, etc, that have to do with that problem. Thing is, my problems where this occurs aren’t theological, moral, or even usually personal; mostly, they’re about some sort of trivial knowledge. It’s just that because I’ve been thinking about these problems, I take special note of stumbling upon items addressing the issue. There is no guidance from on high.

Hell, there are even atheist coincidences.

Part 2: Small Groups

Whoa, boy, lots and lots of circumstantial signs here. And way too much discussion of foot fungus as a sign. And too many mentions of watching Oprah (this also involved foot fungus; hence the talking of foot fungus as a sign by some of the people). One guy even made business decisions based on the circumstantial guidance of foot funguses. It was loopy.

Some guys didn’t buy that God would guide through coincidence, as there is just too much uncertainty and randomness there. Most, however, thought coincidences were undisputable proof of God’s guidance. Thus, most of the discussion was just people telling stories about their coincidences.

That everything happens for a reason and that coincidences are always more than just coincidences are unassailable facts to these people, and, indeed, many people, regardless of religion. I doubt that I would have been able to change any minds here, so I held my tongue.

We had run overtime and there wasn’t much time for discussion anyway.

Alpha Retreat teaser

2008-11-18T07:30:00.000-05:00

I just returned from the Alpha Course weekend retreat which focused on the Holy Spirit. The retreat took place at a bible camp near Bancroft , Ontario , and a little over 40 of us from the Alpha Course attended. I’ll have a full report later (after I post about day 7), but for now I’ll give you a little summary of how it went down.

1) Discussions. The whole weekend was full of video sermons and discussions all focusing on one thing: the Holy Spirit. Holy crap, did I get sick of them going on and on about this piece of theological fluff.

2) Manifestations of the Holy Spirit (eg. Speaking in tongues). Sadly lacking.

3) Food. I kept hearing about how “amazing” the food was going to be from those who had gone to these retreats in previous years. While the food turned out to be okay, pretty good at times, it was far from amazing.

4) Accommodation. Accommodations were surprisingly good for a camp, kind of like a low-end but clean hotel. At least it was for couples and single women. Single men got old, dirty, cramped rooms that smelled like my grandfather’s cottage.

5) Free Time Activities. The camp had a pretty decent gym with ping pong, basketball, and floor hockey. In the rec floor hockey league than my wife and I play in, we’re both solid but not outstanding players. Compared to the inexperienced and not particularly athletic Alpha Course clientele attending the camp, we were like hockey gods. GODS, I say.

That’s about it. It was only a so-so weekend, with good people, okay food, and kind of boring and inconsequential discussions.

Oh, I also got into a giant (verbal) fight with a church elder, but I’m sure none of you would care to hear about that ;-)

Alpha Course Day 6: How and Why Should I Read the Bible?

2008-11-14T08:30:00.002-05:00

Sorry I’m very late. Over a week late, actually (it'll only get worse since this weekend is the Alpha retreat - three sermons, a large group discussion, and a whole weekend of Christ stuff and eating). I blame the cold that I had that I thought went away until it punched me in the face and took me out of commission for a few days. I don’t know if it’s the illness or just general intellectual fatigue (teh stoopid has burned me out), but I let them off really easy today (too easy), despite the fact the group leader was itchin’ for a fight.

Dinner: Mmmmmmmm, sloppy joes. Dessert: Fresh fruit on yogurt with chocolaty bits on top.

Part 1: Sermon

The sermon today was on reading the bible. Gumbel’s main thrust was that it is of supreme importance to read the bible because it’s really precious. He illustrated this with a story about his youthful, newly Christian self smuggling bibles into communist Russia and the joy that these new bibles brought to the oppressed Christians there.

It’s the most popular book in regards to book sales on a yearly basis (though I would question how many of those bibles are actually read). It’s the most powerful book, in that Christians believe it’s a manual for life (and death), and it also serves as form of communication with God.

Strangely, Gumbel veered way off target early in the sermon to talk briefly about the bible and science. According to him, the bible tells us of God’s creation, and science allows us to explore even more of that creation which is not covered in the book. Because this is how it is, science and theology are not in conflict; rather, theology is like “the queen of sciences.” This argument is wrong. First, theology is not a science, let alone queen of them – the methods are very different, since theology is based on authority whereas science is based on experiment and observation. However, it would still be possible that science and theology wouldn’t be in conflict so long as the bible actually agreed with the findings of science. It does not on many levels; therefore, there IS conflict. Unfortunately, since the sermon was actually supposed to be about reading the bible and not about science vs. theology, I completely let this slide during the group discussion. Sigh. I blame my lax brain on still being sick.

Somewhere around here, he quoted Albert Einstein, who said "Science without religion is lame, religion without science is blind," in order to again show that science and religion are the same. It seems like a weird quote for Einstein, a lapsed Jew, to make, but there it is. While it sounds good to Gumbel, I doubt that what Einstein really meant with this quote is what Gumbel hopes it means.

Interestingly, in his explanation for what the bible is, he says it was “inspired by God” but “he didn’t dictate,” meaning that the bible is fully the work of humans – 100% work of man and 100% inspired by God.¹ To explain this, he used the example of the famous British architect Christopher Wren. Wren, in the role of God in this analogy, “built” St. Paul ’s Cathedral, yet didn’t actually do any of the manual labour himself, since he was the architect. I think this analogy is horrible because architects dictate all the damn time, and the way things are built better damn well agree with what they say or else there’s trouble, but I’m just an engineer, so what do I know?

Gumbel also acknowledged that there are “historical and moral difficulties” in the bible. Strangely, he didn’t actually address what we’re to think about them. He gave one example of a historical difficulty (Luke 3:1-2), but showed that this was one historical difficulty that was solved (the gist was that one dude was mentioned as existed during the wrong time period, but subsequent textual findings discovered that another dude with the same name existed during the correct time period). As for moral difficulties, he mentioned the problem of suffering, but didn’t come to reconciliation about it. His summary about “difficulties” is that “We either abandon our faith or we wrestle with the problems. Therefore the bible is the supreme authority.” WTF? Seriously, he went straight from glossing over serious problems with the bible’s reliability to proclaiming it as the supreme authority in a single breath.

After this, Gumbel spent a great deal of time on the “relationship” aspect of reading the bible. He said it’s like “a love letter from God.” I wrote the word “CREEPY” in my course manual. My wife thought I was weird for thinking this way. Anyway, Gumbel’s point is that you have to live like the bible says, not just read and memorize, so in that, I have no disagreement. Except that this was done by AJ Jacobs in his book The Year of Living Biblically, and it did not go over that well.

Gumbel finished with suggestions on how to read the bible effectively. I guess because your average Christian ~~is practically illiterate~~ doesn’t actually read the bible. There sure are a lot of unread/partially read bibles out there.

Part 2: Small Groups

I don’t know if it’s the illness or just general intellectual fatigue (the stoopid has burned me out), but I let them off really easy today, despite the fact the group leader was itchin’ for a fight. As I mentioned, I didn’t fight them about science vs. the bible because I didn’t feel like it was relevant to the “how to read the bible” thing. I also completely forgot to ask them if they were biblical literalists or anything like that. Sorry, I dropped the ball.

The good news is that the lawyer guy brought up the topic of the various non-canonical gospels, like the Gospels of Judas, Thomas, and Mary. He seemed quite curious and not at all dismissive about them. The group leader answered this challenge by saying that the early church councils who decided on the New Testament canon must be correct because they prayed very hard to God and he guided their selections. I said “WTF? What the hell does that mean in real life?” So she tried to explain herself by essentially going on and on and on repeating herself about God guiding decisions for about 5 minutes. I gave up.

I also brought up the difficulties raised in translating and copying the bible (a few things I picked up from Bart Erhman’s Misquoting Jesus). Sadly, the blind faith crowd reared its ugly head again. According to one girl, translation errors “don’t matter because I know the bible’s true."

I don’t know about you, but I think this is a crazy viewpoint. Say I had an engineering drawing, it’s professionally done up, signed and sealed by some other professional engineer, looks all official and stuff. Looks good. However, it’s pretty damn old by some engineering company I’d never heard of. And I have strong reason to believe that the drawings originally had columns but they seem to have been removed by a later draftsman. And I have no idea if the rebar is supposed to be 25 mm diameter at 300 mm spacing or 15 mm diameter at 600 mm spacing. And the height of a wall is clearly wrong. I damn well wouldn’t sweep these issues under the rug or say “it doesn’t matter because the drawing is sealed and signed.” Those are serious issues. FAITH DOESN'T SOLVE THOSE PROBLEMS.

Finally, we readdressed the African tribal issue from many weeks ago. Amazingly, one girl changed her mind back to our original position that says you only get to heaven through accepting Jesus, and that the tribals are screwed, even going so far as to have a serious disagreement with one of the more “feelings-oriented” girls in the group who had been arguing for more subjective entry standards for those who haven’t had a chance to learn about Jesus.

¹ You know, whenever a believer says that God can do anything within the realms of logic so he CAN’T make 2 + 2 = 5, I get a little headachy, since believers usually take great pride in beating the dead horse that 1 + 1 + 1 = 1 and 100% + 100% = 100%.

Alpha Course Day 5: Additional Prayer Journal Stuff

2008-11-13T00:19:00.001-05:00

I forgot to add a few words about Nicky Gumbel's prayer journal. In his Alpha sermon, he recommends that everyone keep a prayer journal. That way you can record all the stuff you pray for and you can "tick" off every prayer that comes true. He says that you'll be amazed how many more ticks than not ticks you will have, and it will convince you of the power of prayer.

Funny, for I've heard that for most people it generally follows that the more of a longshot the prayer is, the more unlikely it is to be fulfilled, and for most people when all prayers, probable and improbable, are taken into account, perhaps 50-50 is the best way of putting it, ie. It’s no different than luck.

Remember all the hubbub about scientific studies testing the effects of prayer on heart surgery patients? And remember how those studies showed that prayer had no effect? And remember how all the religious apologists said that you can’t put God to the test in that way? Well, so much for not putting God to the test in all those prayer-health studies. These prayer journals could easily be viewed as a very rudimentary prayer study, and Gumbel says that they do work.

Does God only answer the prayers of people who won’t publish in a scientific journal? If so, what a bastard, eh?

Alpha Course Day 5: How and Why Should I Pray?

2008-11-06T00:34:00.002-05:00

Over the weekend, I came down with an annoying and persistent cold, so I ended up hunkering down on the couch watch TV the whole weekend…which was pretty much what I planned on doing the whole weekend anyway, so being sick was no real loss. However, I wasn’t fully healed and energetic by this Tuesday’s Alpha Course. I went, but was not my normal combative self. Then again, perhaps my lack of combativeness was due to the letdown from my frustrations last week. Regardless, here comes Day 5’s blog

Dinner: Surprisingly, they made fajitas. Not good fajitas, mind you – by far not enough meat – but still acceptable given the venue. Nice smoky beans and rice, too. Dessert: Personal angel food cakes with lots of fresh fruit and ice cream. Kudos to the cook for two weeks of enjoyable food.

Part 1: Sermon

No names were dropped this week, though Billy Graham was involved in one of Gumbel’s storys. Strangely, Gumbel used Carl Sagan’s “billions and billions” of stars comment (though he left it unattributed) to say how awesome God was. The gist was that God created all the stars and things in the heavens for us during a single day in Genesis, so, yes; God has time to deal with every single one of our prayers.

For the most part, the sermon just covered the basics of how to pray. Gumbel stated that it is important to pray because prayer is two-way communication with God. We should ensure our prayers deal with four topics (Gumbel calls it "A.C.T.S"): Adoration, Confession, Thanksgiving, and Supplication.

Gumbel said that we’re supposed to pray to God “through Jesus” whatever the hell that means. (Though didn’t Jesus say to pray using the Lord’s prayer, which doesn’t refer to Jesus himself at all?) He made this clear with a weird statement that we have "no right to speak directly to God." Huh?

He also tried to answer why God doesn’t appear to answer all prayers. Possibly you are praying for something that is morally wrong. Sometimes God has a different plan for you that is better than your plans (Gumbel assures that God always makes better plans than you). But often it is because you have a mental barrier in your faith, such as committing a sin that you fail to recognize and ask forgiveness for, or not trusting in God to answer your prayer in the best way.

Gumbel also stated how prayer was the most important thing you can do. Oh, how I wish more Christians lived like this (and just sat at home praying instead of screwing with science education, human rights, etc).

Part 2: Small Groups

I wasn’t very combative this day, as I was battling a cold, and for the most part the discussion stuck the plain prayer – what people like to pray for, what they were struggling with that could prevent them from having communications with God, etc – so I generally didn’t say much or challenge anything today. There are of course things I could have said, but I suspect they wouldn’t have much impact in the discussion we were having. For some good questions and comments about prayer, check out Ebon Musings.

We discussed the convolutedness of who we are supposed to pray to. Many group members didn't like what Gumbel said about not having a right to speak directly to God. Do we have to pray to Jesus, as the sermon stated? Or is it to both, either by simply interchanging “God” and “Jesus” at random, or via praying to God, but ending the prayer with “we pray this in Jesus’ name,” as many pastors do? Or is it just to God, as many of our worried group members pray, and how the Lord’s Prayer, as given by Jesus in the Gospels, says?

