Entries in Life

From Fr Stephen’s The Challenge of Atheism:

Our conversation with Atheism is not about the stars and the planets, or about how our planet came to be and how long ago. Our conversation with Atheism is not about the literal character of stories in the Old Testament. Christians who focus on such things in their discussions with Atheism are largely agreeing that these are the essential questions for humanity – and they are not. The central question for humanity is the God revealed to us in and through Jesus Christ. If that God is the true God, then our religion can only be measured by the love we have for our enemy.

This is similar to what Fr Men said in an interview when asked Why be a Christian?:

Jesus, the preacher of morals—this is a historic myth. They would not have crucified him for just that alone. Jesus, the self-proclaimed Messiah? Why then did they not crucify Bar Cochba who also called himself messiah? And there were plenty of false messiahs. What was it in Jesus that aroused such love and such hatred? ‘I am the door’, he said, the door to eternity ( John 10:9). It seems to me that everything that is valuable in Christianity is valuable only because it is from Christ. What is not from Christ could as well belong to Islam or Buddhism. Every religion is a path towards God, a conjecture about God, a human approach to God. It is a vector pointing upwards from below. But the coming of Christ is the answer, a vector coming from heaven towards us. On the one hand, an event situated in history, on the other hand, something quite outside history. That’s why Christianity is unique, because Christ is unique.

So much of our time is wasted on non-essentials. And this is dangerous. Fr Stephen continues:

We believe that the world is so dangerous that even God Himself is not safe within it (cf. crucifixion). We also believe that our mission as Christians is to follow the example of the God/man Jesus Christ and yield ourselves up for crucifixion on behalf of our enemies. Anything less than that is not Orthodox Christianity in its fullness. … The challenge of Atheism is the challenge of despair. For Atheism cannot claim that human beings are improving. If anything, technology only makes us capable of far worse than the past.

Of course this is true — the world has always been and will always be a dangerous place and I cannot imagine it any other way — but what strikes me here is that it is dangerous to God Himself! And, while I’m as excited as any geek about the possibilities that our improving technology gives us, I know that governments have far more resources than to use and create Dangerous Technology than I or my cohorts have to use technology for humanity’s benefit.

Third, I have met the enemy and it is tribalism. I recently heard an interview with E.O. Wilson in which he was asked to react to the critiques of religion that Sam Harris and Richard Dawkins have famously been making. The problem isn’t religion, Wilson said, it’s tribalism. The two often coincide but they are not the same thing. Religion is not a pernicious force in the world. Tribalism is.

— I have met the enemy and it is tribalism This is good third-party confirmation of something I was trying to say a year ago about religion and violence (sparked by the original thread on Flutterby (I am now reminded that this was a response to something I wrote. I enjoy the back and forth.) Even if you were able to somehow eliminate all religion, people would find ways to group themselves. Some of those people would foment violence against the other “tribes”.

It is only my imaginary relationship with Christ (if the Church is invisible it is little more than imaginary). It is the visible character of the Church, and the possibility of boundary (everything visible has some boundary) that creates the “problem.” … The Problem of the Church is that there is one. Whatever free associations man has created, there still exists a Church whose life is rooted in that first community in Jerusalem and stretches through the centuries into the present. It is not a problem to be solved – but it is a challenge to the fiction of invisible Churches and boundary-less associations.

(From The Problem of Church) Recently, it was pointed out to me that I was not entirely respectful of the way someone chose to “dedicate” their child in church. While it is true that I should have kept my mouth shut, this issue has come up more than once in discussions with family and friends — many of whom are Protestant. And I’ve always been caught short when they confront me about this. It’s a hard nut. On the one hand, I do believe in the “holy, catholic, apostolic Church” and I believe that this visible Church — by which I mean the Church with the visible, historic line of apostolic succession — is the Church. On the other hand, I love my family and friends. I respect their work (many of them work “in the ministry”). I don’t want them to feel like I’m pushing them away or, worse, condeming them to hell. I absolutely do not want to project the image that I am, in any way, superior to them. So what do I do? I don’t know. Just reading The Problem of Church helped me understand the problem a little bit better for myself. It also gives me a point of discussion with friends and family.

