This blog has fallen off the internet for a while. It stopped working with an update, and I never felt entirely comfortable restoring it because I disagree with so many of the old posts. And I didn’t want to start a blog from scratch. So whenever I did have an idea for a post it had nowhere to go and eventually dismissed itself from my mind.

But I like writing this blog, and I like some of what I’ve written, I don’t want to have my words I still agree with held hostage by those I don’t, In the past I’ve tweaked a word here or there when I was really wrong, but since losing my faith and transitioning so many of my opinions have changed drastically.

So I’ve added a note at the top of many posts, linking forward to where I changed my mind or just describing that I changed my mind. I can’t leave these articles exposed to google with my name on them without some indication that they’re not what I currently think, but I’m a bit concerned that means the unmarked posts will be interpreted as my exact current thoughts. I’ll continue to change my mind, and might not keep everything up to date.

This blog doesn’t have all the posts I’ve ever written that I disagree with. Somewhere in the mists of time I wrote a shitty defence of christian homophobia that I deleted so long ago that I have no way of getting back, and apart from a kind of morbid curiosity I’m glad about that.

Now what to do about that git history?

Step 1: Use your new name on all future commits

$ git config --global user.name "Newfirstname Oldsurname"
$ git config --global user.email "newemail@example.com"

If you have ever set your name in the local repository you may need to remove it there also:

$ git config --unset user.name
$ git config --unset user.email

Step 2: Override your name on all local git history

$ echo "Newfirstname Newsurname <newemail@example.com> \
        Oldfirstname Oldsurname <oldemail@example.com>" >> ~/.gitmailmap
$ git config --global mailmap.file ~/.gitmailmap
$ git config --global log.mailmap true

Step 3: Override your name for everyone else

This will mean your deadname and new name are connected in the repository. Skip this step if you’re not comfortable with this

$ echo "Newfirstname Newsurname <newemail@example.com> \
        Oldfirstname Oldsurname <oldemail@example.com>" >> .mailmap
$ git add .mailmap
$ git commit -m "Add git .mailmap to correct Newfirstname"
$ git push

And have everyone run:

$ git config log.mailmap true

Step 4: Correct your name on all commits

This will mean rewriting the entire project history, and on large projects it may take hours. Skip this step if getting everyone to rebase their branches is too onerous

$ echo "Newfirstname Newsurname <newemail@example.com> \
        Oldfirstname Oldsurname <oldemail@example.com>" >> .mailmap
$ curl https://raw.githubusercontent.com/robotdana/dotfiles/master/scripts/rename.sh | bash
$ git push origin --force --all
$ git push origin --force --tags

p.s. don’t run scripts from the internet

I might’ve happy cried a little bit.

Throughout my life I’ve finished “Hi my name is …” four different ways

First, I was just [deadname].¹ It was fine. it was my name, and that was that. I tended to discourage variations, because, I don’t know. reasons.

Then, as a teenager I ended up with the nickname ‘Shoeshine’, and I liked it. It felt like my own, so I’d introduce myself as Shoeshine in casual social situations. It was invariably changed to something less cumbersome: ‘Shoes’,² ‘Shiny’, ‘Shoesies’, depending on how cheeky people were feeling. I still think of it as my name, and please don’t feel like you have to stop calling me this just because I’m a girl.

Eventually I became a humourless adult and went back to introducing myself as [deadname].

As I was reinventing myself and preparing to move overseas, I decided to take ownership of my name, and ‘change my name’ to a variant of [deadname]. I got a new domain name. I changed my email address and my facebook. I moved my blog. I introduced myself as this new variant, getting past the slight stumbling awkwardness that comes when introducing yourself in a new way, and I actually finally started to feel like my name was mine. Little did I know, this was just practice.

I finally realised/admitted to myself that I was trans. My discomfort the gendered nature of my name grew, I needed to change it. But to what? I considered everything from Alice to Zoë, and Dana felt like it fit best. And now I can’t imagine choosing anything else.

I like that it doesn’t have a single origin or cultural connection, I like that it’s kinda feminine without being frilly or flowery. I like that it’s short, that it doesn’t invite variants,³ and I can be a knowledgeable beautiful pearl.

Don’t tell anyone, but I only just settled on my middle name as I filled in the name change form. I almost went with no middle name at all, or a bad joke like “Danger is my middle name”.⁴ I’m glad I thought better of it. I always liked the idea of uncomplicated English-word names, and especially had the name ‘Hope’ filed away as a good name for a daughter.⁵ It was even the name of the spaceship in my terrible nanowrimo novel.

I love the meaning of it: hope is so important. I like the feel of it and the sound of it. I like that it anchors my otherwise technically unisex name in femininity. And I particularly like its role as a big neon Don’t Panic sign in the middle of my name.

If you feel like your name doesn’t fit, Mix it up a bit. Change it, even if you’re cis. Maybe to a variation that people don’t currently use for you. Or your middle name. Or just something completely different. There’s something really powerful and beautiful about choosing your own name, and I wish it was more common in our culture.

Things I liked and kept

• List styles
• The exact rgb value of pink
• Simplicity, but even more

Changes

• Smaller subheadings
• Blockquotes now work better when interspersed
• Links in text are be quiet and unobtrusive at rest, not bright pink
• A new typeface. The last one survived a few iterations, this one is “Whatever your default system font is”
• No more Minty green
• Or pagination at all
• The archives page’s job is now done by the / page, so it’s gone away
• “Related posts” has been replaced with navigating by category
• All preprocessors are gone
• I used only the CSS I could hold in my hands, and an even smaller amount of javascript (No more coffeescript!)
• CSS Grids! just because I can

I’m very pleased with how this all looks presently, just in time for a 2018 full of writing (maybe hopefully)

I ended up somewhere I didn’t expect.

This is something like those react videos the kids are doing these days, except in text form.

Here we go.

I don’t understand gender

17 MAY 2014

It feels longer ago than this.

This post is almost entirely from and about my own perspective. I hope it doesn’t mean I’m self absorbed, it’s meant to reflect I don’t feel I have the right or understanding to properly address anyone else’s perspective.

This is a good start.

Recently, while listening to the very excellent GCN Radio,…

I just went looking for this. It’s since gone offline. I’d really like to hear it again.

…the episode Transparently transgender with Lisa Salazar gave me pause. Everything she was saying about how she felt about her gender identity as a trans woman made no sense to me. Not in a ‘how could you!’ way,…

Be honest Dana, there was a bit of ‘how could you!’ in there too.

…more that she completely invalidated my entire concept of gender as being socially constructed, mostly negative, and ultimately transcendable.

Gender is mostly negative? Ultimately transcendable? Why did it take you 3 more years to figure out you’re trans?

I’ve previously assumed that people making bold statements about man vs woman or masculinity vs femininity or etc are completely missing the point; No we’re actually not all from either Mars or Venus, we’re from Earth and we’re pretty much the same, excepting (usually negative) societal expectations.

This I mostly still agree with.

Lurking on /r/AskTransgender helped me to point my distrust and it’s-all-just-a-social-fiction in more of the right direction…

Stop blaming transgender people for society’s regressive ideas about gender!

…though I still can’t truly understand the experience being transgender the same way colour-blind person can’t experience redness as distinct from greenness.

You could say ‘gender is social and sex is intrinsic’ as I learned in my design theory class…

I have way more to say on this over-simplistic frequently-repeated idea but maybe that’s another post.

…but in this analogy that’s basically saying ‘the lighter colour is green and the darker colour is red’. It is a simplification that often works (based on my talking to colour-blind people), but it’s nowhere close to being correct all the time.

Like, I clearly knew enough to know sex-is-between-your-legs gender-between-your-ears is simplified to the point of being harmfully wrong, but not at all how or why, thus tortured metaphors about colour-blindness.

I don’t and can’t know what it would be like to be able to experience the green of a male-gender distinct from the red of a female-assigned-at-birth-body or vice versa, it’s all the same continuous grey mush to me.

I don’t understand this metaphor today, and the convoluted writing implies I didn’t understand it then either. BTW girl, if your experience of your gender is a continuous grey mush, maybe think about that.

Gender roles/norms

This is the part my that makes the justice-fairness-anger burn and caused me to throw any description or prescription of any gender in the ‘dangerous and unhelpful’ bin.¹

You’re getting your causation a bit backward here. You’re not nearly as goody-socially-conscious as you think you are, you’re just really aware the unfairness of gendered expectations for “some” “reason”.

Which I’m beginning to understand is dangerous and unhelpful in itself. I don’t think gender roles or norms should be prescriptive or restrictive, or something one should measure themselves against. at all. ever.

Yes I agree well done good work 5 stars.

I frequently feel like I’m being made to feel like I’m doing being-a-man wrong.²

This is still one of my favourite sentences that I ever wrote.

Almost everything that I hear about manhood, or masculinity, or Wild at Heart…

I really hated Wild at Heart.

…or whatever guns-cars-booze-yay that gets posted to Facebook just makes me angry.

I might’ve had a fairly dim view of masculinity. I mean, I still do, but it’s not quite as stark as it used to be.

Because I’m know I’m a man, and can’t respond with ‘I am not a man’,…

You totally can though :)

…all I can say is: I reject your definition of man and substitute nothing in particular of my own because I have no idea and don’t think it’s important.³

I still couldn’t possibly define what it means to ‘be a man’ or ‘be a woman’. I’ll leave that as an exercise for the reader.