To end the discussion, the group leader lead a prayer according to what was talked about it the sermon.

Let me fill you in on one aspect of Christian prayer I have learned over the years that was reinforced here. To pray properly, you have to absolutely ensure that you say “God” or “Lord” or “Father” or “Lord God” or “Father God” or “Heavenly Father” or even “Lord Heavenly Father God” a lot. In general, every sentence should start with one of these, every sentence should end with one of these, and there should be one of these in the vicinity of most commas. It is really, really annoying.

The Alpha Course is Even Further Pissing Me Off

2008-11-02T10:59:00.000-05:00

During our Alpha Course discussion groups, it bothers me that we start talking about one specific topic and it goes completely off the rails.

We typically start discussing a topic using bible quotes or arguing history or something more meaty of that nature. Then, one of the other group members will start talking about emotions and how their feelings guide their beliefs, and many other group members start jumping in and doing the same. Usually by about minute #2 of the derailment the other group members are talking about some other topic entirely. And they go on and on and on and before you know it, 10 minutes have passed and I've completely forgotten what the hell we were supposed to be discussing.

The Alpha Course is Further Pissing Me Off

2008-10-31T08:58:00.000-04:00

Over the past couple of days, I have been told repeatedly that I'm closed to Jesus, that I’m not “looking for him with my heart” and other such drivel. It’s true that whenever one of the people at Alpha comes up with a new argument for me to believe, I attack it. I attack it hard. And my default position is that all this Jesus stuff is bunk. But that should never be confused with me not being open to new information. I’m just not so open-minded that my brains fall out. I treat what they say as I would anything else – all new ideas and arguments must past muster. What they say does not. And because of this, I’m told I’m not open to Jesus. I say, show me an argument that doesn’t suck and I’ll accept it gladly. Until then, you suck and I’ll ignore you.

The Alpha Course is Pissing Me Off

2008-10-29T07:57:00.000-04:00

One thing that is surprising me about my participation in the Alpha Course is that my anger boils to the surface at very odd provocations.

For instance, it’s not the terrible doctrine discussed during Day 4 that pisses me off (that the vast majority of humanity is condemned to eternal torment in hell through no fault of their own) . What pissed me off was the uncritical 180 degree turn the people in my group made, a turn they made without realizing or acknowledging it. They have suspended their critical faculties. In return, I get angry.

Again, another example is the repeated claim that the historical evidence for Jesus’s life is as strong as for any person in history, with Gumbel using the Julius Caesar analogy in an earlier sermon and the lawyer guy using Alexander the Great yesterday. What bothers me is that it’s such a weird claim to make. I’ve repeatedly pointed out to my group that I don’t need evidence for Jesus’s life to be as strong as for Caesar; just provide SOME good evidence that he was as advertised (which they haven’t done, but I don’t really begrudge them that). But what they do is keep making extravagant claims about how fantastically well historically supported Jesus is, "As much as anyone else in history," despite all evidence to the contrary. Frankly, that just hurts my brain and tremendously pisses me off.

Alpha Course Day 4: How Can I Be Sure of My Faith?

2008-10-27T21:05:00.000-04:00

Dinner: Actually excellent this time, and by far the best thing about this night’s session. Chicken breast in a light fruity sauce with green beans, bread, salad. Dessert: Homemade apple crumble made by a girl in my discussion group.

Part 1: Sermon

Honestly, I found this to be the most disjointed and meandering sermon so far by a wide margin. It touched on many things including:

-How God wants us to be sure of our faith.

That’s nice of him. Let’s see how this pans out…

-How we must not rely on only our feelings which can be changeable and may even be deceptive.

Good advice. Too bad it’s ignored completely by everyone in my discussion group and by Gumbel himself later in the sermon.

-How faith is supported by God’s promises.

Which we then have to “dare to believe through faith,” as the course manual says, thus making the whole “sure of our faith” thing rather circular.

-How we can also be sure of our faith through the works of Jesus.

Which we accept as true based on the same criteria as for God’s promises above.

-How new believers have their lives changed through the presence of the Holy Spirit; their characters, relationships, and feelings all change.

Big Whoop. You’ll find converts to any belief system, Islam, Buddhism, even atheism, claiming their lives have been changed. Feelings don’t prove anything.

-Finally, here are a bunch of new feelings you’ve probably experienced since you’ve been taking this course: new love for God, desire to read the Bible, sense of forgiveness, new concern for others, enjoyment of worshipping God, desire to meet other Christians.

Wow, this is one big happy-feely love fest all of a sudden. I’m pretty sure that this marks the point where everyone is just expected to be Christian now.

Thankfully, and amazingly, he did not do a single name drop during the sermon. Perhaps he figures that by this time, most attendees have already been convinced and don’t need to be further coerced by celebrities.

Part 2: Small Groups

This one was a painful session. Also note that we did not talk about the sermon at all, so this will be about other topics.

Before we got to the formal discussion, my wife asked the lawyer guy (recall day 2) what his big transformative experience was, as it had confounded both of us. I think we were both hoping for an answer that was a 'big deal,' like some big personal trauma or big supernatural revelation. Instead, this normally intelligent and logical guy explained that, one time when accompanying his wife to church, he got to hear one of “my church’s” best musicians doing a very emotional song. Suddenly, he just started crying like a baby and realized he was ready to believe. So much for rational faith.

We also discussed the testimony of a guy getting baptized at the church service this past weekend. The group leader brought it up because she thought it would be very meaningful and relevant for me since the guy was described as “a logical, scientific person” by both himself and by people who know him, and he said that before his conversion “he thought he had it all figured out” and was a “flaming atheist.” First problem: he grew up in a Christian family and those family members got him to read C.S. Lewis’s Mere Christianity. He said that, though it didn’t convert him, the first part of Mere Christianity caused his logical brain to feel uneasy. But the first part of Mere Christianity is the argument from morality, so, in a word, yikes; therefore, I doubt he’s as logical as he thinks he is. The second much bigger problem was that his conversion wasn’t due to solving any of the evidential issues I’ve been bringing up. Instead it was due to what he termed a 'Pauline experience' – for reasons he left unelaborated, he almost died by the side of the road somewhere in Africa and feels he was saved by God. While this is certainly a big deal that stands a good chance of converting anybody who experiences it (even me), I explained that it doesn’t actually do me any good, as an anecdote of this nature fails as evidence and I’m not the one who experienced it.

The lawyer guy also told me about another argument he just heard that he found convincing for proving the historicity of Jesus. The argument involved comparing the legacy organizations left behind by Alexander the Great - different mini-empires that lasted varying lengths of time after his death - with the legacy organization of Jesus - namely, the church. The existence of these organizations are undeniable for both Alexander and Jesus, and we don't deny that Alexander existed; therefore Jesus is as proven as Alexander.

Problem the first: Jesus did not found the institutions of his own religion; it was Paul and other church founders who did. If anything, this proves Paul existed.

Problem the second: He could have said, “We can infer the existence of Alexander the Great by the existence of the organizational structures he left behind; therefore, we can use similar tests to infer the existence of Jesus,” which, while I’ve shown this is incorrect, I don’t actually have a problem with. Instead, he says, “We can infer the existence of Alexander the Great by the existence of the organizational structures he left behind; therefore, Jesus is just as historically proven as Alexander!” But this is stupid; even if the same argument could be made for Jesus as for Alexander, and Jesus could actually be inferred to have existed to a strong probability, there is mind-bogglingly more evidence for Alexander than there is for Jesus: coins minted with his image from when he ruled, dozens of cities named Alexandria (and one named after his horse), contemporary accounts from biographers, historical implications in the cultures of conquered peoples who obviously wouldn’t be pro-Alexander, tombs of his family members, etc.

The lawyer guy could tell that I was shutting him down and getting angry with him, so he questioned if I didn’t want to believe that Jesus existed even as a non-supernatural historical figure. I told him that I didn’t really have a strong opinion about that (I lean towards Jesus as a composite of a relatively mundane historical rabbi, savior mythology, and some anonymous wise-man quotes). And I told him that what really pissed me off is that he expected an obviously misleading argument to be convincing.

Finally, we spent most of the discussion time addressing a question one guy had last week: "do people who honestly have no significant opportunity to embrace Christianity get condemned to hell?"

The group leader went away last week and did some research, finding a couple of bible quotes and some commentary from some Christian scholar who edited her bible. The verses she gave were Romans 2:12-16 and Romans 1:18-20. First, Romans 2:12-16:

12All who sin apart from the law will also perish apart from the law, and all who sin under the law will be judged by the law. 13For it is not those who hear the law who are righteous in God's sight, but it is those who obey the law who will be declared righteous. 14(Indeed, when Gentiles, who do not have the law, do by nature things required by the law, they are a law for themselves, even though they do not have the law, 15since they show that the requirements of the law are written on their hearts, their consciences also bearing witness, and their thoughts now accusing, now even defending them.) 16This will take place on the day when God will judge men's secrets through Jesus Christ, as my gospel declares.

Now Romans 1:18-20:

18The wrath of God is being revealed from heaven against all the godlessness and wickedness of men who suppress the truth by their wickedness, 19since what may be known about God is plain to them, because God has made it plain to them. 20For since the creation of the world God's invisible qualities—his eternal power and divine nature—have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made, so that men are without excuse.

Those passages, and the commentary about those passages, convinced the group leader that all people were required to follow Christianity to make it to heaven. As I summed up, it screws the African tribals.

And at first, everybody who said anything in response agreed. Tribal dudes were screwed and still need to live according to God's laws. But, according to the commentary by the bible scholar, this still gave them a chance to make it in because of humanity's inate ability to be good people and to sense God's presence (ie. all societies have religion of some sort and most people don't go around killing people).

"But wait," I interjected, "Don't these verses mean that you CAN get to heaven through works alone?"

"No," the group leader said, "you need to believe in Jesus."

"That's what I thought. So according to the quotes, 'obeying the law' means both being good AND accepting Jesus, right?" They agreed. "Then, doesn't this still mean isolated tribals are still almost guaranteed to be screwed because they would be required to independently come up with a half-way decent Christianity analog (ie. monotheist but with a God-son sacrificed for your sins)?" They agreed again.

So I hammered home the point that this is unethical and evil; you can't infinitely punish someone for something that is not their fault.

The group leader then went on the defensive and proceeded to talk for about 5 minutes just saying how God's ethics and actions were unknowable and that he has a plan and we don't know what it is but we can be assured that it is good because God knows better than us and who are we to judge?

After that, several other group members jumped in and said how they believed that God would take this into account. Their feelings were that it WAS unfair, so God couldn't be that way.

I was speechless; with mouth agape, I gestured madly at the bible in the group leader's hands. In essense, screw the bible verses we just read and uniformly agreed on, screw literalism, and screw the respected biblical commentator.

In one respect, I was happy that they decided that it was unethical to sentence unknowing people to Hell. And I'll admit I'm not a theologian and I don't know if our interpretation was correct. However, I was extremely disturbed that they could just flip-flop like that and not even notice the problem.

Just say "God is unknowable" and then fall back on feelings and you can uncritically change the goalposts as much as you want.

Are the Montreal Canadiens a religion?

2008-10-26T14:10:00.000-04:00

A professor at the Université de Montréal is going to start teaching a graduate class studying the Montreal Canadiens hockey club as religion.

Are the Montreal Canadiens a religion? Well, they do have a goalie nicknamed Jesus Price, and some have claimed that touching Rocket Richard's jersey has healed them.

If the Habs are a religion, then the Leafs are Scientologists.

Preamble to Alpha Day 4 - I'm getting pissed

2008-10-25T13:10:00.002-04:00

There are purely theological questions discussed in Alpha, things like “What about babies who die? Or mature tribals who never get to hear about Jesus? How does Jesus’s death work as a sacrifice if he’s no longer dead?” However, what I’m interested in is more the historicity of it; prove to me within a reasonable doubt that the bible can be trusted. There are also the scientific arguments; Christianity (at least literal interpretations) contains many claims that can be tested against what we observe in the natural world, and the only way for Christianity to be true is if it agrees with observations (or if Christians admit that God is being a lying dick – strangely, I’ve met few Christians willing to go that far). For me, these (history and science) need to be addressed to my satisfaction if I’m to go anywhere near Christianity as a belief upon which to centre my life. Once these are addressed, then the theology would become important, but before that, it’s just intellectual masturbation.

The theology in this case is the icing; the historicity and the agreement with the natural world is the cake. I’ll debate the icing, but really it doesn’t concern me much when the cake is still missing. Unfortunately, I’ve looked ahead in the course and it seems that from this point on, Alpha concerns itself not only with icing, but with sprinkles, candles, cherries, and serving a big piece to your overweight cousin Darryl. But there’s still no cake.

Stay tuned for my summary of day 4 of Alpha, which will explain why I’ve introduced this post with such a snarky editorial. But for now, all this cake talk makes a good segue into discussing dinner.