Flat Earth Last week, in discussing the Al Gore’s agitprop (NB: movies made by politicians are, almost by definition, propaganda) An Inconvenient Truth with a friend, I said I was “more of a flat earther when it comes to global warming”. Which isn’t to say that I don’t think of ways I can conserve energy. I switched much of my lighting to compact fluorescents. Do any members of the Flat Earth Society believe the earth is actually flat? Reading over the FAQ at their forums, I can see some must, but there are also some people who are just poking fun at scientific dogma. I mean really. “Ice Wall”? A world-wide government conspiracy? (Best Joke: George Bush believes the earth is flat and so does his administration. That is why Cheney shot that lawyer. They are taking down the Round Earthers one at a time.) Pennsylvannia’s Charter Day Today was a gorgeous day. The perfect day for Charter Day at the state museums when everyone gets in free. This year, dvfmama and I slipped on our sandles and went to Harrisburg’s State Museum. Fun diorama’s of Indians and Mammals. Interesting history about the state’s Robber Barons. I’ve resumed reading some RSS feeds I’ve found useful information from in the past. I feel like I’m back on top of things.

• Flex Your Rights — nice little bit put out by the ACLU on how to handle yourself around the Police.
• iMacros — it may take some time for me to really make this useful, but it looks like this will help regression-test some ajaxy bits of some work I’m doing.
• This review of Why Aren’t More Women in Science? contains this interesting tidbit:
  

  Rsearch by Dweck and others has shown that if students—both male and female—believe that something is a “gift”, i.e., that people are either born good at it or not, then they are less likely to do well at it, because the first time they hit a setback, they conclude that they “just don’t have the gene”. If, on the other hand, they are told that mastery of the ability has been proven to depend only on hard work, they will, on average, do better.

  Which goes back what I wrote a couple of weeks ago. In essence, don’t tell kids they have intrinsic intelligence as it makes them less apt to try hard to succeed.

• I found the above article via Shelley Powers who focused on the Open Source aspect. From the review: While the male:female ratio in the software industry is between 7:1 and 12:1, depending on how you measure it, the ratio in open source is at least 200:1, and probably worse. As the father of three daughters and one son, I’m not sure this matters. Why are men interested in Free Software (I don’t really like esr‘s “open source”), anyway? Why did they self-select into it? Why didn’t the women self-select into it at the same rate?
• Posting by User Agents is a new graph on Gmane that shows who is posting what. I’m impressed that Gnus continues to hold relatively steady. I’m not surprised that Mutt is more popular (though it seems to be losing ground faster, too), but the rapid adoption of Gmail is impressive.

’cause sometimes I see people coming across links months after I’ve seen them, I’ll risk posting links you’ve already seen.

• Video: The machine is Us/ing Us
• DIY Space. Supposedly they launched on Sunday, but I don’t see an update yet.
• rms is giving up management of emacs after emacs22. I think this is the last project he was still active in on a daily basis. Still this is probably a good thing as it will allow the project to grow outside of his vision for it.
• Globe4d is nice but at the North Museum they had a very, very similar globe. It lacked “direct manipulation” but that was about it. (North Museum really surprised me. It is a small museum, but they had volunteers interacting with kids individually. My children were really caught up in a story one of them told about the lunar eclipse. Too bad it was overcast during the eclipse.)
• Roughly Drafted:
  

  Apple doesn’t have to take a majority share of the desktop market to win, it only needs to take the most valuable segments of the market.

  Once that happens, Microsoft will be forced to choose whether it wants to battle Mac OS X for control of the slick consumer desktop, or repurpose Windows as a cheaper, mass market alternative to Linux in corporate sales.

  (My own bold.)