Gender presentation/expression

This is the part that’s always thrown me about discussions of gender (and the tiniest bit of sexuality questioning)…

The “Tiniest Bit” huh. Miss “I can’t be gay I like girls” because gay is the only word you ever had for anything different. Even at 26 you still had this hopelessly tangled.

…because the idea of wearing women’s clothing or clothing styles doesn’t make me feel uncomfortable.

Red flag!

I don’t mean to say I cross-dress - for all my anti-authority anti-tradition ideologies I pretty much live colouring inside the lines.

You’ll get over it.

Dresses just seem like a cool thing to wear and women’s fashion is so much more interesting than men’s.

RED FLAG! Also, I’m still kind of amazed that I posted this admission publicly. I was so far in the closet I was out the other side chatting with Tumnus, I don’t think I realised what I was admitting.

As for the physical body and gender: If you look for sex-distinctive facial characteristics of other races than your own then it’s easy to be misled.

I’m pretty sure this is racist somehow.

Sex-distinctive build characteristics in very skinny, very fat, and very muscular people can also misleading or missing.

Just stop. this is not something you understand enough. I think a better way of expressing the ideas I was grasping for is something like: Gendered phenotypes are deeply connected to systems of power and oppression, and don’t represent the full range of humanity.

That there is some archetypal male and female figure is an unhelpful fiction and can’t be good for those more distant from that fictional archetype.

This at least is true.

I don’t think it’s that important to have hard distinctions in men’s appearance vs. women’s appearance ether for myself or in the ways I find people attractive.

Still don’t. In fact, I think it’s important to not.

Gender identity

This is the part where I am reduced to tautology. I am a man because I am a man.

You’re really not selling it, girl.

I don’t feel strongly aligned to men as a category. I don’t feel any more comfortable or welcome at men-only church than women-only church events.⁴

I hadn’t articulated to myself the different ways they were each uncomfortable though.

Whenever there’s a cry for men to “stand up and be men” I shrink back because I don’t want to be part of standing up and being man because I don’t like what that looks like.

I mean, even if I was a man this would probably be a fair response.

Shortly before I wrote that post some clown literally told all the men in the church to “stand up and be men” or similar, and I stayed sitting down and cried a lot (mostly, but not solely about the events around my post on masculinity).

Being a man is not something I’m uncertain about; I know I’m not a transgender woman.

Lol.

The lady doth protest too much.

Also this “knowledge” is because of a series of myths, like “born in the wrong body” or “trans people know from a young age” (though I know young trans people get “you’re too young to know that at your age”. We can’t win).

However, I don’t think I’d be distraught or have my whole sense of who I am turned upside down if I woke up tomorrow and I was suddenly magically a woman.⁵

It’s pretty great.

I don’t know how much of that is a strange kind of empathy, how much is genuinely having only a weak identification with my own gender, and whether my identification with my own gender is actually much stronger than I think it is because it’s invisible and indistinct to me.

I feel like this sentence conveys my confusion at the time pretty well, and some of why it’s common for some trans people to realise they’re trans later on. It’s difficult to see your own gender from inside yourself.

---

In summary I don’t understand gender, and what I thought I understood I now understand even less.

This was the start of a long, inevitable tumble down the rabbit hole.

Rereading, I realise I concluded every section with some variant of ‘It’s not important’, however I want to stress that the distinctions are not important to me rather than unimportant universally.

Everyone experiences gender differently. Some feel their gender strongly, some weakly, some not at all. Sometimes it fluctuates. And sometimes this matches that which they were assigned at birth. Sometimes not. Sometimes it fluctuates. Let everyone do their own gender thing. Be like Vi. We can all not understand each other’s genders together.

• I couldn’t possibly understand bash scripting
• The truth is always somewhere in the middle
• I’d never live in Australia
• At least not for long
• Trans people somehow accidentally reinforce society’s binary view of gender
• I understand bash scripting
• I’m straight
• I’d never live with animals
• My spiritual experiences meant something
• You should resist ridiculing a regressive majority viewpoint
• coffeescript would last
• White supremacy is a fringe view that is understood to be destructive nonsense by most of society
• God, as described, is good
• I wouldn’t stick with a vegetarian diet without a vegetarian partner
• Sex work is inescapably exploitative in a way that other work under capitalism isn’t
• I’m not that social, I can be ok when isolated
• There’s an overarching coherence to scripture
• I only regularly misspell a few words
• “Correct” spelling and grammar is a good proxy for intelligence
• It matters at all if you use semicolons wrong
• Going to theology school is a worthwhile choice
• I’m likely to only ever write one post about gender, so the path for that post should be /gender
• I’m a guy

We get along fine with extremely confusingly imprecise pronouns in English,
you that could be plural or not, we that could be ‘we but not them’ or ‘we but not you’ or ‘we: I, them, and you’. They that could be a collection of individuals, or a group acting as one, and so on. but heaven forbid we not be precise with the ‘she’s and ‘he’s and ‘him’s and ‘her’s and etc.

Hypothetical People

These are the illustrative drops of imaginary human who are called into action at a moment’s notice then dismissed without any name, race, age, background, hopes, dreams, even hair colour, but because of a quirk of grammar, they have a gender.

Because of this, and because there’s often no other specifiers, you will end up making a commentary or meta commentary or counter commentary or something whether you wanted to or not, drawing attention to gendered stereotypes and expectations and relative populations whether you follow them or counter them, all of which will distract from the point you were trying to make using this ethereal person.

I noticed this so many times in an otherwise very engaging book “Thinking fast and slow”. It is filled with these hypothetical people. The seemingly arbitrary yet accidentally meaningful ‘he’s and ‘she’s became increasingly noticeable and distracting, but led to this post so maybe it’s not all bad.

Potential People

Unfilled roles, future children, partners, and other not-yet-specific but-one-day specific people. why. why do we need to gender these. even when it’s probably illegal in things like job descriptions, it still creeps in. Why.

Trans People, Non binary people

Not everyone has a clear answer for ‘what is your gender’, or even ‘what pronouns do you prefer in every case’ because not everyone is consistent. Just chill everyone.

Gods

Whether or not a deity is a multitude or singular, it still manages to end up with gendered pronouns - even the giant spaghetti monster has his noodly appendage praised. (Sidenote: surely it is correct to refer to a triune God as ‘they’? majestic? multiple persons (“it” though genderless, is also personless), and avoids having some folks complaining that using a feminine pronoun for a God who transcends gender will gender God more than using the cough default cough masculine pronoun. Maybe monotheists prefer explicitly singular pronouns, but prayers addressed to ‘God, you…’ are not questioned.) (Sidenote, the second: I tried for a while to avoid gendered pronouns for God, but it was never unconscious (and is almost entirely impossible while singing worship songs written by others).

Anthropomorphised things

Robots, cars, post-it-note-piles, glass cups, form fields, and pretty much everything is made more awesome when imagining personality, but for these objects to have a personality they can’t be referred to with the impersonal pronoun ‘it’, and we so quickly reach for ‘he’ or ‘she’ (somehow either choice manages to be sexist… how do you do it patriarchy?). BB-8 is not a he. BB-8 is a genderless ball, but BB-8 is full of personality, and the only way I can continue to refer to BB-8 as a person it to use BB-8’s name. Were I to refer to BB-8 as it, it would feel significantly less full of life, and if I call him a he, then he has personality again. How, language? How do you work?

Programmers and copy writers.

Now the self-serving part, If I’m trying to construct a string of text about how this person that you know did a thing, I could use their user name over and over again. ‘catfriend77 wanted you to visit catfriend77’s page of catfriend77’s cat photos’. We could ask catfriend77 catfriend77’s gender so we can construct the sentence simpler in english, but we have no business knowing that, we just host catfriend77’s cat photos. and maybe ‘catfriend77’ is a brand™ anyway, so our insistence on gender pronouns is frustrated.

Use they more, and embrace the awkwardness of repeating a name 100,000 times, it’s fun.

I have lost my faith. My previous drafts of this post¹ were mostly attempting to explain why or how, and they read like trying to convince you of my new position or, even more unhelpfully, invite argument.
I want neither, so deleted the paragraphs on paragraphs of explainyness. You don’t need them anyway.

Losing my faith was an extremely emotionally stressful activity. I don’t recommend it. Christianity was a foundational part of my identity. God and being part of the Church was for me the source of purpose, belonging, direction, worth, value, ethic, coping mechanisms, confidence, kindness, hope, joy, beauty, creativity, and so many other good things.

As my faith tore away from me (which took a long time) I closed up. I stopped writing openly. I closed away friendships, many of whom I had absolutely zero cause to hide from. And I regressed so much, falling back into depression, back into a level of social discomfort that I hadn’t seen in myself since before high school.

I feel ashamed at this regression, I feel ashamed of how I hid, I feel ashamed at giving up instead of continuing to try to resolve my various issue with God and the Church and the Bible from within. And I feel ashamed of how I’ve felt ashamed about all this. And now I have no-one to go to with all this shame.

What is ahead? I don’t know. These days I’m trying to build hope and love and boldness and purpose on that which I have always seen as meaningless and worthless² and sometimes it even works?

(Even writing the various drafts of this post has been a roller coaster of emotions and not something I could’ve done even 6 months ago. So that’s something.)

Or not, not really. Sure, technically that’s the sequence of events, but it’s woefully incomplete.

My faith, such as it was, lasted the full length of the first year of school by sheer stubbornness, outlasting (and probably sapping) any sense of hope or drive or joy. By the end of that school year, I just didn’t care at all about the school or the work. And even most of a year later I have negative feelings toward the entire country. Sorry England.