Real Manifestation of God in “My Church”

2008-10-20T08:10:00.000-04:00

Something spooky and powerful ALMOST happened the other day in “my church” (in quotations because it’s really my wife’s church – she just drags me there). I was in church minding my own business (trying to nap in my seat) when the pastor’s tone changed as he got very hot ‘n’ bothered during the sermon. “Today we've thought about Jesus, and we've talked about Jesus. But now, instead of just leaving like we usually do, we're going to actually ask Jesus to do something here. We're going to be in relationship with him and actually ask him to move.” Needless to say, I suddenly woke up.

“Holy turd pucks!” I exclaimed in my head, as I’m wont to do when surprised.

I actually became somewhat worried, nervous, and excited. Was their going to be crazy speaking in tongues? Was everyone going to sprout stigmata? Was Jesus’s giant, disembodied/ethereal head going to appear above us?

Then the pastor continued and told all those in the audience struggling with such and such a faith problem to stand up. They did. Then he instructed everyone to pray for them and their challenges. Then he told them to sit down. He then made everyone with another type of faith problem stand up. Everyone prayed for them, too. Then a third group stood up. More prayers.

Then, the pastor triumphantly proclaimed, “Doesn’t it feel much better to have actually done something?”

Oy. Seems like their “just talking” and their “actually doing something/Jesus manifests himself” are more or less the same damn thing. What a disappointment.

I went back to sleep.

Alpha Course Day 3: Why did Jesus Die?

2008-10-17T07:13:00.000-04:00

Dinner = A really, really bland shepherd’s pie, salad. Dessert = Assorted dessert squares (actually not bad).

Seriously, this was disappointing. I know the cook had to spend hours preparing ~40 lbs of potatoes, but the result was quite mediocre. The scary thing was that a number of people raved about the dinner this week.

You know, Toronto is easily one of the most multicultural cities in the world. That, however, does not extend to the sprawling suburbs east of Toronto , which are as white as Wonderbread and about as cultured. These people probably think a boiled-wiener hotdog with plain yellow mustard is haute cuisine.

NB. If you think I’m being too mean about this, especially compared to the relatively academic tone of the religion debates, please remember that I’m mainly attending Alpha for the food.

Part 1: Sermon

Nicky Gumbel’s video this week was about why Jesus had to die. Names dropped this week included Madonna, Jennifer Aniston, Bono, Naomi Campbell, the Pope, and the Archbishop of Canterbury. The good news was this was all constrained to the introduction as he was talking about people who wear crosses.

The sermon was quite simplistic. Gumbel actually spent most of it just explaining how we are all sinners (at least in God’s “everyone falls short of my perfection” definition of sin); therefore, we all fall short of God and are doomed to/deserve death and hell. But! God is so forgiving that he would take it upon himself to suffer and die in our place so we can get the heaven deal when we die. As long as we believe in Jesus, that is.

That was basically it. A lot of demonstrating how we can be judged to fall short of God and trying to argue how by simply not being perfect, hell is justified. Magic loophole tacked on at the end, and voila.

There was no real discussion as to why an omniscient, omnipotent, and omnibenevolent God would create imperfect creatures then judge them to an impossibly strict standard involving not just real crimes but also irrational rules, then arbitrarily assign an all-or-nothing justice system with punishment for the inevitable failure being eternal even though the crimes are finite. Also no reason was given why this God would then decide to sacrifice himself to himself in our place in order to let us off the hook, rather than simply snap his incorporeal fingers and change the crappy rules that he himself set in place. And, of course, no discussion as to why this magic loophole should only exist for those who believe that he did sacrifice himself.

As for sin, Gumbel had to rely on the “thought police” style of crimes primarily introduced by Jesus in the NT, like lust being exactly the same as adultery and anger towards someone being the same as murder, in order to convince people that they have all sinned. He then said that the standard of comparison is not the best human example (who still has a few sins to his/her name) but to the perfection of Jesus, so you’re doomed to fall short. Then, he says that, in stark contrast to human justice where a minor crime gets a small fine, God says than when you break one law, you’ve broken all of them, and therefore deserve Hell.

Good job, Christianity. You’ve taken essentially good people and twisted them to think they are 100% evil. Kudos.

To introduce the solution of Jesus’s sacrifice, Gumbel used the example of Fr. Maxamillian Colby, the priest who sacrificed his life in place of another prisoner sentenced to die in the Nazi concentration camp in Austvich. Admitting that all analogies break down eventually, I wonder what this says about Christianity that in this analogy, God isn’t just Colby but he’s also the Nazis (Hmm, did I just Godwin myself?). Anyway, Gumbel believes God/Jesus’s sacrifice was even more amazing than Colby’s.

There was quite a bit of background talk about how horrible crucifixion was as a method of execution. To me, this seems completely irrelevant to the discussion. Jesus is God, eh? What’s a little horrible torture to an omnipotent being? The real point (still quite silly, though) is that Jesus was executed by humanity to take the punishment for humanity’s sins. Crucifixion, lethal injection, burning at the stake: it doesn’t really matter. Besides, crucifixion was bad but Mediaeval people (mostly Christians themselves) came up with stuff that was even worse.

Gumbel ended with a few more analogies for what Jesus did for humanity. His favourite one was two school friends who go their separate ways, one who becomes a judge and the other who becomes a criminal. The criminal friend ends up in the judge friend’s court and pleads guilty. As Gumbel says, there are consequences so the judge can’t let his friend off the hook, so he sentences the friend to the hefty fine he deserves, and then pays the fine for his friend.

How is this justice? There are consequences but how are consequences meaningful when they aren’t felt by those who deserve the consequences?

Part 2: Small Groups

Sadly, the discussion started with a bunch of group members talking about how moving and powerful Mel Gibson’s snuff film was. I could tell it wasn’t going to be that productive of a day.

The group discussion kind of mirrored the sermon in that most of it was spent on discussing sin and guilt rather than the Jesus part. During this, I basically talked about the irrationality of the all-or-nothing (one broken law = broke the entire set of laws) approach to morality God is taking. Fortunately, I wasn’t the only person who had problems with this view; I had support even from some dedicated Christians. Of course, they were willing to let God’s ethics remain mysterious while I hammered home the arbitrariness of the system.

Unfortunately, we spent so much time just talking about sins in general - how secular societies have crimes based on real-world effects instead of sins against God’s law, just what makes a sin, and how guilt relates to sin - that we were left with only 5 minutes to talk about Jesus’s part in all of this. Ie. The resurrection as substitute for our punishment.

Only being able to strike once, I chose to appeal to the higher ethics of humanity. There is nothing wrong with accepting the gift of redemption and forgiveness from the person you have wronged. However, getting back to the story of the judge and his criminal friend, what is better: the criminal accepting his friend's offer to pay his debt for him? or the criminal saying, thanks, but no, I need to repay this on my own, and making his own amends the best he can? There already exists a higher ethic to aspire to than what Christianity holds as its pinnicle.

And, on that note, it was time to leave.

As we were leaving, two of the other vocal members of the group, both highly pro-Christianity, came up to me to say that I was asking really good questions and that they were happy I was in their group. I'll take that as a very good compliment; however, I'm a bit worried that since I haven't disturbed them yet, I'm not being confrontational enough.

Finally, we talked to the group leader a bit, and she said that there was actually at least one more non-Christian in the group that she knew of. I was surprised, and argued with her that every single person last week made some mention of being Christian during the introductions. Then I realized where I went wrong; a couple of people had only said that they grew up Christian. They made no mention of what they were now or if they went to church. So I have at least one person to step up to the plate for during our small group discussions.

How to Argue Against Emotion?

2008-10-16T20:15:00.001-04:00

I need some advice. In the Alpha Course I’m currently attending, I have been bringing up many logical and factual problems with Christianity during the group discussions. Talking about these questions in the groups has been interesting and somewhat fruitful, but, quickly, any answers given from the religious group members (which are almost all of them) reduce to appeals to emotion, and feeling, and knowing God’s love, and all that crap. I can’t just steamroller over their beliefs and feelings since that’s a surefire way for them to disrespect anything I say. Hell, I can’t even respectfully disagree and give alternative rational viewpoints for anything they believe in based on feelings. I’ve tried with my wife; she interprets any response other than, “your feelings have won me over; of course Christianity must be true” as a personal attack. There is even one girl in our group who just starts crying from time to time due to the emotion of thinking about Jesus.

So my question is: how do you argue effectively with people whose viewpoints are entirely based on feelings? Right now, whenever the Alpha discussions descend into emotional territory I’ve just had to drop whatever I’ve been arguing for and move on to another topic because it’s a dead end.

Any suggestions?

Alpha Course Day 2: Who is Jesus?

2008-10-10T18:42:00.001-04:00

Dinner = Ham with pineapples (blah), boiled broccoli and cauliflower (blah), creamy scalloped potatoes (good), and a green salad (blah). Dessert = Carrot cake (blah).

Our table had some serious discussions with the organizer about unleashing the cook from the “can’t offend the taste buds of the bland old people” directive he’s been under. He’s Indian and I’ll bet he could make some killer curries if he was given the mandate to do so.

Part 1: Sermon

We watched Gumbel’s video about who Jesus was historically, what he said about himself, and the implications of these claims.

The sermon started with Gumbel talking about his journey to Christianity. According to his story, he was an atheist in college when his roommate suddenly converted to Christianity. Confused as to why his friend would do such a thing, he started reading the New Testament (NT) and he finished the thing in a few days of almost solid reading (he must have been enrolled in a slacker artsy program; no engineer would have time to read like that) and by the end of reading the NT, he had come to the conclusion that Christianity was true.

What a vomit-inducing story. I don’t know if I’m justified in suspecting the story is a lie, as I don’t like to dismiss what other people say about themselves without evidence, but it seems highly unlikely that a skeptical person could read one book about a supernatural happening and come away totally convinced. I’m also skeptical that a skeptic could be that enthralled by the bible; even most Christians don’t get enthusiastic about reading their bibles. Hell, I’ve read NT verses and have found my eyes glazing over out of boredom in minutes, and I read science and history books for fun.

Getting back to the sermon itself, it started by looking at the extra-biblical evidence for Jesus, which Gumbel portrayed as being solid. Historically, the non-New Testament evidence for Jesus really is zero. All he referenced were the very meager mentions in the writings of Tacitus, Seutonius (his supposed Jesus quote probably only referred to Christians in Rome and not Jesus himself; at least he wrote a work called Lives of Famous Whores), and Josephus. He even tried to pretend that Josephus was writing practically contemporarily with Jesus, despite the fact that Josephus wrote his Jesus comments in ~94 AD. Unfortunately for Gumbel’s assertions, these guys all wrote generations after the events of the gospels and almost certainly gained all their information from the stories told of Jesus by Christians. A nice little article about this is provided on Internet Infidels.

Gumbel then tried to prove that the NT is accurate by comparing it to a number of other ancient works using this table:

Work, When Written, Earliest Copies, Time Span (yrs), No of Copies

Herodotus, 488-428 BC, 900 AD, 1300, 8
Thucydides, 460-400 BC, 900 AD, 1300, 8
Tacitus, 100 AD, 1100 AD, 1000, 20
Caesar's Gallic War, 58-50 BC, 900 AD, 950, 9-10
Livy's Roman History, 59 BC - 17AD, 900 AD, 950, 20
New Testament, 40-100AD, 130 AD in part 250 AD full, 300, 5000 Greek 10000 Latin, 9300 other

The big problem is that the number of copies doesn’t really matter. It’s the truthfulness of the content that is important. For instance, the table lists Herodotus, and while we don’t doubt that he was a tremendously important pioneering historian, like almost all pioneers, his results kind of sucked, in that subsequent investigations show that he was often wrong.

Unfortunately, from this point on, the NT itself was used as its own proof. Can you say:
?
[image lovingly ripped-off from the almighty Plognark]

So Gumbel uses the bible to prove that Jesus was human, claimed to be Son of God, and did miracles. Seriously. Gumbel’s argument to prove that Jesus said what the bible says he said is to quote the bible saying more of what Jesus said. Other "proofs" were his absence from the tomb and his appearances to the disciples, again only referring to the NT. Funny the 500+ people he appeared to didn’t write anything down about his resurrection (nor the zombies emerging from their graves at the same time) other than what found its way into the NT. He then hit upon CS Lewis’s Liar, Lunatic, or Lord argument. With all due respect to Lewis and Gumbel, this calls out for a Spaceballs reference:

Dark Helmet [as King Roland]: Vespa, come to me.
Vespa: Daddy, is it really you?
DH [as KR]: Yes, my dear, I guarantee it. Would I lie?
V: Daddy.
[Vespa reaches King Roland, who turns into Dark Helmet]
DH: Fooled you! Ha-ha-ha!

Part 2: Small Groups

We were assigned into groups of about a dozen according to rough age. Our group had a good mix of male and female, all late 20s to early 30s. One woman became very depressed when she realized she was so old as to not be in the youngest group.

We introduced ourselves, briefly explaining why we were there. I was more or less truthful, saying that I was not Christian or religious, and I was there primarily because my wife coerced me to and there was going to be food. I also said that they were going to have to be very convincing for me to change my mind. I omitted the fact that I was also there to obtain blog content.