I lost my faith. I always phrase it this way. I lost. I lost something significant, important, grounding, central to my identity and sense of purpose and being and morality. I didn’t become an atheist as some kind of grand self-created insight. I lost. Defeated and directionless and alone.

I lost my faith in humanity.

In 2014-15 I’d started paying more attention, especially those the stories and experiences of those in the not white-straight-able-cis-male demographic. Now to those of you who are variously members of minority groups this is going to be painfully obvious and a glaring example of privilege: I realised that not only is life not even remotely fair, injustices rarely even get acknowledged, let alone corrected, and usually injustice is only ever increased once any attention is drawn to individual cases, that calling attention to these individual cases is a personal sacrifice to gradually change the wider injustices.

I knew that of course life’s not fair, but I had never internalised how significantly not life’s fairness is, and I’m starting to understand that I will never really understand, I can only barely improve my dim understanding.

I lost my faith in specific humans and in general humanity, in governments, in the promise of democracy, in social systems and services and bureaucracies and charities, even in media and arts.

I’m slowly recovering some hope and joy. But it’s still a flighty, easily shaken thing.

I lost my faith in the Church

Theology school is much more directly responsible for this, my view of the Church now and historically. My definition of Christian and The Church necessarily grew to include people I don’t like, and people I disagreed with. Even if I just include those who sincerely believed, who followed what they thought God wanted to the best of their ability, excluding those who appeared to present and use Christianity solely for its political power, I am in the company of people who vociferously defended slavery, those that ran crusades that were not only horrifying but also ridiculously inept, those who got thoroughly confused about the difference between conquering people and bringing Jesus’ message to them, those who killed other Christians who baptise people ‘incorrectly’ (however that is), and even currently living folks who believe it’s unbiblical and a man-fail to do household-chores¹, that any kind of homosexuality is an abomination, trans people deserve less respect than a stray dog, and we should only extend care and hospitality to the perfectest ‘Christian’ refugees.

Of course #notallchristians, but definitely and obviously some Christians, and it frequently feels like #mostchristians at least passively seem to support the worst (ok, maybe not the worst worst, but at least the next worst).

I lost my faith in God

Faith is commonly used to mean ‘belief in the existence of’ when we’re talking about supernatural beings, but here I am engaging in something commonly called ‘word play’ and using it in a different sense: trust that they are good.

With man’s inhumanity to man², and especially man’s inhumanity to man when the inhuman man is defending their inhumanity-ing using God, Church, or Bible, why would God either: 1. stand idly by while we destroy one another, or 2. speak through prophets but not with any distinction between those who speak for God, and those who claim falsely to speak for God, apart from ‘know them by their fruits’ - a metric which, by the time we have data, the damage is done. alternatively 3. destroy us all, either hell or flood.

It strikes me as odd that the major instances of God stepping in and saying ‘enough is enough’ were a flood that wiped out almost all life on earth³ and then thousands of years later, sending himself to Earth to live a truncated human lifetime saying some genuinely subversive and compassionate things, and then vanishing after a confusingly bloodthirsty example of self-sacrifice⁴, not ever popping back up for a moment to say ‘uuh, that’s not quite what I had in mind’. whether power by threat of hell or continued subjugation of women or antisemitism or more general xenophobia or not explicitly condemning slavery, or however else Jesus’ own mostly not awful words have been used for evil purposes, let alone the rest of scripture.

If it is what God had in mind? that’s not a God I want to follow, and if it isn’t, then that’s not a God with any, love, care, or responsibility, up and leave and not pay attention to the outcome? also not a God I want to follow.

Now, I am not the pure source of all love and morality, or an infinite intellect, so please forgive my not having answers and just asking the questions.

I didn’t have the energy or will to argue this case with even the most gentle of my classmates, friends, family, etc, or the desire to attempt to change anyone else’s mind. I also don’t feel I had earned this emotional state toward discussions of the church or spirituality: no-one has abused me personally.

Yeah.

As I see it, there are a variety of overlapping reasons people are vegetarians, it’s not just because animals are cute. Here are some.

Environmental Sustainability

It’s inefficient and hard on the environment to use animals for food in our industrial scale. Plants are easier to grow and store and prepare and ship.

People sustainability

There’s enough food production on the planet to feed everyone already, not just that everyone is fed, but that everyone is fed to healthy and strong. However, a lot of that food goes to livestock, so rich people can regularly eat meat and poor people can regularly eat nothing. Yes, worldwide distribution isn’t this simple, but nothing is this simple, so it’s a start.

Treating animals humanely

It’s arguably barbaric that we take creatures that have complex brains and raise them in order to slaughter and eat them. We’re basically the hyper-intelligent villains in some alien invasion movie, asserting its dinner is more important than a human’s life. This is not a convincing argument for me but it’s an added bonus.

Other people

This is a motive in both directions, if the people you regularly eat with are vegetarians then it’s easy, if they eat meat, it’s hard. In my case I have no people I eat with regularly, however this was a significant part of my vegetarianism last time.

Taste

Astonishingly, Dae Hee, some people don’t like the taste of meat. I personally consider chicken and pork the same as tofu: a white protein that, even when the best quality stuff is cooked in the best possible way, is still to be eaten only as sauce/spice/flavouring vehicle, and when cooked poorly it just ruins everything. I can also clearly remember the taste of the first lamb I had after being a vegetarian for over a year. It tasted like blood and farms. I kept eating meat because it’s easier and the shock of that faded, but it’s still really weird.

Health

My interpretation of why unscientific fad diets work for some people is that if you go from not paying attention to what you eat to paying attention to what you eat, you’ll probably eat better. The same for switching to a vegetarian diet, with the added advantage that you have to be purposeful about protein and iron and such.

Decisions

Restaurant menus become so much simpler. I’ll have the one vegetarian option that doesn’t have tofu, please.

Religious/Cultural

In the first version of this post I totally missed one of the more common reasons people are vegetarian.
This doesn’t feature in my list of reasons at all except perhaps as an instigator for consistency-of-ethics.

My own reasons are mostly the consistency of ethics in environment sustainability and global poverty, with side benefits of taste and health. This is something that I’ve been increasingly leaning toward and now I’m in control of my own meals again I can be freely vegetarian.

I’m not going to be strict or even necessarily consistent. I have leather shoes and bags and wristbands. I’m probably not going to worry about vegetarian cheese or gelatin, or shrimp-based curry paste, I’ve been vegetarianing for not even three weeks and I’ve eaten meat five times (partly because travelling, and partly because refusing meat cooked for me when I’d been a vegetarian for 48 hours seemed pretty rude).

“Accusations of racism and sexism are just as bad as racism and sexism.”¹

I keep coming across this. I just…. ugh. Let’s drop in other offences.

Accusations of murder are just as bad as murder. Accusations of kicking puppies are just as bad as kicking puppies. Accusations of harassment are just as bad as harassment. Oops. That’s said too.

We live in a sexist, racist, classist, ageist, ableist, homophobic², cissexist, etc society. We’re excellent at prejudice, at tribalism, at discomfort with people different than us on any axis. To think we’re unaffected by that is arrogant and/or naïve.

Everyone is all of these things to varying degrees (yes. Even you). So we are free to a) not be so skittish and defensive when called out for problematic behaviour, and b) not be so haughtily self-righteous and pitchfork-wielding burn-them-to-the-ground when someone else is.³

Sure, when I’m accused of something like that it doesn’t feel good. It is jarring and uncomfortable to learn I’ve unintentionally denigrated someone. I (with most) like to think I’m one of the Good Guys, It hurts to realise I may have been the villain. Crucially though, that hurt is my fault, it is not the fault of the person who brought this to attention.

And yes, sometimes it was legitimately a misunderstanding, a mishearing, a lack of context, whatever. But. More often these are the excuses we tell ourselves to keep being the hero rather than take the time to examine the implications of our (unconscious) behaviour.

When someone says “Dude, that joke/​comment/​act/​word/​behaviour is not ok.” I have two choices: I can apologize and learn, or I can follow the instinct to double down. To justify. To defend. To make sure everyone knows I’m the good guy here. It was all just a hilarious misunderstanding, see. My prejudice is perfectly reasonable according to this graph from the internet. And your criticism is invalid because of this [blank]ist thing you did that one time, perhaps even as part of this very criticism.

But all that defence is not even necessary. They’re (probably) not saying “Dude, you’re a horrible person”. They’re saying “Dude, that’s not ok, it’s [blank]ist and because you’re apparently unaware of it I’m pointing this out, I’m hoping that by letting you know this is a problem you’ll change your behaviour to not be un/intentionally hurtful because I actually don’t think you’re a horrible person”.

Though, even when they are saying “You’re a horrible person”, even if they subsequently write me off entirely, I can learn, apologize, and do better next time.

P.S. I will continue to mess up, to say or do things that I know are hurtful when I’m tired or angry or stressed (or it’s a Tuesday), or to suddenly learn things I’ve been saying or doing for years are hurtful to a group of people I’ve never even thought about. But that is not really the test of character. What we do next is.

An apology is:

1. Unqualified

   No “But you must admit’s”, no “I was just’s”, no “To be fair’s”.

2. Owned

   There is a subtle but essential distinction between “I’m sorry I hurt you” and “I’m sorry you were hurt”.