You know, for a course that claims to be aimed at non-Christians, the number of non-Christians in the group was surprisingly small. The number:

One. Just me.

Every single one of them was a committed Christian already. Some were new, most had grown up that way and were looking for a refresher. Many were talking the course for a second or third time. One honest thing about Alpha is that they claim to be welcoming and as non-judgmental as your average person can be. I can honestly say that no one was put-off or intimidated by my stating that I wasn’t one of them and that I would be somewhat confrontational wrt the contents of the Alpha sermons.

Wrt my confrontationalism, I must admit I was probably the most vocal person there. In general I stuck to either items from the video or comments other group members made, and while I was confrontational, I tried to not push or antagonize. There was one instance where I completely lost my cool, and it happened right away. During the introductions, one group member mentioned that she came to Alpha after being inspired by reading the book The Case for Christ by Lee Strobel [spits]. Our group leader then recommended Strobel in absolutely glowing terms, explaining how he was a journalist who started atheist, then set about writing a book to crush Christianity, interviewed leading theologians with hard-hitting questions, looked at archeological and scientific data, and came away a Christian. She also warned that, even though the book was great, it was difficult reading.

It was at that point that I snapped and interrupted her, stating that, firstly, scientific data was part of a different book he wrote, The Case for a Creator, the science in that book was utter garbage, and that the reading level was actually very easy. I stopped short of calling her an imbecile for thinking Strobel’s writing was difficult, but it was excruciatingly hard for me because that statement pissed me off the most. I must admit that it became very difficult to take any of what she said seriously after that. That said, it was a completely over-the-top outburst that I wish I had been able to contain.

Only about half of the dozen of us contributed much to the discussions. Of these, all made a point of their emotional rather than rational reasons for their belief in Christianity. This made it difficult on me because I really have no comments to make about that. The only one who actually seemed to care at all about evidence was a divorce lawyer who had recently become Christian because of an undisclosed major event in his life, so even though he was fairly rational, he also had serious emotional reasons as the foundation for his faith.

The lawyer guy actually beat me to the punch about the "number of ancient copies" problem. Ignoring for a moment the work of scholars like Bart Ehrman which detail how the bible has changed over the centuries and why, we both emphasized that the analysis shown in the sermon only indicates that, as literature, the ancient bible copies maintained fairly good fidelity to the original writings from a few hundred years earlier. It does not help prove the truthfulness of the original writings, which were written ~100 years after the alleged events they chronicle.

I tried to hammer home the lack of extra-biblical evidence. Again, the impression I got was that everyone other than the lawyer did not care. The bible is true, why bother with what anyone else thinks? For what it’s worth, the lawyer and I agreed that Tacitus, Suetonius, and Josephus were all too late to be valuable as references. He also figured that Josephus, while being slightly less late, was not that trustworthy, given that he was a turncoat and political crony and all. I tried to be diplomatic and state that absence of evidence is not evidence of absence; I believe my exact words were, "I’m just disappointed by the lack of extra-biblical evidence." Fair enough?

I’m afraid I got drawn into a long-slogging argument about the Liar, Lunatic, or Lord argument because I challenged it on its own terms. I should have reiterated that the argument is meaningless until the reliability of the bible is confirmed. Instead I went about arguing that it is possible to be a liar and still be able to spread good morals (afterall, even the vile pirate Jebediah Springfield inspired his followers: "A noble spirit embiggens the smallest man"):

I argued: What if you hated how the people around you behaved unethically? You have a strong, almost fanatical sense of what morality is, and you really think people should follow your way of thought. However, they don’t pay you any mind. So you tap into the local religious consciousness (unfortunately bending your own morals about lying along the way) and raise a big fuss about yourself, claiming to be God etc. Now you have followers; followers who will finally live their lives the way you believe in and will teach others to do likewise. (You throw in a little megalomania just for kicks). And there you have it: a great moral teacher who isn’t bonkers but also isn’t God - a liar who still manages to be not evil (though admittedly not as good as he could be if he wasn’t lying).

While falling on deaf ears, this did not turn out to be a complete waste of time, at least for me. I learned something about how this particular mindset of Christianity thinks. In essence, they have a really low opinion of humanity. In this case, they couldn’t fathom how someone who wasn’t God could piss people off and put themselves at risk and yet not get anything out of it themselves. They always expected the liar to be selfish. They kept asking me, "What’s in it for Jesus then?" They never could understand that helping others to be better people can be rewarding in and of itself. In a completely separate conversation, one woman couldn’t believe that someone who was not God could come up with Jesus’s teachings as they were so perfect and so different from any other human teaching. As if a species that claims the likes of Einstein, Mozart, and Plato would be unable to handle the Sermon on the Mount. Confucius was teaching things like the golden rule 500 years before Jesus anyhow.

And, lo and behold, before we knew it we had run 15 minutes over time and barely scratched the surface of the sermon. I’m not sure if I would say that I had a good time or a bad time. The group atmosphere was pleasant enough, but the discussions weren’t what I’d like them to be. Often I felt like a brick wall would answer questions with more thoughtfulness than many of the people in the group; there were quite a few outpourings of emotion but very few attempts at logical discussion. And, like many Christians (including my wife), there exists no evidence that can change their minds about Christianity. I’ll just have to accept that I’m of a different mindset than everyone else there and try my best to understand them in the coming weeks.

KA’s hitting myself in the nuts

2008-10-07T08:14:00.000-04:00

I occasionally write about kicking people in the nuts. What if you want to kick yourself in the nuts? Not easy. However, you can hit yourself in the junk very easily in other ways. Uncomfortably, that was the case for me last week.

The scene: rec floorhockey. We play in an elementary school gym, one featuring basketball nets with big pads mounted on the wall behind them to protect players attacking the basket from cracking their heads open. Very good things, those pads. Under normal circumstances.

However, under other circumstances, floorhockey circumstances, they are not so good. Say, you’re trying to carry the ball at speed around the back of the opponent’s net. The ball is bouncing, so you lift you stick up a bit and reach out to try to corral the ball that’s bouncing away from you. Just then, as your stick is outstretched, the blade of your stick embeds itself between the big pad and the wall it’s mounted on. The stick stops suddenly. And if you remember Newton, you’re inertia keeps you moving forward. Moving forward at high speed directly into the butt-end of your stick. A stick that happens to be firmly wedged in front of you and pointed directly at your groin. With only a millisecond of travel time between you and the stick, there is nothing you can do but take it right in the dingle-dangle and hope for the best.

A teammate said that it looked like I was doing a pole vault (hehe, POLE vault).

Everyone stopped and asked if I was alright. My wife, meanwhile, just shook her head in disgust and motioned for me to get off the floor lest I embarrass her further.

I was lucky; the butt-end of the stick missed the most vital bits by about 1 cm, so it could have been much worse. It hurt, but there should be no difficulties producing children.

However, what was bad was that the teammate who called it a pole vault also happens to work for my company. And she told everybody.

I might have to change jobs.

Alpha Day 1: Boring, Untrue, and Irrelevant

2008-10-05T08:53:00.000-04:00

Last Tuesday night was intro night. Dinner = lasagna of reasonable quality, Caesar salad, garlic bread (too tame) and mushrooms. Dessert = ample pie and ice cream. I was really tired so I drank too much coffee. It didn’t help in keeping me awake for the video, but it did keep me from falling asleep that night in bed. Unfortunately, since it was intro day, we did not break into groups to discuss the sermon, which was too bad.

If you’re just showing up, you might want to read the previous two posts: Alpha Course: see it again for the first time, and Alpha Course Primer. These will get you up to date on what Alpha is and why I’m attending.

The introductory sermon was entitled “Christianity: Boring, Untrue, and Irrelevant?” In it Nicky Gumbel attempts to address these three common reasons given by non-Christians about why they aren’t. Let’s go through what Gumbel said about each of them:

Boring

I was pretty tired that night so I might have slept through it, but I’m pretty sure he never said anything to counter the “boring” accusation.

Untrue

For me, this is the deal breaker, and the one that I had the argument about with my wife afterward.

In this, Gumbel did a particularly unconvincing job. You’d think that if you wanted to convince people of something’s truth, you’d demonstrate it with your best evidence. In fact, not one shred of evidence was given (hopefully the other lectures on the subject will provide some). Instead, he started out by telling a story of when he was an atheist in school. He was “so misguided” that he had written an essay detailing his proof that there was no God, and that the quality of theological knowledge at his school was so poor that his essay was nominated for the theology essay prize. If course, this kind of comment draws a smug chortle from the fundy crowd.

He went from this straight to multiple arguments from authority. First, he named a British historian, Thomas Arnold of Oxford, who said (note: he’s very dead, d. 1842) that the resurrection is the best attested fact of history – a whopper if I ever heard one (see a long ago post about this here). Here we see an example of fundy-style “binary thinking” about God (all or nothing) – not only is the resurrection true, it’s the MOST true! Even though being most true is completely unnecessary for their claims and being most well documented is a completely unreasonable demand to make of something that was 2000 years ago. That it’s probably NOT true and it’s NOT EVEN SPARSELY historically documented is a big problem though.

Next followed more arguments from authority: Gumbel said that many people who make careers out of evaluating evidence, like scientists and lawyers, support Christianity. He then listed a fairly long and impressive list of scientists (plus mathematicians and philosophers of a more scientific bent), including Descartes (d. 1650), Newton (d. 1727), Kepler (d. 1630), Locke (d. 1704), Galileo (d. 1642), Copernicus (d. 1543), Faraday (d. 1864), Boyle (d. 1691), Mendel (d. 1884), Kelvin (d. 1907), Maxwell (d. 1879) and some guy named James Simpson (d. 1870). Problems with this: First, science is evidence-based, not authoritative. If you’re going to reference scientists, do them the honour of explaining why they believe something, rather than just that they did. Second, most of the scientists listed lived in the 16th through the early 19th centuries. This is a big problem when you consider that the bulk of them lived before Darwin and Natural Selection (published 1859), before Lyell (published 1830-3) and modern geology, and before an understanding of the universe outside our solar system (Hubble proved that there were other galaxies around 1925). In their days, Christianity was not questioned much and origins were deferred to Genesis because there was no scientific alternative available. Now, with the discoveries of modern cosmology, evolutionary biology, and physics, scientists today are overwhelmingly atheistic (only about 7% of members of the US National Academy of Sciences believe in something similar to the Christian God).

Irrelevant

The third section talked about Christianity’s relevance. Or something like that. By this time, I was getting really tired and had started to zone out. Strangely, the impression I got was that his talk on relevance was kind of irrelevant.

The only thing I gleaned was yet another example of fundamentalist “binary thinking” – black or white, all or nothing, and superlatives to either side. Gumbel quoted CS Lewis who said that if Christianity is not true, it is of no importance, and if it is true, it is of ultimate importance. No middling importance. Well, that’s not quite true there, my dear deceased CS and my dear mentally deceased Nicky. If Chirstianity is true, then it certainly is of ultimate importance; however, I have zero faith in Christ but I think Christianity is somewhat important because of its cultural and historical relevance – for better or worse (usually worse) it affects my life. And what about Muslims? If they’re correct, then Christianity is partially true and therefore of some but not supreme relevance. Regardless, it's relevence is tied to its truthfulness, so there's still a ways to go there.

We (me, my wife, and her two friends) sat together at a table with one guy, there without his wife, who was at home with his kids. According to him, she was of admirably strong faith and had been for many years. He was there to, in essence, catch up. Nice guy. Already indoctrinated. I didn’t get a chance to interact with anyone else to hear their thoughts.

In summary, dinner was nice but unspectacular and the Alpha Course spectacularly managed to be boring, untrue, and irrelevant.

Alpha Course Primer

2008-10-04T10:53:00.000-04:00

Before I get into the meat of what went on in the Alpha Course Tuesday night, I’m going to introduce what Alpha is and how it works for those of you not familiar with it (feel free to click on the “alpha course” tag at the bottom of this post to read my previous stuff feelings on it).

The Alpha Course is an introductory course into the basics of Christianity aimed at interested potential converts, new Christians, and Christians who haven’t really thought about their faith that much. Its aims are to reinforce the Gospel message and teach people how to be Christian in regards to what their faith means, how to pray, and other religious fluff. Since 1990, it has been run by Nicky Gumbel, a reverend in the Church of England. It’s a popular course that is taught in churches all over the world.