3. Explicit

   There should be some indication that that the issue and its gravity is understood, and space for responses like: “actually that wasn’t the (only) issue, X was (also) the issue.”

4. Just the start

   “But I apologised” is not a magic phrase. Apologies, regardless of their sincerity, don’t automatically grant forgiveness or absolution or an audience.

Apologies are not for avoiding embarrassment or guilty feelings, or for making yourself look good, they’re not resolution, and their acceptance isn’t automatic or required.

I have fallen short of many of these. If you too have apologised incompletely, don’t fret! It doesn’t mean you didn’t genuinely feel apologetic. However, it does mean you expressed it poorly if you truly meant well, and (like me) can do better next time.

Belief is complex and slippery idea, but also an useful everyday word. I enjoy categorising things. Thus.

This scale is about how strongly you hold a belief, not how true, popular, reasonable, explicable or false, unpopular, unreasonable, inexplicable such a belief is.

It is super difficult to think of examples that have even a whiff of universality. Even finding things that don’t interact with identity in rage-inducing ways is tricky.

Thus these (hopefully politically inert) maths examples might help you get the idea.

1. Knowledge.

   Unquestioned beliefs. You’re still aware that you can think your way out of this belief, but so many things would change that abandoning this idea is not useful.

   e.g. 1 + 1 = 2
   Arithmetic requires this or the entire mathematical enterprise falls apart. (assuming a base greater than 2, pedant)

2. Belief.

   Strong beliefs. You can, at a stretch, put yourself in the mind of someone who doesn’t believe this thing to see where they’re coming from, but they’re definitely wrong, mistaken, deluded, deceived.

   e.g. 0.999… = 1
   I can see why this is not as immediately obvious as 1 + 1 = 2, but it’s just as true.

3. Opinion.

   Weak beliefs. Your belief of this affects your life and the way you think, yet you can easily put yourself in the mind of someone who disagrees, and either you think it possible you could be wrong or see it as merely preference.

   e.g. Imaginary numbers are as arbitrary as negative numbers.
   Counting numbers work with the analogy of how many apples you have. Everything else doesn’t. I can see why imaginary numbers seem more made up: you learn them much later and the name certainly doesn’t help, but they’re not in different categories of arbitrariness.

4. Assent.

   Forced beliefs. If asked, you’d say you believe, but it doesn’t affect your life. It either follows logically from what you do believe or is something you believe due to social pressure, but you possibly wouldn’t believe this in isolation.

   e.g. 0! = 1
   I watched the video. Sure, whatever.

5. Apathy.

   Disinterested ignorance. You might have an answer if pressed, but it’s a coin toss which way you’d answer. There’s nothing you do believe that requires you to believe about this thing any particular way, so you don’t. You also feel no pressure to learn or have an definite position.

   e.g. 1 is/n’t a prime number
   1 is an exception either way.

6. Dissent.

   Weak disbelief. Your disbelief of this affects your life and the way you think, yet you easily can put yourself in the mind of someone who believes, and either you think it possible you could be wrong or see it as merely preference.

   e.g. 1+2+3… = -1/12
   I’m pretty sure this has broken a rule somewhere and done something with infinity or equals that it shouldn’t have.

7. Disbelief.

   Strong disbelief. You can, at a stretch, put yourself in the mind of someone who does believe this thing to see where they’re coming from, but they’re definitely wrong, mistaken, deluded, deceived.

   e.g. numbers exist
   I see mathematics and numbers as internally consistent fictions/human inventions useful for modelling the physical world. I know the majority of people disagree, but any other position seems ridiculous to me.

8. Incredulity.

   What you see as absolutely ridiculous to believe. Things that are impossible for you to imagine actually believing. Thought experiments can take there, but surely no-one actually, sincerely believes this.

   e.g. 1 + 1 = 3
   Arithmetic requires this to be false or the entire mathematical enterprise falls apart.

I don’t understand the concept of cheap grace.

As near as I can tell it is invalidity of grace shown to someone who doesn’t respond “appropriately”. Or something like that.

But by definition, grace is unearned and undeserved. How can it be cheap?

Cheap grace seems often an excuse for unforgiveness or judgement or an expression of incredulity about Christianity. It is there in our struggle with truly believing ourselves forgiven. In that case the problem is not cheap grace, rather, the problem is grace grace and how maddeningly unfair God’s grace is.

Perhaps a better phrase is cheapened grace. Our response to grace given doesn’t determine its value in abstract, instead it reveals how much worth we see in it. And our attempts to earn God’s grace by our limited good behaviour cheapens it just as much as squandering it.

Grace is always an unaffordable, undeserved gift.

Finally, lest you think I’m saying something I’m not:

“Shall we sin because we are not under the law but under grace? By no means!”Romans 6:15 (NIV)

This was sparked by thinking about the concept of Trinity while revising Tertullian and the Nicene creed and so on for my church history exam. During the revision process I realised I don’t like church history (though it may be that I actually don’t like exams. That’s more likely.) I like writing blog posts though, so lets do that instead.

I’m going to ignore all this proceeds from stuff. Don’t care. I’m also going to ignore who’s subordinate to whom¹ because… because.

We’ll start at human persons. That’s easy. A body. I am a person, you’re a person. We’re different persons in different physical person-spaces. Done.

But wait a minute, what about conjoined twins? To some extent they share a body. So we need something else.

How about distinct wills? That works. Except for Christianity. The will of the members of the Trinity is the same, so how are they still to be seen as distinct persons?

Back to our conjoined twins. They walk somewhere. They are, together, walking. Each of them is walking, they are both walking, the walking they are each doing is the same walking, but they are still distinct persons, with distinct wills, doing the same walking distinctly. Walking.

There’s not an appreciable difference between the unity of action and the unity of wills in this example. They have to both intend walking for the walking that they are both doing to happen, and for them to each both be walking they have to both want to be walking. They can’t walk independently, but that doesn’t make them the same person.

An aside on unembodiedness

Let’s consider people without bodies, whether they be unembodied because of some kind of nirvana-like daniel-from-stargate ascension, or because they are an AI named Jane that exists in a galaxy-wide computer network, or they’re a Peretti-esque angel, or a Pratchett-ish god, or whatever.

I’d like to group persons by their ability to act on the physical.

• Normal embodied things - Humans, goats. These affect the world in the area they inhabit.
• Very powerful embodied things - Superman, the Doctor², Galactus. They can affect the world, around them in ways no-one else can, but they too are constrained to the limited area they inhabit, so basically they follow the same rules, this is merely a difference of degree, not of kind.
• Abstract things - ‘2’ness or ‘the concept of a trinity’. These can’t affect the physical world. Or the non-physical. They’re completely and entirely impotent except when wielded by the mind of any of the potent beings in this list.³
• The incarnationally potent⁴ - the ships of Ancillary Justice, demonic possession. These unembodied beings can affect the physical world, but to do so in the manner they do they must become embodied, and thus also have the restrictions of a physical body (or bodies. You should definitely read Ancillary Justice).
• The universally potent - able to affect the physical world in any location simultaneously (or at any time, if your model of time allows).

If you’ve followed me this far we can see that unity of distinct wills is still required when we go up a level from conjoined humans walking to universally potent beings doing anything. As they could affect any part of the universe, they could do everything and also counter everything done by any other similarly powerful person, everything they do do must be done in unity, their wills must be aligned.⁵

In Christian understanding, this is not just a pragmatic unity and it’s not a grudging political bargaining of goals in some kind of cosmic minority government. Instead, the perfect love exemplified in the Trinity is behind this unity of wills, and is the reason our shadowy made-in-the-image-of-God reflection of this unity is our loving relationships.

Now that I’ve written some words about the nature of the Trinity I’m probably 6 kinds of heretic, but this was fun.⁶

I’ve been at school for about a month now, and I’m finally changing my mind about something, all based on learning a alternate definition of one little word: “Veneration”. It’s so exciting.

I’ve always assumed that veneration was synonymous with worship (perhaps a little weaker, but still ultimately the same idea). This is borne out in many of the uses of the word (other synonyms include: deify, idolize), however there is another.

My new learning was that to properly venerate a symbol is to worship the signified by honouring the signifier¹ and that that is good.

This resolves (or at least defines) my wrestling with honouring and enjoying beautiful architecture and music and ritual and (as the cause for this change of mind) the history of the use of icons in the Eastern Orthodox church.

The same pitfalls remain: we can so easily transmute good veneration into worship or deification of the symbol be it art/ists or song/writers or architect/ure or ritual. As it’s about the direction of the heart rather than any external difference of action, it’s invisible to anyone but yourself whether your own worship is to or through, so we can’t judge the legitimacy of others’ worship.

This is the same for an Eastern Orthodox church building filled to the brim with icons and gold, or a youth megachurch filled with moshing and lasers and bass solos, or even the person standing on the side of a mountain, alone at sunrise.

Jesus said, in the context of being asked by a Samaritan to judge between the worship methods of the Jews and the Samaritans:

But a time is coming—and now is here—when the true worshipers will worship the Father in spirit and truth, for the Father seeks such people to be his worshipers.John 4:23 (NET)

The tool or place or style of worship is not what defines it as true worship or not (though much of the history of the Church would indicate otherwise), it’s absolutely about the direction of the heart. and using whatever tool or symbol or method you can to worship God.

I read this description of the Progressive Christian Worldview from the perspective of a conservative with great interest and recognition. It’s actually pretty good and highlighted to me the central difference in our worldviews.