Through bribes of free dinner, it draws its participants in once a week. After eating, participants watch a video lecture (I’ll often call it a sermon; that’s basically what it is) by Gumbel about a particular introductory Christian topic. Afterwards, participants break into small groups of about a half-a-dozen to discuss the message in the sermon. From the website, the topics are:

• Is there more to life than this? (previously Christianity: Boring, Untrue and Irrelevant? – which is the video we got.)
• Who is Jesus?
• Why did Jesus die?
• How can I be sure of my faith?
• Why and how should I read the Bible?
• Why and how should I pray?
• How does God guide us?
• How can I resist evil?
• Why and how should I tell others?
• Does God heal today?
• What about the church?
• Who is the Holy Spirit? [*]
• What does the Holy Spirit do? [*]
• How can I be filled with the Holy Spirit? [*]
• How can I make the most of the rest of my Life? [*]
* denotes topics discussed at a weekend retreat

Nicky Gumbel is an interesting person to watch and listen to. He looks kind of like a Wallace and Grommit version of Richard Gere, except Gumbel has a buck-toothed Napoleon Dynamite look to him. A bit annoying, but he actually comes across as a happy, friendly, “genuine” guy (genuine in quotations because, while he’s genuinely friendly and happy, you’ll see that a lot of what he says is anything but genuine).

As Theo Bromine noted in the previous post’s comments, reasons given to believe are factually superficial and highly emotional. The overriding theme in the introductory sermon was actually the “God-shaped hole in everyone’s hearts” (I guess Nicky doesn’t believe in content atheists). Other than the overwhelming “God’s love” stuff, there’s not much in the program to convince people who are investigating Christianity to actually accept it. Most of the program takes God and Jesus as a given, and instead focuses on prayer guidance and other such things you’d have to worry about assuming you’d just become a Christian.

Other early thoughts are that Alpha works frequently through name dropping and quotations that may or may not be taken out of context. Names dropped during the introductory sermon included: Freddy Mercury, CS Lewis, Robert Louis Stevenson, some British barrister which would be a lot more impressive if I lived in England (note: turns out his name is Frank Morison; he’s not important enough to have a wikipedia article), Leo Tolstoy, and a bunch of scientists you’ll see in the next post. Some of these guys weren’t even Christian, but they’ve been quoted as saying they had a void in their lives for whatever reason, so Gumbel just inserted God into that void on their behalves. Another key thing about all this name dropping: the vast majority of the famous people being name-dropped are long dead.

Another thing is that my Church Peeve #5 is alive and well (if you don’t remember, that’s Stretched Tie-ins to Pop Culture). He talked about football (soccer) quite a lot. He’s a bit more skilled than your average preacher at working these references in, but they are still pretty superfluous.

If you read my first post on going to Alpha, you’d remember that I was worried about two of my wife’s friends who had been bribed by food to attend. I was worried that their skepticism was insufficient and that they’d be won-over by Alpha. I’m not 100% sure yet, but it seems my fears were unfounded. They looked even less interested than I did. They did not crack one smile at any of the amusing stories Nicky Gumbel told. Afterwards, they said not one word to us about what we’d seen in the video. My general impression was that they were very unimpressed and will not being going back.

What about me? My wife wants me to go back, and I feel like there is some unfinished business because, as you’ll see in the next post, we didn’t get a chance to go into the small groups this week. Still, looking at the list of topics, I doubt I’ll be able to tolerate all the religious mumbo jumbo that’ll come fast and furious each week. I’m really not interested in how to pray or why I should be telling people about Christ. That said, I guess I’ll probably continue going as long as I can stand it just so I’ll have something to blog about.

Church Peeves: Part 6 - Bonus Good Stuff

2008-10-01T07:20:00.000-04:00

Over the past couple of weeks, I've posted a series of 5 posts of inconsequential stuff about some churches/churchgoers that really bugs me.

So in fairness, here is a quick one-off post of 5 inconsequential things about church that are actually pretty decent:

1) Musicians
Depending on the church (the younger and bigger the better) you can find some pretty damn good musicians. Too bad the music they play sucks monkey balls.

2) Charity work
Yeah, they run a few food drives and the Christmas shoebox campaign, so that’s good. Unfortunately, most of the programs at my wife’s church are of the bible camp/missionary trip/self-help program variety rather than outright charitable causes. Still, at least some of the money they collect isn’t spent on new Powerpoint projectors and a sweet games room.

3) The handful of guys slouched over and sleeping in their chairs
They hide in the back. They prop their heads up. They slouch and sleep. They really don’t want to be there. Perhaps, like me, they are forced to be there by their wives. In these guys, I feel like I’ve found a few kindred spirits. I, for one, am appreciative of when the pastor calls on the congregation to bow their heads in prayer because then I can rest my eyes for a while. I believe these guys feel the same way, and I respect that.

4) Hot girls
My wife would kill me for mentioning it, but at many churches I’ve been to, there are a lot of good-looking young women. And, while they aren’t dressed slutty per se, they are definitely advertising themselves for something. Not that I’m looking. Of course not. [shifty eyes]

5) Standing up, sitting down
And Standing up, and sitting down, then standing up again, followed by sitting down. You get the picture. It’s awesome. No wait, I fucking hate it. I must have run out of positive things to talk about. Oh well, at least it’s good exercise. And at least we don’t go to a Catholic church. How do Catholics not have huge quad muscles?

So in summary, church isn’t all horrible. There are at least a couple of good things going on for the annoyed atheist. Do they make church bearable? Hell no.

Alpha Course - see it again, for the first time

2008-09-30T18:00:00.002-04:00

Don’t laugh: After years of heckling, belittling denigration by me on the subject, I have reluctantly agreed to accompany my wife to the Alpha Course. Tonight is the first night, an introductory dinner, so nothing will be too painful. Yet.

Before anyone says anything about me being whipped¹, I’d like to say that I’m not actually vehemently opposed to going to Alpha. After mocking the course repeatedly (just click on the Alpha Course tag below to see examples) I’d really like to see just what the hell they are teaching beyond what can be gleaned from the textbook and talking with my wife. So I am interested – really - though probably not in the way Alpha organizers hope I’d be interested. Well, there’s that and the free dinner that’s provided. Bribes certainly help.

Actually, the free dinner is the cause of the third reason why I’m going; my wife managed to convince a couple of her friends to go too (both irreligious) due to the food bribes. I feel the need to protect them since, although they are currently skeptical, I don’t understand their thought processes well enough to know how well their Bullshit Detection Kits² are working, and I want to do something to protect them, just in case.

So with that in mind, I intend to be fully argumentative and bring my reasonably extensive scientific, historical, and biblical knowledge to bear. I’m not exactly sure how confrontational I’ll be since I don’t think I can be an absolute dick and still be an effective debater - or even tolerated at the table, for that matter – but I’ll try to sow some doubt and try to ensure that those who weren’t Christians before won’t become Christians after. I guess the questions are how confrontational can I be and how will it affect my marriage?

Will King Aardvark be sleeping on the couch?³ Stay tuned over the coming weeks and find out…

¹ I likely am.

² Carl Sagan called it the Baloney Detection Kit, but that was in the ‘90s and we’ve progressed linguistically since then.

³ It’s actually a pretty nice couch, so I can swing that if necessary.

Stretched Tie-ins to Pop Culture: Church Peeves Part 5

2008-09-29T08:14:00.000-04:00

Church Peeves: Part 5

This is the fifth in a 5-part series of things about church/churchgoers that piss me right the hell off that are of little or no consequence whatsoever:

5) Extremely stretched tie-ins to popular culture

Is it reasonable to talk about the gross stuff you saw last night on Fear Factor as a prelude to a sermon about Acts of the Apostles?

How about spending five minutes talking about watching Canadian Idol with your wife just to introduce the topic of idolatry? Yes, it has “idol” in the title, but it’s just a freakin’ talent show.

Here’s a hint for all the preachers out there: admiration for Sam Roberts as a musician does not equal idolatry either. We know that you’re just attempting to ride the coattails of a successful popular culture figure in order to hook the audience into listening to you.

And you know what? It’s lame and ineffective. Please cut it out. You’re only embarrassing yourself.

One time, we had a pastor who was a huge hockey fan. He introduced his sermon with a few slides discussing the rather silly Vote for Rory^* campaign, where NHL fans tried to elect the unworthy defenseman to the NHL All-Star Game. I have no idea how the Vote for Rory campaign even tied into anything the pastor was saying. I would like to say it was something like “Jesus is voting for you even though you don’t deserve it,” but that wasn’t it. I can’t even remember what the sermon was about anymore since the tie-in was so loose. It hurt my brain, not only as a church-goer but as a hockey fan.

Few things are more mentally painful that an awkward, desperate tie-in. Yet time and time again preachers try and stretch to connect the fad of the day to whatever Jesus topic they were planning on speaking about.

I don’t think they can be that clueless as to how bad their connections are. My guess is that it’s one of two things, possibly both, depending on the person:
1) preachers have no shame and are willing to tie anything to anything else to try to sell their product
2) newbie preachers/speakers have been told that pop culture tie-ins are a great way to engage audiences, so they use them, despite knowing that they are clueless about doing it properly

^* FYI: In the NHL, the starting lineups for the all-star game are decided by online fan voting. The ballot has options for voting for the most likely star players at each position, but write-in votes are allowed. Back in 2006-2007, fans started a movement to try to elect Rory Fitzpatrick, a journeyman defenseman with no standout qualities, to the starting defense. The movement took on a life of its own and Rory just missed out on the all-star selection.

Ps. Yes, I voted for Rory a bunch of times.

Hard-Ons for Jesus: Church Peeves Part 4

2008-09-25T08:10:00.000-04:00

Church Peeves: Part 4

This is the fourth in a 5-part series of things about church/churchgoers that piss me right the hell off that are of little or no consequence whatsoever:

4) Hard-ons for Jesus, yet anti-gay

It’s true: a good number of the men who go to church have literal hard-ons for Jesus. Want proof? Okay:

Think about how many times you hear a guy speaking at the church who says things like he “loves Jesus,” or is “in a relationship with Him,” or “desperately needs Him,” or is "passionate with Jesus" and the like.^* For those of you who haven’t been to church in a while, I’ll give you a hint: it’s a lot. And these are self-proclaimed manly men – the type that would never admit to having loving feelings towards male members of their own families. Ergo, we have to assume these yearnings for Jesus have some homosexual undertones.

And there’s nothing wrong with that. I know from the Kinsey studies that people are on a sliding scale from fully straight to fully gay with most people in between. Their hard-ons for Jesus are purely natural, considering how wonderful Christians believe he is. Definitely mancrush-worthy if you like the skinny bearded type.

The problem is that the man love that these guys embrace does not extend to men other than Jesus. You’d think that this man-man common ground would lead to a positive understanding between Christian men and homosexuals, but strangely it does not.

^* re: the “loves Jesus,” “desperately needs Him,” etc. It really is like the South Park episode where Cartman starts a successful Christian music act by taking fluffy pop songs and replacing the ‘girl’s and ‘baby’s with ‘Jesus’

Your Use of the English Language Sucks: Church Peeves Part 3

2008-09-22T08:21:00.000-04:00

Church Peeves: Part 3

This is the third in a 5-part series of things about church/churchgoers that piss me right the hell off that are of little or no consequence whatsoever:

3) Your use of the English language sucks

Did you know that “the resurrection” is not an event, it’s a person? Me neither. Of course, this was said in my wife’s church referring to Jesus. So Jesus isn’t just man and God, he’s also an event, too? Jesus is a freakin’ Swiss Army Knife.

I’m not sure if that works. Can I just claim an event for myself? As in “the passing-of-gas is not an event, it’s King Aardvark?" Does that make sense? It’s not like it’s Jesus’ boxing nickname (Jesus “The Resurrection” Christ would work, though we saw how bad he was at boxing in South Park).

I think this is all part of a ploy to break the audience’s brains so they’ll stop thinking and just suck everything in.

Another thing that bothers me is the capitalization of anything remotely to do with God/Jesus. You don’t write, “Where is KING AARDVARK going in His Car? Is He going for pizza? KING AARDVARK, You have stated it is the Truth that mushrooms are your favourite topping. It is an example of Your Wisdom.”

You don’t write that, yet somehow this has become the preferred style when writing about God.

One more thing: How come when members of the congregation get up to lead a prayer they start speaking with archaic ‘thee’s and ‘thou’s and ‘verily’s and the like? Dude, who the hell do you think you are? This isn’t 16th century England, you’re not a Shakespearean actor, and the Bible you use is the freaking New International Version, for crap’s sake.

To summarize: having obnoxious word/capitalization usage doesn’t make you look pious; rather, it makes you look like a giant douchebag who has been drinking too much douche-flavoured Cool-Aid and fell out of a douche tree, striking every branch on the way down. Please speak/write like a normal human being, ya douche.

Palin for President

2008-09-18T08:20:00.000-04:00

I’m getting on the bandwagon. There is a Palin out there who is a much better candidate for leader of the free world:

Not only is he worldy, well-educated, and probably the nicest guy on the planet, he’s also a lumberjack and he’s okay.

Secular Advice? Nope, it's God's: Church Peeves Part 2

2008-09-16T20:02:00.000-04:00

Church Peeves: Part 2

This is the second in a 5-part series of things about church/churchgoers that piss me right the hell off that are of little or no consequence whatsoever:

2) Secular advice? Nope, it’s God’s

a. Question: when does a church sermon actually feature a useful message?
b. Answer: when that message is a mundane secular message.