When confronted with something that is grey, the conservative response tends to be: “I’m not sure what the loving thing to do is so I’ll defend what I believe to be correct”. For progressives it is “I’m not sure what the correct thing to do is so I’ll defend what I believe to be loving.”

That’s same response is visible in any of the major church/political issues throughout history: gender-hierarchy, homosexuality, racism, slave-ownership, war/pacifism, killing heretics and muslims, death penalty, etc.

That’s not to say that progressives don’t believe in there is one truth, however we’re less likely to be sure we own it, tempering our specific interpretation of scripture with humility, particularly when belief or the defense of that belief can be shown to be hurting people.

This is especially visible when we see staunch defenders of “biblical truth” throughout history have tended to be shown to be defending the unconscionable.

Wrong side of history

I don’t like the wrong-side-of-history retort. Everyone is already on team: social change or team: change is scary; the progression of history is already seen as either an enemy or a friend so describing change as impending is just unhelpful. And of course all social change is black-and-white always improvement.

Ultimately it’s just a self-righteous brag for team: social change.

One thing I certainly don’t need is all these scratchably shiny plastic discs. They’re safer and smaller and quicker as mere data on my various computery things.

Getting them there fantastically simple with The Little App Factory’s Ripit, however it is somewhat legally questionable.

All my CDs live on my computer and phone and iPad and backblaze and iTunes Match. Legally. I think.

All my DVDs now live on an external hard-drive. Apparently less legally - according to a googled forum post and Consumer. When I read through the copyright act it seems far less obvious than our dear friends at consumer would have us believe.

Even if my ripped DVDs are qualify technically as infringing copies (not clear to begin with), it still doesn’t appear to me they are criminally infringing copies (I’m not distributing them in any way, and the economic consequence of any such “infringement” is effectively zero¹). If something isn’t criminally infringing is it infringing at all? I’m certainly not doing anything unreasonable, unfair, or unethical.

This is the first time I’ve read actual legislation so I’m probably entirely wrong and opening myself up to completely unreasonable fines and jail time.

I just realised wonderful unintentional ironies in the discs visible on the various piles.
The Creative Commons licensed Ghosts I-IV by Nine Inch Nails, The Forbidden Kingdom - a tale of inspiration from dodgy copies of Kung Fu movies, and, of course, Pirates of the Caribbean.

This post is almost entirely from and about my own perspective. I hope it doesn’t mean I’m self absorbed, it’s meant to reflect I don’t feel I have the right or understanding to properly address anyone else’s perspective.

Recently, while listening to the very excellent GCN Radio, the episode Transparently transgender with Lisa Salazar gave me pause. Everything she was saying about how she felt about her gender identity as a trans woman made no sense to me. Not in a ‘how could you!’ way, more that she completely invalidated my entire concept of gender as being socially constructed, mostly negative, and ultimately transcendable.

I’ve previously assumed that people making bold statements about man vs woman or masculinity vs femininity or etc are completely missing the point; No we’re actually not all from either Mars or Venus, we’re from Earth and we’re pretty much the same, excepting (usually negative) societal expectations.

Lurking on /r/AskTransgender helped me to point my distrust and it’s-all-just-a-social-fiction in more of the right direction, though I still can’t truly understand the experience being transgender the same way colour-blind person can’t experience redness as distinct from greenness.

You could say ‘gender is social and sex is intrinsic’ as I learned in my design theory class, but in this analogy that’s basically saying ‘the lighter colour is green and the darker colour is red’. It is a simplification that often works (based on my talking to colour-blind people), but it’s nowhere close to being correct all the time.

I don’t and can’t know what it would be like to be able to experience the green of a male-gender distinct from the red of a female-assigned-at-birth-body or vice versa, it’s all the same continuous grey mush to me.

Gender roles/norms

This is the part my that makes the justice-fairness-anger burn and caused me to throw any description or prescription of any gender in the ‘dangerous and unhelpful’ bin.¹ Which I’m beginning to understand is dangerous and unhelpful in itself. I don’t think gender roles or norms should be prescriptive or restrictive, or something one should measure themselves against. at all. ever.

I frequently feel like I’m being made to feel like I’m doing being-a-man wrong.² Almost everything that I hear about manhood, or masculinity, or Wild at Heart, or whatever guns-cars-booze-yay that gets posted to Facebook just makes me angry. Because I’m know I’m a man, and can’t respond with ‘I am not a man’, all I can say is: I reject your definition of man and substitute nothing in particular of my own because I have no idea and don’t think it’s important.³

Gender presentation/expression

This is the part that’s always thrown me about discussions of gender (and the tiniest bit of sexuality questioning) because the idea of wearing women’s clothing or clothing styles doesn’t make me feel uncomfortable. I don’t mean to say I cross-dress - for all my anti-authority anti-tradition ideologies I pretty much live colouring inside the lines. Dresses just seem like a cool thing to wear and women’s fashion is so much more interesting than men’s.

As for the physical body and gender: If you look for sex-distinctive facial characteristics of other races than your own then it’s easy to be misled. Sex-distinctive build characteristics in very skinny, very fat, and very muscular people can also misleading or missing. That there is some archetypal male and female figure is an unhelpful fiction and can’t be good for those more distant from that fictional archetype.

I don’t think it’s that important to have hard distinctions in men’s appearance vs. women’s appearance ether for myself or in the ways I find people attractive.

Gender identity

This is the part where I am reduced to tautology. I am a man because I am a man.

I don’t feel strongly aligned to men as a category. I don’t feel any more comfortable or welcome at men-only church than women-only church events.⁴ Whenever there’s a cry for men to “stand up and be men” I shrink back because I don’t want to be part of standing up and being man because I don’t like what that looks like.

Being a man is not something I’m uncertain about; I know I’m not a transgender woman. However, I don’t think I’d be distraught or have my whole sense of who I am turned upside down if I woke up tomorrow and I was suddenly magically a woman.⁵

I don’t know how much of that is a strange kind of empathy, how much is genuinely having only a weak identification with my own gender, and whether my identification with my own gender is actually much stronger than I think it is because it’s invisible and indistinct to me.

In summary I don’t understand gender, and what I thought I understood I now understand even less.
Rereading, I realise I concluded every section with some variant of ‘It’s not important’, however I want to stress that the distinctions are not important to me rather than unimportant universally.

Yesterday Brendan Eich, the new CEO of Mozilla was forced out, primarily because he’d made donations to opposing same sex marriage. This last week I saw so much vitriol about him in my twitter feed from generally-mild-mannered individuals. Would the causes he supports really have that much affect on his CEO-ing, or Mozilla’s work environment, over strong organisational support of the LGBT community?

A few weeks ago Fred Phelps of the Westboro Baptist god-hates-fags church died. This man is almost-singlehandedly responsible for my and many others’ inability to be neutral on these issues, and I’ve never even met him. I’ve always known that whatever it is I believe it is not that. And so I sought out books like Torn, and blogs like Registered Runaway.

Just last week World Vision US decided they would change their hiring practices to include gay Christians in same-sex marriages. World Vision US claimed they didn’t want to take a stance on an issue that isn’t clear in the wider church. They emphasised they weren’t being forced to.

The next day because of massive outcry and calls to boycott they reversed the decision. They were forced to give in to the ‘christian agenda’ instead. And they folded.

I cried when I read these posts.

Clearly in the secular world it is there is list of people and groups whom it’s allowed, deserved, or even completely invisible to hate.

Equally clearly, in a conservative Christian context there a similar but occasionally opposing list.

For those of us (Christians who affirm same-sex marriage) it all seems insane and can’t we all just get along?

Yet I’ve recently realised that I too have my own list.¹

I don’t know what the correct response is. I don’t think there should be space for ‘Yeah, but it’s ok to hate this person/group because they’re whatever’. I need to remember the people we’re disagreeing with are still human, still worth having grace for. Still redeemable.

I’ll leave you with this.

This September I’ll be moving to England to study theology at the London School of Theology.

Why?

1. My relationship with Jesus will be stronger and deeper with this time of focus.
2. I always want to know how things work, or how they might work. It’s probably why I work with computers.
3. I want to spend more time in and around Europe and the Middle East - London is a lot closer than Wellington.
4. I want to learn more about Islam so that I can have coherent conversations with my Muslim friends.

My main reason for going is this:

5. The ultimate goal of my life is removing unnecessary barriers.

In my political views¹, in my economic and social views, in my attitudes towards UI design, and API design. It’s how I want to improve my writing - to learn to write clearly and efficiently, but with enough fun to keep boredom from being a barrier.²

Unnecessary rules

I spend a lot of time thinking about ethics and morality and law, the rules we have and make and which are necessary and which are not.

This battle over which rules applied universally and which were just unnecessary barriers to a life following Christ is woven through most of the New Testament.³

I want to have a deeper understanding of ethics and morality and law.

Unnecessary intellectual challenges

There are so many questions and answers floating around Christianity, as well as so much misunderstanding and misinformation, either wilful or non.

These questions and their sometimes unsatisfactory answers can be unnecessary barriers to being open to a life following Christ.

I know there are better answers, I don’t always know how to articulate them, or how to extricate the actual question being asked out of people’s general barrage of imprecision.

I want to be able to clearly and satisfactorily answer people’s tough (sincere) questions.

Unnecessary intellectual requirements

I’m not going to theology school to be a professional theologian, to talk about ivory-tower theologianny stuff with other theologians all day.

Programming has trained me to ensure my logic is sound and clear. Design school trained me to present things attractively and simply in new ways. I feel like combining this skills and learnings will enable me to do … something?