There was some good advice at a church service I went to the other day. It was all about taking one day off a week just to refresh by not thinking or doing anything about stuff you consider to be work. I like that advice. In fact, I try to have several days a week like that; however, annoying things like my job or my wife (just kidding) do all they can to get in the way of that. The pastor talked of his early ministerial life where he felt burned-out continuously because he never took a day to himself and eventually the senior pastor had to force him to take Mondays off. This is all good advice.

Of course, I could have given you this advice without having to create something called a Sabbath, tying it into a story in Genesis about God “resting” on the seventh day - not because he was tired but to serve as an example for us, and causing some poor guy picking up sticks on a Sunday to be stoned to death:

32 While the Israelites were in the desert, a man was found gathering wood on the Sabbath day. 33 Those who found him gathering wood brought him to Moses and Aaron and the whole assembly, 34 and they kept him in custody, because it was not clear what should be done to him. 35 Then the LORD said to Moses, "The man must die. The whole assembly must stone him outside the camp." 36 So the assembly took him outside the camp and stoned him to death, as the LORD commanded Moses.

Apart from sabbathing, I’ve heard other good sermons about marital relationships and conflict resolution, the benefits of hard work even in poor circumstances, charity, and striving to push yourself beyond your comfort zone. They all had tenuous ties to the Bible and the secular advice was pretty spot-on, though some of the more firm ties to the Bible were pretty sketchy in advice quality (see the stoning of the dude in the Sabbath story – stoning people isn’t typically considered good advice under any circumstances in this day and age).

I really wish I had read the pamphlet entitled, “God-Centred Approach to Job Loss.” That could have been enlightening.

One last thing: even though a secular advice-giver will give all this good advice as well as any other, for some reason many believers won’t take this good advice to heart unless it comes by way of a minister and a tenuous connection to the Bible. Trying to help people these people is frustrating.

Sarah Palin: Hockey Goon; or, How Obama can avoid a trip to the penalty box

2008-09-14T19:35:00.000-04:00

Sarah Palin worries me. She worries me because she’s a bible-thumping crazy who, if she attains power, will quite possibly take the world down in flames. She also worries me because, despite being a loud ignoramus, she’s been remarkably effective in drawing attention to herself and slandering Obama and Biden.

The hockey fan in me will now draw your attention to a new article on FiveThirtyEight.com explaining why she’s successful, not despite being a loud ignoramus, but because of it. You see, she’s not a hockey mom, she’s a hockey player: a 4th line agitator, a pest, a cheap-shot goon. And as agitators before her (eg, Sean Avery) have shown, she can be effective:

Watching Sarah Palin this week, and the reaction to her by both sides, and all the talk of hockey mommery, I realized that this is who she is. She skates into the corner, throws up an elbow, and the Democrats cry: "Foul!" Hey! She said Obama has never passed a major bill – this is an objective lie! Hey! She ridiculed community organizing the day after Service was the theme! Technically people should punish her by not voting for her over this infraction!

It’s whining, and whiners hit back second and go to the penalty box on top of it.

That’s right: the American public is like a hockey referee who hasn’t wised-up to the agitator’s antics. Palin can lie and slander all she wants; as long as she’s the agitator, any counterattack by Obama and Biden will come out looking bad.

In the old NHL, the way to handle a player like that would be to either send your goon out to pummel him into a fine paste or to do a nice two-handed ankle-breaking slash. Unfortunately, these options are no longer allowed - neither in the NHL nor in American politics.

The current solution in both venues is much trickier: you have to ignore them. Be it a punch to the head after the whistle or a blatant mischaracterization of your political history, you have to not respond to what they are doing and continue with your goals. Retaliate on the scoreboard, not on the ice.

For Obama and Biden, this means not giving the media a juicy retaliatory soundbites. The Dems have to keep on pushing their talking points and policies and avoid Palin’s distractions. They have to ensure the media presents them as all business while Palin is portrayed as a whiney hag. If they don’t, they’ll look haggier than the hag, and we’re all screwed.

--------------------------------------------------

Note: This actually ties-in pretty well with the debates between creationists and evolutionists (I hate using this term; it should say 'rational people'). On talk.origins you’ll often find mentions of the Gish Gallop, a "format of most debates where the creationist is allowed to run on for 45 minutes or an hour, spewing forth torrents of error that the evolutionist hasn't a prayer of refuting in the format of a debate." The solution is the same: don’t bother defending yourself. Stick to what you’re there to debate and take down your opponent on your terms, not his.

Church Peeves: Part 1

2008-09-05T19:48:00.003-04:00

As an atheist who keeps up with the writings of PZ Myers, Ebonmuse, Greta Christina, etc. I am well aware of the damages inflicted to the human thought process by religion and the dangers posed thereof. But that’s not to say there aren’t things about church/churchgoers (not all of them, but a significant portion of them) that piss me right the hell off that are of little or no consequence whatsoever. And since I really need to vent, you’re going to read about them in a 5-part series. Here’s the first:

1) Bland Omni-Happiness

You know the type: the kindly middle-aged lady, the smiling and squinting old gentleman greeter, the pudgy junior pastor – all sorts of people at the church united by one common element – they are always, always happy-looking. You come in the door; they smile. You sit down next to them; they smile. You engage in half-hearted small talk; they smile. It doesn’t matter if times are good or times are bad; if it’s raining, snowing, or sunny; if a group of orphans just got run over in the parking lot; or if you’ve just insulted their stinky old grandmother with a limp: they keep on smiling that same soulless lobotomized smile. They are like freaking morning TV show hosts.

Here’s a news flash to all the smiley automatons of the religious world: it’s okay to show emotions other than bland omni-happiness. It’s what makes us interesting as human beings. If God^* had wanted us to only smile, he wouldn’t have given us all these wonderful facial muscles that can make us look angry, bored, confused, frustrated, and (here’s one to try) genuinely happy – not the phony-looking blandly happy garbage that these guys put on.

That said, I’m sure some of them really are that happy; for some, they who have drunken deeply of the Jesus cool-aid, I’m sure that there is a genuine euphoric response to being holed-up church surrounded by people and things that have been Jesified. However, I’m also sure that some of them are fakers and just going along with the crowd.

Regardless, I badly want to kick one of these guys in the nuts just so they will express some emotion other than the bland omni-happiness. Even though it may not be “emotion” so much as it will be “agonizing pain.” I’m sure there will be other emotions in there such as confusion and anger even if you can’t quite tell by looking at them. No matter; at least the smile will be gone.

Scratch that, I’d bet some of them would merely wince and drop to their knees, yet maintain their smile and reach out, saying, “Isn’t it a wonderful day to be loved by Jesus?”

Grinning bastards.

* Note: not actual God, but it’s much easier than writing, “If evolution by means of natural selection had selected for us to only smile…”

Blessed ... TO DEATH!

2008-08-21T12:36:00.003-04:00

From yahoo!, a 25 year old Bangladesh man has been killed and eaten by a crocodile. That's a horrible thing, made worse for the fact that his mother was there.

The fun part? The man was visiting a Muslim shrine where the crocodile and four of its brethren reside and was attempting to receive the croc's blessing.

You get that? Visiting crocs for a blessing? Just what do you think a blessing from a crocodile looks like? Just a nibble?

The shrine itself is fairly popular, with hundreds of pilgrims visiting each day to sacrifice goats and chickens to the crocs living in the pond. According to the article, part of the ritual involves bathing in the water with the crocs. Let's sum up: pond o' water, 5 crocodiles, bloody chicken and goat parts, bathing. Sounds like a smart idea to me. It's a miracle that people aren't eaten more frequently.

The benefits of basic reading comprehension

2008-07-28T11:44:00.001-04:00

Me and a bunch of friends were in the vicinity of some batting cages yesterday. There was a wide variety of pitching equipment, with little kids hitting slower pitches, bigger guys on the faster machines, and even a guy practicing for his slow pitch league.

There we saw a girl, looked like late teens or early twenties, with a girl friend the same age, dressed in typical young girl summer clothing - printed shirt, shorts, sandals, oversized sunglasses - and obviously spending too much time on her appearance. She was getting ready to bat, and we all stopped to pay attention, knowing that the results would be worth it.

She donned a batter's helmet, entered the cage, popped in her tokens, stepped awkwardly into the batters box and awaited the first pitch.

The fun began: "AAAAAAAAH!!!!!!" she let out a very loud high-pitched shriek of terror as the ball flew by and impacted the padded backstop with a loud "THUMP" behind her.

THUMP
THUMP
THUMP
as she cowered and fumbled with the door handle to eventually escape.

We all laughed and felt satisfied with her unfortunate situation.

But how did we know?

It wasn't that she was generally unathletic-looking and unprepared for swinging a bat.

Rather, it was basic reading comprehension and her obvious lack thereof.

And even then, it wasn't the fact that she ignored the posted "shoes required for safety" warnings, instead going in with sandals and endangering her feet. A downward foul ball could easily break toes. But it wasn't that.

Instead, it was the unmissably big sign on the door to the batting cage with the big red letters stating "BALL SPEED = FAST: 90+ MPH" that tipped us off.

Definitely worth the price of admission.

I suppose its time to weigh in on the Wafergate incident

2008-07-15T11:57:00.001-04:00

I suppose its time to weigh in on the Wafergate incident playing out on Pharyngula (better late than never, eh?).

First off, I’d like to comment on communion wafers themselves:

Communion wafers are crap. They are utterly tasteless, insubstantial, and have a texture like really weak cardboard. They border on being unfit for human consumption. To all you Catholics out there, you’d probably be better off horribly desecrating your wafers like PZ wants to rather than actually eating them. In fact, I have a theory that the original kid who stole the communion wafer did so because, when he put it in his mouth, it was so bland and unappetizing that he just couldn’t stand to swallow it.^*

PZ probably shouldn’t be referring to them as crackers. My wife is Protestant – they don’t believe in transubstantiation - but they do use actual little broken pieces of crackers for their communion, and sometimes even real bread. My wife really wants to try a communion wafer because they are “so small and cute.” She has a thing for tiny food items, like sushi or those little stubby ~200 mL cans of pop. Strange, I know. Regardless, if she ever tries the communion wafers she will be disappointed.

Speaking of using little broken cracker pieces for communion, I’m thinking that cracker companies are really losing out on product placement deals and opportunities for expanding into new markets. Imagine Ritz brand communion crackers and (insert TV sports announcer voice) St. Mary’s Cathedral Communion Break – Brought to you by Nabisco, and you’ll see the possibilities are limitless.

Second, I’d like to comment on whether PZ’s remarks were inappropriate:

Yes, they were inappropriate, but so what? It’s still funny. I think the debate is: do PZ’s inflammatory cracker threats hurt or help the godless cause?

Hemant at Friendly Atheist thinks it does no good whatsoever:

At the same time, trying to obtain a consecrated communion wafer for the sole purpose of destroying it serves absolutely no positive purpose. Now, you’re just trying to piss off Catholics.

Why bother? What good does it do to rub this in their face?

Does anyone really think that this act will cause any Catholic to say, "Oh! You are right! That is a crazy belief! Thanks, PZ!"

Now, I’m sure most Catholics will either just shake their heads in mild disgust at PZ’s antics or send in hate mail/death threats. Certainly no positive purpose there, and quite possibly some negative results.

That said, I wouldn’t be surprised if Hemant’s last line actually does play out a few times. You’d be surprised at the number of Catholics who are just going with the flow and don’t actually know what they’re supposed to believe. I can certainly picture the likely response of many of my (only mildly) believing friends at Catholic school: "That’s what transubstantiation means? That's messed-up. It's only a freakin' wafer!"

They certainly won't say, "Oh! You are right! Thanks!" but hoping for a big slap of rational thought right in the face isn’t out of the question here.

I’ve always said that we need both loud, obnoxious unfriendlies (PZ etc) and friendlies (Hemant etc) to make the most change. Would 140+ people comment on Hemant’s friendly post on communion wafers if not for PZ's Wafergate scheme? I don’t think so.

So keep on being rude and inflammatory. As long as nicer atheists are there to clean up the mess, that is.

^* When I attended a Catholic highschool, I spent the first couple of years taking communion during school mass. Those wafers are most unappetizing. I didn't want to draw attention to myself as a heathen outsider during those early years - bad for the rep, especially if any overzealous teachers are watching. It was only after I established myself as a top student in the eyes of the teachers that I stopped. I still took it on some days when I was desperately hungry and needed something, anything, to sustain me until lunch.

Back in Church - I forgot how weird it was

2008-07-07T12:25:00.002-04:00

Okay, so I haven't posted in over a month. It's been stupid busy in my life this whole time what with moving into a new house, being swamped at work, and generally feeling lazy because the last three months have been insanely hectic (the last week or so of that "lazy" refers specifically to following the NHL free agency period).

My last post was about me trying to make a positive lifestyle choice and walking the ~35 minutes to work for the first time. I have chosen today to post because today I walked to work for the second time. That's right: too damned tired every single damn day since June 4 to walk again, and I finally forced myself to do it today.

I'm so proud.

There is one big plus side to being so busy that I don't have the energy to post: we don't have time for church anymore. In fact, the last time my wife dragged me off to church was Easter^*. As with not walking, that streak came to an end as well.

You know, after not going to church for almost three months, you forget how weird it is:

-People standing and singing with their eyes closed and their hands raised up in the air.
-People leading prayers that sound like "Jesus, we pray to you Lord Jesus for mercy, even though we do not deserve it, Jesus, and we pray, Jesus, that you will guide the hearts of our missionaries going to Estonia, where they will be spreading your holy word, Jesus, and keep them safe, Jesus. In Jesus precious name, Amen."
-And speaking of that, Estonia? Estonia is Christian already.
-All that fire and brimstone preaching, including convoluted confused theology due to the whole switch-over from OT to NT, and "works" vs. "faith - it's a really messy religion.

At least it's not Catholic; our guy spouting the fire and brimstone doesn't have to wear a goofy costume.

*If you don't count all the historical East Orthodox churches we visited in Greece.

Positive Lifestyle Change

2008-06-04T10:29:00.001-04:00

Today for the first time I walked to work from my new house.

Thirtysevenmotherfuckingminutes.

I may have to start waking up earlier to get there on time. Or buy a bike.

Positive lifestyle change is hard¹.
______________________________________________________

Back to the house:

We moved in on Friday. The lawyer said we'd get the keys around 1pm. Of course, that means we didn't get the keys until 4pm. Lousy lawyers².

What followed was close to a dozen trips in our car and my dad's van to the new house, broken up by a nice big greasy Swiss Chalet dinner (conveniently located right around the corner from our new house). We didn't end up getting to bed until 2:30am because we couldn't stop until we found our toothbrushes/clothes for the next day. Since everything was packed away in boxed stashed in the garage, this took quite a while.

We never did find our shower curtain. The next morning was quite soggy in the bathroom.

Since then, we've spent most of our days (and nights) cleaning the new house to get rid of 'the old people germs', as my wife calls them. 2:30am seems to be our new bed time since we can't justify going to bed while the house is still so dirty and disorganized. On the plus side, all the late night cleaning meant that we slept through church on Sunday. We made the house clean enough that by Monday night we didn't have to stay up to 2:30am cleaning, but then the stupid hockey game went to triple overtime, resulting in another 2:30am night.

It's been a weird experience. Hard to believe that we've got a house. Back when we lived in the apartment we didn't like to refer to it as 'home' because it was just a crappy apartment. But it felt a bit like home; it was comfortable and familiar. The new house doesn't feel like home at all. It feels weird and alien - almost like we're house-sitting for someone and we're going to be kicked out soon.

Some realizations:

-When the hell did we accumulate so much crap?
-How the hell did we fit so much crap into our old little apartment?
-My god, my wife has way too many clothes. About 6 huge garbage bags full, plus many still on hangers, plus a bunch of shoes and hats.
-We actually didn't move that far. We can still hear the train but it least it isn't in our backyard anymore.

¹ I actually walked to work once from the old apartment when my wife took the car someplace. Fifty-seven minutes that time, but I managed to scam a ride home.

² Please don't sue me.

It’s Almost Moving Day

2008-05-29T15:18:00.001-04:00

Since getting back from Greece, I’ve been ludicrously busy at work¹ and at home getting ready for the big move. It still hasn’t struck me yet that tomorrow my wife and I will be moving into our very own house.

It’s hard to believe: me, a home owner (though not really; the mortgage company is the one ponying up the dough – give us about 7-8 years to pay it off). It wasn’t too long ago that I was living in a slum of an apartment in grad school.

I often miss grad school, with its relative lack of responsibility, flexible work hours, etc, and part of my brain would love to go back to it if I could. The other part says, “Dude, you can afford to buy a house!” So, understandably, brain part #2 wins, and thus I stay at my relatively well paying job.

Speaking of the house itself, we really lucked out and got a house exactly in our price range, well-built, and in a location we wanted. My wife, of course, thanks her prayers to God for it. Actually, it was the same thing with her job and with my job – we both had requirements for the jobs we wanted to get when we left school and we both found jobs that satisfied those requirements. She thanked God. She didn’t thank the fact that we’re both properly educated and experienced for these jobs and searched until we found something suitable (she actually spent 3 months after we left school searching for her job). Again, with the house we got ourselves a good realtor, told him exactly what we wanted, and eventually something came up. It’s no miracle.

I leave with a quote from The Simpsons:

Homer: So, Mr. Malloy, it seems that the cat has been caught by the very person who was trying to catch him.
Skinner: How ironic.

¹'Work' being a bridge that was due for tender on May 16, wasn't actually tendered until May 22, and we're sending an addendum out tomorrow to fix all the little errors and omissions that we missed originally.

Mmmm, souvlaki

2008-04-25T14:12:00.003-04:00

After three weeks of living hell while my supervisor was away ("I'm going to New Zealand for 3 weeks; have these two bridges and this bridge rehab database completed by the time I get back. By the way, I haven't left you any of the background info that will allow you to do these things and all the other people working on these projects, regardless of whether they work for our company or for the owners, take forever to get anything done.") things are finally winding down. My supervisor is back, so all the crap I tried (unsuccessfully) to finish while he was away now gets dumped on him.

I can guarantee that it will still be waiting for me when I get back from my vacation to Greece in two weeks.

No that I no longer care about work (I'm just waiting out the clock now), and I finished taking care of all the mortgage/lawyer stuff for our new house, and the trip planning has been finished, I can finally start to look forward to Greece. I'm a history nerd, so this is going to be really cool. I may have to drag my bored wife around several museums and ruins, but I'll be happy.

We'll be taking a bus tour from Athens to Meteora, Delphi, Olympia, Napflion, Corinth, Mycenae, and finally back to Athens. After that, we get a more leisurely 2 days in Mykonos, 3 days in Santorini, and 3 days in Crete. We'll be taking lots of pictures, eating lots of gyros, and probably spending way too much money for people who have just bought a house.

Fortunately, my company just gave its staff a $1000 bonus. Yay! Let me open this here cheque and - hey! damn government took $418 out of my bonus.

Apparently I think you all suck

2008-04-24T15:45:00.000-04:00

You Are 80% Misanthropic

Here's the truth: Most people suck. You are just lucky enough to know it.

You're not ready to go live alone in a cave - but you're getting there.

How Misanthropic Are You?

Whole lot of nothing

2008-04-16T12:55:00.002-04:00

Well, no updates for a while here. Many reasons for that:

a) Super busy - As many of you can surmise, I mainly blog at work when I'm procrastinating (I know, probably going to be fired); however, my supervisor left for a 3 week vacation to New Zealand and dumped a metric assload of work on my desk that all needed to be done a month ago.

b) Real life getting in the way (non-work) - I've been running around like a miniature daschund that's just stepped in an ant hill full of angry red ants (there's a reason the red ones were the badguys in SimAnt). There are two main things taking up all my time right now: 1) bought a house, so I have to do all sorts of paperwork for mortgage, lawyer, house inspection, and other assorted crap, and 2) going on vacation to Greece for a couple of weeks, so I have to organize all of that. FYI - #2 will result in a further blog haitus until mid May. I also realize it was unwise of me to schedule a vacation for NHL playoff time.

c) Surprisingly little to write about recently.

Apologies for wasting your precious time.

It would be better

2008-04-04T15:55:00.000-04:00

Last night my wife said an interesting thing about religion, the likes of which I'd never heard from her before.

We were discussing the Iraq situation and I talked about the division between Sunni and Shia Muslims that is helping to fuel so much civil warfare there. An hour or so later, she displayed an impressive train of thought for someone who usually has religious blinders on, actually connecting criticism of another religion to her own religion and appreciating the meaningful parallels.

Out of the blue, and with a touch of disappointment in her voice, she said, "It would be better if God would just come down and explain exactly what was going on and exactly what he wanted."

Indeed it would.

Hmm, I should really swear more...

2008-04-01T15:50:00.002-04:00

That red zone on the meter sure is tantilizing...

Created by OnePlusYou - Free Online Dating

From BigHeathenMike.

Bad News

2008-03-31T08:36:00.000-04:00

The bad news is that I have to degrannify a house.

The even worse news is that my study into the correlation between religiosity and home decor will have to end.

Spirits sagging: The end of the rover missions?

2008-03-25T11:06:00.001-04:00

NASA's Spirit rover, currently exploring Mars, was only designed for an operational life of three months. Four years later both Spirit and its sibling, Opportunity, are a bit worse for wear but still going strong. Now I've just learned that Spirit is about to be waylaid not by the harsh Martian environment nor by mechanical failure but by budget cuts: the damnable US government is too busy pissing away money in Iraq to maintain the rover mission's $20 million per year budget¹. The new budget of $16 million means that Spirit will have to be put in hybernation for the forseeable future while Opportunity will have its work cut back.

So, you can spend billions of dollars a year for an illegal and incompetently managed war but not an additional $4 million to unlock the secrets of the universe? Way to stick your heads in your asses, GOP.

More details can be found at The Martian Chronicles.

¹ To be fair, the feds aren't directly to blame on this. NASA is given a limited budget, and they decided that it would be better to cut the rover funding and divert the $4 million elsewhere. Still, the sucky NASA budget comes from somewhere, and that somewhere has their priorities screwed up tremendously².

² Hey, dems, don't you control congress now? Shouldn't you, you know, do something about this?

Pastor doesn't have a clue

2008-03-24T14:55:00.000-04:00

My wife dragged me to church on Easter Sunday. You'd think that since Easter is the most important day on the whole Christian holiday schedule they'd have a special service of some sort, but it really did seem like more of the same. They threw around the word "Truth" (capital 'T' intended) entirely too much, all for stuff which is unsupported opinion. They, in a semantic nightmare, referred to "the resurrection" as "a person (Jesus) not an event." And then the pastor got down to the actual sermon which, while mentioning the resurrection occasionally, was really focused on the persecution complex that Christians have.

"Christians are being attacked on all sides" by things like secularism, obscurism, and the neo-atheists, the pastor said. The neo-atheist part was interesting, in that it seems the pastor doesn't know what being an atheist means. He complained that people like Dawkins and Hitchens were ridiculously blaming things like war, disease, the spread of HIV, crime, etc. on God.

On God, eh?

It's not like the most important thing about being an atheist is, you know, not believing in God? I'd expect such unthinking ignorance from the fundy rank and file but I hoped better of the pastor. I guess I was hoping for too much, as I've yet to meet a pastor who isn't a theistard (I have no idea where the guys at Debunking Christianity find their ivory tower theists who in no way resemble the real theists - anyone who thinks The God Delusion attacks a strawman of religion needs to leave the aforementioned tower, go to a freakin' church, and listen to the head ignoramus speak).

It's also interesting how when Christians complain they are under attack, the attack consists of anti-discrimination laws (laws that ensure religious freedom), a bit of reasoned argument, and a big heaping pile of ridicule. It's not like it's the Inquisition or anything. Afterall, the secularists and the neo-atheists wouldn't kill a man for claiming to be the son of God. We leave that up to the Sadducees.

Home Décor – Additional

2008-03-20T12:10:00.001-04:00

Upon another weekend of house hunting, we have a few more tallies for my pigeonholing of religion vs. décor. First were two houses that again fall into the single religion = very austere grouping. The first one I could tell from outside the house how granny it was; I could see granny drapery through the windows. The inside was not terribly religious, just a big, centrally-placed bible and a little cross tucked away in one of the rooms. Still, it fit neatly into my categories. The second one was terrific: the first non-Christian confirmation of my categories. This was a Muslim house, with inscriptions in Arabic all over the place. The women wore traditional fully covered clothing. And the house was very barren and not welcoming at all.

However, the next two homes kind of destroyed my breakdown a bit. The third house we saw just didn’t fit since the current owners were just reselling a house they bought last year. There was literally no décor to speak of. The fourth house was tasteful granny, but fully secular. I’d never seen one of these before. It’s always contemporary secular, tastefully granny but kind of religious. Very odd.

Anyway, it was a nice old guy and his wife moving to a condo. We weren’t supposed to meet him, yet we did. Why? It was sort of a townhouse, in this case, garage connected to the neighbours’ garages but the actual living space did not share walls. Also, the backyards were separated by tall fences. To get to the backyard, you have to go through either the garage or the house. We went through the backdoor of the garage (we didn’t want to track our dirty boots through the house to use that back door). So me, my wife, my mom (who came down to help us out) and the real-estate agent were in the back when we noticed that the back door to the garage had closed and locked. We were trapped in the backyard with no way out. Doors unopenable. Fences unscalable. Neighbours absent. The realtor had his cellphone and was able to call the owners who had to hurry back to free us. The good news is that we got to examine the backyard in exquisite detail while we waited.

They had a very nice garden.

The owner did eventually free us after a little while. I was amazed he did. He’s quite hard of hearing and I was astounded he could understand our desperate phone call. Our agent said that in the many years he’s been working, something like this has never happened before.

Anyway, despite getting locked in the backyard, we put in a lowball offer on the house. We’ll see what happens.

This can't be a good idea

2008-03-17T09:31:00.003-04:00

As my wife and I strolled into her church yesterday (15 minutes late, as usual) I suddenly realized it was Palm Sunday; one of the ushers was doing an impression of a tree, holding a large collection of palm leaves in front of him. To my surprise, he gave one to my wife and another to me. To summarize: he gave a palm leaf to me. TO ME!!!