I want to be able to explain these complex ideas about God and life, and why they matter clearly and simply.

Unnecessary infighting

One of my friends recently posted this to Facebook:

How can #Calvinists & #Arminians #Cessationists & #Continuationists and #egalitarians & #complementarians work together for the #Gospel ?

It prompted a bit of (positive) debate, but ultimately reminded us that these things don’t matter as much.⁴ Though so often this spills out as a kind of narcissism of minor differences/which local sports team do you support - this isn’t useful, helpful, productive, constructive, etc.

One of the reasons I was attracted to LST is that it is cross-denominational. Hopefully they will embody the universal Church well.

I want to have a deeper appreciation for those views I don’t hold, and to work and live with people who differ.

Unnecessary cultural baggage

It’s not just rules and laws that are sometimes un/necessary barriers, but rituals and practices and structures - do we need to do Church the same way as twenty-first-century pop-culture, or nineteenth-century rural America, or sixteenth-century Germany, or the first-century Roman empire?

I don’t want to throw babies out with their bathwater, and I have to fight against my own aggressive anti-traditional bias, but I think these are good questions to ask.

I want to have a deeper understanding of the essentials of Christianity, and how to wrap Christianity in various cultural contexts.

I’m so excited.

I saw a meme recently posted to Facebook: a picture of a gear stick and the text, something along the lines of “If your boyfriend’s car doesn’t have one of these, you have a girlfriend.”

It bothered me. A lot. In part because I usually have a lot of respect for the person who posted it, but also because it’s not a completely alien idea, but something I’ve seen many times.

I want to explain and explore why this bothered me.

1. It expects men to value something inconsequential to a culture that has some very confused values already.
2. It implies that if a man is deficient in some manner then he is therefore not a man, he is a woman.

Number 2 is the one that I think is really dangerous, because people actually believe that. Maybe they won’t admit it, but it is definitely there in the language people use: you hit like a girl, stand and fight like a man.¹

Regardless of whether 1. is valid or not, please, don’t fall into the trap of thinking along the lines of 2.

A deficient man is not a woman. A woman is not a deficient man.

Now I don’t think anyone reading this actually thinks that a man becomes a woman if he doesn’t live up to some standard of masculinity, but the idea that a man is acting like a woman by falling short of some definition of manliness: that I’ve heard said.

It should be clear this is nonsense. I’ll say it again, just so we’re clear:

A deficient man is not a woman. A woman is not a deficient man.

Ok. moving on.

Now, you might say that 1 is not going to confuse anyone because obviously it’s a joke, and no-one really thinks that their manliness is tied up in how they control a mere mode of transport.

You’d be wrong - car advertising has successfully indoctrinated our culture into believing that the kind of car they drive is core to their identity, and woe and shame to any man who drives a girly car, or a family van.

This should also be self-evidently ridiculous. It should be clear that any given man’s value is not tied up in the kind of car you drive. I hope.

I refuse to propagate the idea that by refusing this (or any particular) definition of manliness I must be a woman or gay. In fact, there have been times when I’ve thought ‘maybe I’m gay’ because I don’t fit the definition of manliness that is expected. Which is not helpful to me, or to my understanding of actually gay people.

I’m done with ridiculous definitions of manliness.

• As a man, I don’t have to be addicted to sex and have only aggression and uncontrollable desire for all of my female friends.
• As a man, I don’t have to love and worship aggression and violence and patriotism and military and power.
• As a man, I don’t have to bend nature to my will and love the great outdoors and killing things that live there.

• As a man, I don’t have to value myself based on my car or my job or whatever.

• I refuse to feel like I’m a lesser man because I play sport with women who are better at it than me.²
• I refuse to feel like I’m a lesser man because I work in an office rather than a manly trade.³
• I refuse to feel like I’m a lesser man because I have some aesthetic appreciation.⁴

What then is a good definition of what makes a man a good man?

Love sacrificially. Care indiscriminately. Forgive quickly. Share whatever wisdom you have.

Obviously this isn’t just for men. This is a good goal for any human people. Men and woman and those that aren’t contained by the gender binary.

As though the only reason you’re being inclusive/fair/whatever is because 1. it’s the correct move politically (interpersonal politics/politeness), 2. because some government is watching you and insists on it, or 3. (this is the really weird one), because it will make them liked by/voted for by/attractive to whomever they’re being inclusive of. That would mean inclusiveness is just a foundation for posturing and lies! ugh.¹

It makes me even angrier when people decide they don’t need to be ‘politically correct’ because, say, there are no women presently present. No. False. It doesn’t suddenly make it ok. You still don’t talk that way about women, not just because it might offend, but because it’s wrong, and apart from offence or exclusion it also harms your own perspective: it distorts your view of the abilities, value, or (ugh) ‘purpose’ of women, collectively or individually.

I try to be very careful about the language I use because I’m sure it affects how I think about people and groups. The way I swear, even just the words I use to refer to other cultures, backgrounds, disabilities, etc. I try to use gender-neutral terms where I can, even when it’s maybe not historically correct (they, actor), I try to not use girl when I’m talking about a female person over 20, especially when I don’t know them socially. And so on. Even for things not as obvious as racial slurs or infantilizing terms: Using ‘myopic’ to refer to something unwise, for example.

I also try to avoid making jokes or straw-man-arguments about or another culture, or religion², or language, or gender (even the minority ones), or economic class, or etc. And it’s not because I’m a humourless bore³, or because I don’t want to offend people[^4], but because I think that it is intrinsically important to be inclusive and understanding and valuing of people - especially those that are different than me, especially when my own privilege hides the little signals of unwelcomeness I unintentionally give out, let alone the intentional ones.

And when those people I’m trying to be inclusive of aren’t present? That’s still not wishy-washy political nonsense. It’s practice. The way you usually talk will affect your attitude and the way you think.

I’m still not excellent at this, there are many times I can’t believe I just said that, and many, many more times when I learn that something I say often can be hurtful or exclusive or belittling. I think it’s important to try, and I don’t think it should be dismissed as political correctness.

• addresses
• geography
• names
• time (which is especially difficult (really))
• gender.
• even just letters and numbers are absurdly complex.

So: in the interests of fixing all this, and restoring sanity to the galaxy, my project for next month is going to be much less of a spectator sport: Sleep. (you should really have been able to guess from the post title)

Now you’re probably thinking that sleeping sounds like something that shouldn’t take much energy to do. I don’t suffer from insomnia, I can fall asleep within 2 minutes if I choose to, and have no difficulty napping in blazing hot sunlight with music blaring. (That’s probably a bit strange.) But sleeping at normal human sleepy hours, and enough said hours per night, that’s something I’m lacking.

I will have to kick the caffeine again, I’ll also try and follow some of the suggestions from Steve Palina the Sleep Nerd for sorting out sleeping patterns and regularity.

How do you fall asleep quickly?

Since apparently this is some deep dark secret skill I hold, I thought I’d share it with you.

I am very practised with sleeping in adverse conditions. Because I’ve spent so much time being a bit nocturnal, I’ve learned to sleep with light and noise out of necessity. I don’t know how to do that except by practice. (And yes, it’s a weird thing to practice).

1. Have practice with the rubbish quasi-nocturnal sleeping pattern I’m trying to fix with the above.
2. Close your eyes. Don’t open them again even if you feel like you’re wide awake.
3. Don’t move. There isn’t a comfier position. That’s a trick. Don’t fall for it. Stay still.
4. Concentrate on breathing slower. Each breath should take longer than the one before. Reealy concentrate on it. It should drown out all the little worries and nagging thoughts.
5. That’s all. You should be asleep now.

I’ve tried listening to podcasts - these unfortunately make it impossible to focus on what I’m doing. I’ve tried listening to my music collection on shuffle but it’s too jarring, too focus grabbing, too many songs I love or have to skip.

I’ve finally settled on the listening to a single good album, on repeat. Something that has some variation, but not too much, something that has some energy, but not too much. And I listen to it over and over and over again, so it fades to the background, so I don’t think about it, I don’t process the lyrics.

This last few weeks it’s been Lorde’s Pure Heroine. I really like it.

That’s all.

It interrupted my reading and reminded me that I hadn’t played it in a very long time. I have an excuse of sorts, I live in a cheap apartment with extremely inadequate sound-proofing, and 99% of the time I’m not even in my apartment except when people would (or should) be sleeping. However, it just so happened that I was here, in my apartment, during the day. And there was my guitar, quietly challenging me.

So I picked it up. Strummed a bit, played a few chords. I felt entirely self-conscious, that those in the rooms next to mine would hear and judge and be annoyed at the noise, and my weak fingertips reminded me of days past when they were permanently calloused, when I thought of myself as a guitarist.

Now I mostly think of myself as someone who merely was a guitarist. Who can play some chords and pick some patterns and strum some rhythms, but who doesn’t really have the right to own a guitar.

In short, I need to play my guitar more.

I’d hoped to share with you some of what I learned, instead I will share with you how to mix your markdown with some Arabic.

For those unfamiliar: markdown is a simple, very popular, text-mostly markup language. For those unfamiliar: Arabic is very popular, beautiful human language which is hurting my tongue with the pronouncing, but we’re getting there.

First issue: SublimeText, my editor of choice, has no support for right-to-left text. None. Zero. Not even remotely.

Solution: TextEdit, however has some support, so I will jump to TextEdit when writing Arabic prose. (TextMate apparently also has support, but I removed my copy when I first moved to sublime text. Apparently that was a mistake.)

Second issue: I’m used to typing markdown in monospaced text and whatever the fallback font used by my Mac for Arabic support is, it is decidedly not monospaced

Solution: Download DejaVu Sans Mono

Third issue: I don’t trust browsers with the right-to-lefting skills, especially in mixed documents.

Solution: Sprinkle a liberal helping of <span lang='ar'></span> everywhere, and throw this in the SCSS (given you’re using compass )

[lang='ar'] {
  direction: rtl;
  text-align: right;
}

I’m a wee bit sad about having to use raw HTML for the lang attributes, but all my research turned up nothing.¹

Fourth: I spent all my time trying to find out how to do this, and none typing any Arabic.

Solution: اسمي دانا.

It is merely and only a colour picker, equivalent to Photoshop’s eyedropper tool, except for the whole screen. One tiny edge of functionality in a universe of functions.

It is: Colour Snapper

These were the wise words of one of my esteemed colleagues, when told about it today:

Ow. $5.
You do realise OSX has the Digital Colour Meter right?

Yes, they are tools that do the same thing, and yet no.

Digital colour meter on the left, Colour Snapper on the right.

1. It just looks better.
2. There is unbelievably less chrome to deal with.
   1. This reduces the cognitive overhead of all those buttons.
   2. It doesn’t cover up what you’re working on.
   3. Did I mention it looks so nice?
   4. That’s probably my circle obsession coming out again.
3. It’s just a keyboard shortcut away (I keep mine on ⌘⇧2) just hanging out in the menu bar waiting to be invoked
4. It reduces the common case to one keyboard shortcut and one click (copy the colour under the cursor to the clipboard in a predefined format)
5. It has never once disobeyed me, or broken something I was doing or crashed or whatever and I love it for that.
6. The loupe is flexible enough (⌘+, ⌘-) that I frequently invoke the colour picker just for the loupe and don’t pick a colour at all.

Whatever you do, as a design professional don’t fall victim to the taking screen shot, loading it into Photoshop, and then picking the colour there. Sadness and destruction are the only possible outcomes of that.

Honourable mention goes to my ⌘⇧1 tool: PixFit, also $5, a measuring tool that isn’t quite a screen ruler.

Have a nice day everyone.

A couple of days ago I read a post on kottke.org a site I regularly read, about how there’s new evidence that camels in the bible are anachronistic.

Immediately I thought of a reasons why this interpretation was flawed:

1. Absence of evidence isn’t evidence of absence - especially in a study like archaeology where evidence is scarce at best.
2. Language changes over time. Just look at how our understanding of what a computer is, or a train has transformed. Many words originally describe their intent, and that intent is passed on as the name of the new technology - in this case (possibly) domesticated camels.
3. Seriously? Camels?

There was no generosity of interpretation here, they (at least in the New York Times article) were looking for holes rather than looking for explanations, possible interpretations of how camels made it to Israel.

As soon as I thought this I realised I had no generosity toward the article as I read it. I wasn’t looking for ways they might be right, I was looking for ways they might be wrong - just as these authors were doing for the Bible. Should I be being more generous in my interpretation. Should I assume that they’ve thought of these explanations? That their conclusion of “I didn’t find camel bones” is “the bible is all wrong” is something I should think about?

Who am I kidding. Just read this list of headlines.

• Study finds camels don’t belong in the book of Genesis
• Archaeology Find: Camels In ‘Bible’ Are Literary Anachronisms
• There Were No Camels During Time of Biblical Patriarchs, Study finds

The glee with which various media jumped at the chance to say “nyea nyea bible wrong ‘cos camels” is kind of disheartening, but not surprising. Especially when you put Bible in scare quotes.

I don’t care about the camels. They don’t interact with my theology the tiniest bit. The fact that I without any information at all, could come up with 2 reasonable explanations for the supposed anachronism leaves me with no reason to think the historical reliability is suspect, and just for you I followed it up with the tiniest modicum of research (the ever-un-persuasive google search): creation.com, studylight.org, blogs.cnn.com, christianitytoday.com, christianthinktank.com, endthelie.com… Note: I don’t know anything about the various organisations presenting answers here, or whether they have any more or less validity than the archaeologists who are the source of all of this.

We went through the alphabet, learning the consonants, trying to distinguish between similar sounds.

So I built a flash card system so you can learn with me.²

Now featuring:

• Less fretting about what colour something should be¹
• Less unusual/confusing full-screen titles
• Even more brighter bright colours
• Packery.

Still to come: lots.

Following on from my post on creating a space for confrontation within relationships I thought I would examine why that was necessary at least for me.

First: definitions. Confrontation at an intellectual or personal level is merely the act of stating a difference of opinion, or caution or desire or etc than what has been previously stated explicitly or implicitly by the other party, rather than staying silent. It’s not pressing or forcing that opinion (nagging or domination), or even the rational defending of that opinion (debate/argument).

I suck at it.

One of the foundations of this blog is me learning to be confrontational correctly, I tend to be motivated to write when there is a disconnect between what I hear other people saying and what I believe. This makes my usual pattern for posting distatefully confrontational.

However this manner of posting is a fairly passive aggressive response to the various things I feel I need to confront. I need to move beyond that to confront things more directly.

The truth is that I am confrontational. I will call people up (if there is some level of relationship) if they’re being sexist or racist, especially if I feel they ‘should know better’. My workmates would probably not consider me non-confrontational as I will happily and readily exclaim that design or UI patterns, or coding techniques are stupid and should be avoided, and when I review code I tend to be unapologetically opinionated.

However the issues that I avoid being confrontational in: politics, sexual ethics, religions in general and specific, doctrinal issues, mac vs pc, etc… I do so for a variety of reasons

1. I avoid confrontation that would start fights

   There’s a massive difference between rational debate and argument and what usually happens when certain topics come up. So it becomes socially unacceptable to bring those topics up, or to present opposing opinion when it comes up. It’s one thing to say “I’m a Christian”, it’s quite another to say “therefore I believe you, the Atheist, Agnostic, Muslim, are fundamentally incorrect about the nature of the universe.” but that is what I believe. I avoid these conversations because frequently they achieve nothing and all we end with is ridicule and no-one is persuaded of anything.

   It’s impolite to tell someone you think they’re wrong. Politeness must lose more often in my life, such as pushing someone out of the way of a bus that’s about to hit them isn’t polite, it’s necessary.

2. I avoid confrontation where I’m not sure of my position

   If I don’t know what it is I believe with certainty then I will be much less likely to voice an opposing viewpoint unless it’s something trivial.

   Also If I have doubts about my opinion then I’m much less likely to confront with it.

   I need to learn more, and to lean more on and live more out of the things I’ve already learned.

3. I avoid confrontation where I’m not sure of the other’s opinion

   In my view this is the best reason to avoid confrontation. At this point, if appropriate it would be better to more fully understand the other party’s opinion than jump in with your own.

   I should, in this instance seek to learn to understand the other’s opinion, rather than remaining nonconfrontational at a distance

4. I avoid confrontation if I don’t care about the other person

   I’m sorry.

   I sincerely hope that my not being more forward and confrontation with my Christian beliefs is due to 1, 2, and 3. I fear that sometimes it is this. I know that sometimes it is this. God help me love others more.

We should be as wise as serpents and gentle as doves, dealing with issues and differing opinions with grace and understanding, in love, being careful in the presentation with scary life-altering truths, but not being paralysingly wary of doing so.

This post is still unfinished thought, and meandered where I didn’t mean it to go, but since it’s already 1am you get it in it’s present form.

Why don’t the possessive apostrophe rules apply for pronouns? Him’s and her’s would make like much simpler for its/it’s. As a wonderful side effect we’d avoid the whole there/their issue by using them’s instead.

A retrospective is a meeting at the end of each couple of weeks of work to discuss how we’re going with the project, to raise issues, amend processes etc. It’s not about what’s being developed, it’s solely about the ‘how’.

This is good because it means the rest of the time you’re not messing with the how, the deficiencies of various processes, etc, and can solely focus on the actual doing of the work. It also means you bring up issues relatively close to them coming up and throughout the life-time of a project processes do improve. It’s pretty much magic.

Because romantic relationships are clearly exactly like software development, and I am apparently a massive nerd, I think that would be a good thing to add to whatever future romantic entanglement I find myself in.

Why? In previous relationships I had an illusion of myself that I wasn’t the sort of person to get angry or frustrated with other people. I’ve since found out that’s nonsense, that my just rolling with stuff doesn’t mean I’m unflappable, just that I ignore it more and pretend everything is fine longer.

In the service of frequent and open communication, I think something that looks vaguely like a retrospective would be awesome. Because dealing on the meta level in relationships is important, but it’s equally important that it doesn’t overwhelm the just being in a relationship. That those conversations have a place, but don’t become every conversation.

So every month or fortnight or week depending on necessity, there could be a date-ish thing, where you talk about the things that are working and the things that are not, the things that you don’t really want to talk about, the things that are hard to bring up. And you skip it if either one is tired or stressed or already angry or in any way not up to dealing with the messy meta bits of important relationships.

You’re probably saying ‘why do you even need to make this a system, frequent and open communication should just happen’, but I know what I’m like, so this is me trying to design a solution for the issue that is me.

And maybe/probably/ideally this fades with necessity over time, as you become more used to each others rhythms and signals and the times when it’s good to talk about necessary hard things and the times when it’s really not, but that might just be optimism on my part.