Are they frickin' idiots or something?

2.5 ft long, fairly sturdy, sword-shaped palm leaf. Relatively dark enclosed room. Mind-numbing, gut-wrenching, jaw-dropping boredom.

And me.

AND.

ME.

On the scale of ideas, this is below Boston's maligned Big Dig and only slightly above giving a loaded AK-47 to an orangutan.

That is to say, not a very good idea at all.

*poke* *poke* *poke*

I'm amazed I didn't get thrown out.

Happy St. Patty's day, boys and girls.

Ape Book

2008-03-10T09:26:00.000-04:00

As I mentioned here, the next time I was in Toronto I planned on picking up the ape book. Well, I did. And there was much rejoicing!

(FYI: the book turned out to be a lot more scholarly than I remembered. Turns out it's by famed primatologist Birutė Galdikas, so that's some Canadian content, too.)

My office is getting kicked in the nuts

2008-03-05T13:12:00.000-05:00

I have a crappy little grey cubicle at the office. This crappy grey cubicle sits in a pale grey room. I am far away from any source of natural light. The very loud PA speaker, which services a tributary area of about 8m x 10 m, is directly over my head.

I am being moved to a new cube.

You’d think I’d be happy about it, but I am not. You see, my new cube will be even worse. Even smaller. Even greyer. The room it’s in is small and prison-like, dark and with cinderblock walls on all sides. It also happens to be on the far side of the building through several additional security doors and past the garbage room in a part of the building that I had never been to before in my life.

I heard from the previous occupants that they called this room "The Morgue."

My current cube has the benefit of being near the rest of my department but far enough away that no one can conveniently bother me or walk by – the best of both worlds, really. The new cube will be the worst of both, as half the department will move with me to the new prison room and the other half will stay put. Now I’ll have to call ahead if I want to see someone from the staying half, and then walk all the way across the building to see them; however, the other half will be so close so as to be practically breathing over my shoulder.

The only improvement will be that I’m closer to the window, though I still can’t see it directly. I forgot to check if the PA speaker is directly overhead again and, since it would take me about 5 minutes to walk there, I don’t think I’ll bother checking now (even if I could find the place again – seriously, I didn’t even know this area of the building existed).

I must look on the bright side of life, though, for the situation is even worse for other people. My supervisor is losing his big office with a window and moving into a much smaller new office featuring zero windows in the walls, zero windows in the dark grey metal door, block walls on all four sides, a low ceiling, poor lighting, door frames and window sills from the previous incarnation of the room that have since been filled-in with masonry, and, inexplicably, a lightswitch that is on the opposite side of the room from the door (knowing my supervisor's predisposition towards clutter, I predict many injuries). Close the door and it really is like being in a storage closet.

Monkeys fling poo, just like us!

2008-02-27T08:39:00.002-05:00

There’s this bargain bookstore that I go to frequently in Toronto where I’ve found such wonderful things as Carl Zimmer’s Parasite Rex and Evolution: The Triumph of an Idea, which you just can’t find anywhere else these days (on sale, that is). The past couple of times I’ve been in this bookstore, I’ve covetously passed by a largish coffee table book on apes, very tempted to buy it, but each time passing it up because of the $25 price tag and the fact that it is light on fact, heavy on photos. I like info, so that's a bit of a problem. That said, many of the photos are hilarious and just prove that you don’t need to put a chimp in a tuxedo to make it funny.

However, I’m thinking that I should be picking it up, and not just to laugh at the ape antics. Part of the reason religious fundies don’t like evolution is the “I don’t come from no monkey” mindset (complete with bad grammar). They, and sadly this “they” includes my wife, think it’s a horrible, demeaning idea that we’re related to grimy, stupid, poo-flinging animals. Perhaps if they just stretched their brains more they’d see how similar we actually are to our ape cousins: that they’re highly social, that they’re intelligent problem-solvers, and that they have well-developed personalities. There is nothing wrong with being related to an orangutan¹.

On the other hand, most of these people probably have already seen nature shows on tv and just filter the ape stuff through God coloured glasses. In which case my whole argument here is just rationalizing the fact that, if it’s still on the shelf, I’m buying that ape book the next time I’m there.

¹ FYI, I have an uncle who strongly resembles an orangutan. He was actually conceived in Borneo, where orangutans live. We don’t want to think about what this potentially means for cross-species fertility.

Book meme going around

2008-02-25T15:04:00.002-05:00

I've seen this book meme going around, so I decided to preempt it after reading CL's post about it (and the handy dandy bible quote she managed to get out of it: It really is "the good book." Who cares about the meaning of life or morality? The real important stuff is how to make the carrying harness for an ark.)

Anyway, here are the rules. Yet again, screw #5. I don't know that many people.

1. Pick up the nearest book of 123 pages or more. No cheating!
2. Find page 123
3. Find the first 5 sentences
4. Post the next 3 sentences
5. Tag 5 people

I'm kind of cheating; the nearest book to me is my Handbook of Steel Construction, which would not work very well. The steel book does not have a page 123 per se. Its format is 1-12, 3-121, etc, which is very good for a design manual but not very good for memes. Most pages don't have sentences either, but instead have of tables, figures, and clauses.

So I choose the second nearest book, which is Early Greece, 2nd Ed., by Oswyn Murray. Turns out this is a university text and it's extremely dry and detailed, yet amazingly contains little actual useful detail. Here's my three sentence excerpt:

For the homeland, prosperity again, and not only among the colonizing cities: Aegina never colonized, but the basis of her wealth was the resulting trade. The religion behind the colonists also benefited: the Delphi of Apollo the Leader became the richest and most important international sanctuary, and repository of the tithes of booty from victories colonial and home. Politically the influence was most perhaps from colony to mother city.

Ugh, I should have shuffled my books around a bit before doing this. That was horrible.

Pharmboy got snipped - live!

2008-02-22T09:35:00.003-05:00

Abel Pharmboy at Terra Sig went under the knife and liveblogged his vasectomy. Personally, I felt he didn't get into enough detail as far as his thoughts and fears during the operation, but given that the whole procedure takes ~20 minutes and that he's, you know, getting his general wang area hacked into, I can kind of forgive him.

The best comment on the post belongs to theo: "but do you mean to tell me i only had to ejaculate 20-30 times after the procedure to flush all the lives ones out?!!?!?! they told me i had to wait 6 mos. i coulda taken care of it in an afternoon if i'd known."

Religion makes you decorate your house like a colourblind imbecile

2008-02-21T09:43:00.000-05:00

We’re house hunting^* and have been witness to a bizarre variety of decorating options over the course of the ~10 houses we’ve seen so far. I’ve noticed a fascinating pattern of religious ornamentation. I’ve seen lots of Christian stuff, including crosses, crucifixes, inspirational posters, and East Orthodox icons. I’ve seen serious, old-fashioned Buddhas and jolly rotund Buddhas. I’ve seen the many arms of Vishnu (“hey, Ganesha, want a peanut?”). And, amazingly, despite the very limited sample size, some very definite trends have emerged that correlate religious expression with home fashion sense:

1) No Religious Ornamentation – This coincides strongly with the having the best home fashion: inviting colours, tasteful, well laid-out furniture, decent artwork. I can’t say for sure whether the current inhabitants actually live this well thought-out life of irreligion and good taste or if it’s just a ploy to sell the house better, ie. Obtain new furniture that you’ll return once you sell the house and clean the house to make it more presentable, ie. Hide your creepy religion. Regardless, these houses show very well.

2) One Dominant Religion on Display – This has always been one form of Christianity (no dominant Hindus yet). This coincides strongly with a more conservative approach to home décor. Sometimes it can be quite tasteful in a ‘granny’ sort of way. Mostly, it is just austere and cold, often keeping the unimaginative original carpet and paint. Typically the colours are drab or plain white. Crosses/crucifixes are obvious in the entrance and usually in the kitchen/dining area and in the bedrooms. There are usually bibles somewhere and maybe some fridge magnets, inspirational posters, even some artwork. Generally not too inviting.

2.5) Fascinatingly, there is a subset of this grouping: One dominant religion plus one wacky apostate – Twice I saw houses that looked like normal religious homes when I was suddenly floored by an incongruous room with a Buddha, Chinese calendars, incense, etc. Both times, this stuff was tucked away in the smallest, crappiest bedroom (actually a converted office room in one case and a cramped partially finished basement room in the other). I get a feeling the rest of the family is hiding these poor souls: tucked away in the darkest, lowest build-quality rooms to live their sinful lives in shame. Or I could just be building the story up in my mind. Either way, weird.

3) Religious Hodgepodge – These houses are living nightmares of décor. There are religious items of all sorts – Hindu, Buddhist, Christian, various Asian traditional religions – basically anything with some sort of catchy motif or trendy ‘religion of the day’ fad associated with it. There are typically woo books on the bookshelf. The paint is insane, usually bright and contrasting and not pale enough to be unobtrusive or dark enough to be soothing. For instance, one place kept the original burnt rose carpet and augmenting it with lime green walls. Furnishings are laid out in strange ways that interfere with movement. Furnishings are also hideously ugly, being of garish designs and colours that look like they are from a bad ‘80s science fiction show. They might have been trendy in the gawd-awful yuppieverse of the ‘80s, but did I mention all these houses were built in 2001 or later? Just atrocious. The basement of one had been converted into some sort of twisted dance club, complete with a superugly black and mirrored wet bar (of the aforementioned bad ‘80s science fiction variety - amazingly, it matched the master bedroom furniture), disco ball, and several miniature plasma lights instead of regular lightbulbs.

While correlation does not equal causation, I will go out on a limb and say that religion seems to impair your taste in some way, or that if your taste is impaired, you will choose to be religious. I will further say, in regards to the class #3 people out there: HOLY FUCK, WHAT’S WRONG WITH YOU? HOW DOES YOUR HOME MAKE SENSE IN ANY WAY? WHEN YOU THOUGHT YOU WERE WATCHING TRADING SPACES: HOME EDITION, WERE YOU REALLY HOPPED UP ON A COCKTAIL OF ASSORTED HALLUCINOGENS AND WATCHING AMERICAN GLADIATORS? I MEAN, SERIOUSLY, WTF?!!!

Okay.

Other than that, I have discovered that in about 40% of homes, regardless of income or education, there will be some form of blatant hockey-related ornamentation not necessarily confined to the rooms of the children. This is Canada, after all.

^* There’s a chance I’ll even be close enough to walk to work, which would be very cool.

All this time spent on atheism blogging is useful for something

2008-02-19T16:25:00.004-05:00

I think that yesterday, for the first time, all this time I’ve spent reading and participating in the atheism/culture wars blogosphere has paid off in a tangible way.

Last night, me, my wife, and a bunch of friends were gathered at another friend's house playing Wii and Cranium. The atheism stuff didn’t help the Wii playing in any way whatsoever (side note: this was my first time on a Wii and my arms are killing me! I mean, I'm in decent shape but, dude! serious lactic acid build-up. Stupid Rayman); however, it may have singlehandedly won my team the Cranium game¹. We were going for the final question which was to be a word question. I was selected because they guessed I was the best speller on the team (I believe my teammates just didn't want to spell). The other team read the question:

Them: “Spell the following word: ? ... {whisper to teammate} I don’t know this... Me neither. Do you? No. Umm, should we just try to sound it out? {speaks back to us} We don’t know this word, do you? {flashes it to one of my teammates who won’t be answering the question. She shakes her head “no”} Ok, no? I guess I should just try to say it {grumbles} ... here it goes: PRAW – SEE – LIE – TIZE.”

Me: “{hurriedly cutting him off} Oh, I know that word. Proselytize. It means to try to convert someone to your belief or viewpoint, usually regarding religion.”

Everyone but me: “Wha?! How does he know that? I’ve never heard of that before in my life.”

Them: “{grumbles} Now we’ve lost.”

Me: “Not so fast. I always get the ‘e’ and the ‘y’ mixed up. (here I demonstrate that I spend so much time on this stuff that I have a regular misspelling of an infrequently used word). {concentrates so as to not embarrass myself} P-R-O-S-{pause}E-L-Y-T-I-Z-E. {looks up hopefully}²”

Them: “Crap.”

My Team: “Woohoo!”

¹ A little boasting on my part. We were actually far, far ahead. We could have screwed up our next 10 chances at the final question and still won.

² To be honest, my spelling is only so-so these days (I have been seduced by spellcheckers) and I had never seen the word ‘proselytize’ until about two years ago on some atheist blog.

It's Darwin Day!

2008-02-12T12:14:00.000-05:00

Apparently, today is Chucky D's birthday. He'd have been 199 years old if he hadn't died a while back, though I imagine he'd be pretty wrinkly by now. In honour of the event, I bought Evolution (the Oxford Reader) edited by Mark Ridley, and also have a copy of The Origin of Species that I will read (eventually).

Ben Stein poster

2008-02-07T08:52:00.000-05:00

From Friendly Atheist. Awesome.