All this is completely useless to me currently and it probably wouldn’t work in practice anyway but it was fun to think about, and I needed a post for today.

Sound quality is important

Like, really important. I listen to most of my podcasts on 2⨉ speed¹ because Americans talk way too slow, but if I have to slow it down because the quality is so bad I’ll be unhappy.

If you’re doing long distance conversation/interview podcasts, record the audio at both ends, unless your internet speeds allow you a clear skype/facetime connection. Definitely don’t record a skype-to-phone conversation from only one end, for the love of anything.

Use a slightly decent microphone - every notable podcaster will have a list of what’s good and cheap, here’s Dan Benjamin’s.

Keep your intro short

Your intro isn’t to tell a story, or to make a statement. It should simply be a ‘Where am I?’. A lot of conversational podcasts do without one entirely. I especially like the Giant robots smashing into other giant robots’ intro, which, considering the length of it’s name, really couldn’t stand being anything other than just that.

Your intro is the first thing a new listener will hear. They didn’t come for the into, they already read the description and they came for the talking.

Plan, and don’t be afraid to throw out the plan

Are you a conversation podcast? Have a thought out list of topics to converse about (There’s a reason why John Siracusa is my favourite podcaster). Are you a question answering podcast? Look at the questions before hand and have some idea of the answers. Are you an interview podcast? Know something about interviewing techniques and asking good questions, as well as knowing enough about your interviewee. And don’t keep pressing questions that are not going to be answered to your satisfaction - you’re not an investigative reporter, you’re an informational entertainer, and an interviewer who keeps asking a question that won’t be answered is the most frustrating thing to listen to, and it can’t be good for your chances of getting your guest back.

Sound passionate and excited

This is (sadly) more for the theology podcasters. Most of them sound really bored. Your voice should show your enthusiasm. Inflect. Exude passion for this thing you are clearly passionate enough to spend/waste your time making a podcast about. Embrace all the times you’ve been called a hypocrite, consider it encouragement of your acting abilities.

Comment with your favourite podcasts with those who do these things well. I need more podcasts to cover the amount of walking I do.

This bag is one of my most favourite things that I own. It is easily the cheapest favourite thing: it cost me $18.50¹ from Trade Me², over two and a half years ago.

It looks like it is from WWI, and was for gas-mask equipment (explaining the unhelpful internal divider).

Here’s the American version made new.

It’s served me well, though I’ve had to repair it a couple of times, and I did cut out that internal divider, it’s incredibly sturdy. For a bag I use all day, every day, in even the most appalling weather, it’s lasted very well. Previously I’d been used to bags with plastic buckles and connectors breaking after mere months of use, or stitching coming undone, however the only issues I’ve had with this bag is the actual canvas wearing away with use. And fair enough - it’s been through a lot.

And it’s fun to fix with my truly terrible frankensteinish sewing.

This is, of course, madness.

The primary reason to never flip the bozo bit is that I’m wrong some (large) percentage of the time. False positives won’t help me better understand the world, they just increase echo-chamber effects.

Sometimes we’re both right and and merely have different perspectives, sometimes even though I think they’ve said something ridiculous, the chain of reasons goes back quite reasonably to some slightly incorrect premise. (something I was frustrated at when I posted On Ridicule).

Even when they’re actually and objectively wrong, people can teach me something - sometimes that’s how to better explain things to people who have different world views, sometimes it’s just being aware of how different people think (which is really useful as a UI designer).

Everyone says and believes some stupid things. I was reading through this list of fallacies today² and I know that I see many of those fallacies in my own thinking even though I’ve been trained by computers to have a sound grasp of formal logic and what makes a valid argument/program. Yet I commit the fallacy fallacy so often I should have it tattooed on my other arm.³

I still flip the bozo bit an unreasonable amount - I hide at least a quarter of my facebook friends⁴, I dismiss out-of-hand everything Mark Driscoll says, and it’s all I can do not to put my head through a wall when I’m listening to the occasional theology podcast’s panelists. I need to seek good ideas and truths everywhere they can be found and not just where I expect to find it.

I’ve only started to realise that I am quite arrogant when it comes to dealing with ideas and people I disagree with, and I mean to do that less.

What’s your strategy for dealing with people who you find are all-too easy to ignore?

It’s set in Ireland, about a busker/hoover-fixer-sucker-guy, and a poor Czech pianist who gives him ten cents and asks him who his songs are about.

And I love it so much.

Some spoilers below. C’mon, watch it first, you should’ve seen it by now anyway: it’s been out eight years.

It’s a simple story, simply told

You can see that it was shot very cheaply, no great camera rigs or dollys or lighting or whatever. I don’t think that the incredible amount of money spent on creating entertainment is really that worth it - often you can tell stories much more cheaply, and some of the best movies have been done by being creative about having no money

I love that you can see the edges, that it’s not great acting, or amazing set design, or camera work, or editing. it’s just a story about a boy and a girl who change each others lives in small and big ways.

The music is amazing

I’m not usually that into musicals, I dislike the breaking out-of-character in-to-song.¹ This blows such musicals out of the water; the music is plot-driven and plot-driving, and very close to the characters’ personalities. It’s so well woven into the story.

The songs themselves are beautiful, the soundtrack album is an excellent album in its own right. It helps that the actors are musicians first. Glen Hansard was apparently initially hired to be a music-advisor and song writer, not to star - the producers of this movie were very fortunate that everything ended up the way it did.

It shows creating music well

I enjoy how realistic the scenes that show writing music are. One scene shows the guy writing a song - guitar in hand, doodle-covered notebook and computer in front, quietly singing fragments and couplets and scribbling away - which is exactly how I wrote songs in days of old.

The whole recording scene also makes me super-nostalgic for the recording I’ve done.

There are some beautiful little moments

These are my favourites:

• Her walking the vacuum cleaner.
• The smile on the music-shop owner’s face as he listens to them play together for the first time.
• After he insisted her vacuum repair was free, and her insisting that “nothing is free”, his father letting them both off by saying just four euros.
• “Try to speak a little English ma,” “No thank you”.
• “I’ll pay you back.”
• The sound engineer as he listens to their first song.

They don’t end up together

This is easily my most favourite thing about this entire movie². It doesn’t follow the hollywood line of leading man and leading women must end up together, or even that people who are attracted to each other should end up together. They’re just two people who meet each other, encourage each other to move forward with their lives, and then go their separate ways - probably never to meet again.

I think it’s beautiful and real and a breath of fresh air.

1. I really enjoyed the week last year when I wrote posts daily, and I need the motivation to not just fiddle with the design of my blog, but just write, about anything and everything.
2. Without the motivation of writing regularly I’ll just write whenever I’m pissed off about something - and then it starts to seem like I’m just always pissed off.
3. The best way to be creative is to force it. No, really.

So you’ll be getting a bunch of posts of varying quality throughout the next four weeks. Subscribe to the feed to catch them all.

And comment! Your comments make me feel like I’m being read and encourage me to put effort in or whatever.

Love.

I grew up assuming that homosexuality was bad™. I had the attitude that “There is bible verses and stuff, I don’t know where, but there are, and reasons”. And though I “knew” that homosexuality was a sin, as I grew up I couldn’t shake the feeling that we’d really screwed up the way we’d handled everything.

Then everything went to pieces and I left Christianity, which resolved another¹ cognitive dissonance I had held as a Christian, and as an Atheist I could happily accept and ignore homosexuality. Not my problem any more.²

Once I returned to Jesus, and meant to respect the Bible, but the traditional interpretation of the various passages regarding homosexuality still really bugged me, more so than ever before. I felt torn by ideologies - on the one hand, I wanted to believe in what I felt lined up with what the bible taught, on the other hand I couldn’t stand with what I saw as widespread ostracisation and dehumanization of gay people by the church.

I recently read Torn by Justin Lee. And I recommend you do too. Gay or straight. Christian or non-. Look, I’ll lend you my kindle. It’s not a long book.

It’s autobiographical, it’s careful biblical interpretation, it’s grace-filled, and gentle. I was expecting a liberal-christianity burn-your-bible-jesus-is-a-hippie book, but it is so not that.

It shook up some of my long-held, but groundless beliefs about the source of homosexual orientations. It caused me to realise that though my most recent reconciliation attempts had me seeing same-sex-but-asexual romantic relationships as a-ok was not really enough - not everyone is as enamoured with the idea of continued singleness and celibacy as I am.

I’m now 100% behind the legalising of gay marriage (yeah, it’s just like me to show up late to the party), and will happily take the flak for supporting and advocating for Christian same-sex marriages. Because I think that’s the right thing to do.

Regardless of what you believe, please never never say “Love the sinner, hate the sin.” That is just about the most self-righteous, dehumanizing, trivialising, arrogant, judgemental, ugh.

I was in this uncomfortable Christian meeting recently. The deal was all the married people went to one room to be lectured on how to be married better, and all the unmarried people went to another room and were told not to have sex before marriage because reasons.

Why was it uncomfortable? Because they were talking about …sex…? No! It was because the reasons were terrible, the presentation was dismissive and holier-than-thou, and mostly just boring and inapplicable.

Lets look the reasons why, as Christians, we should not have sex before/outside of marriage?

1. God seems to think monogamy is a good idea.
2. why the heck do you need a second reason?

An interesting presentation could have looked like going through scripture. Examining the implications that the man after God’s own heart had hundreds of wives, or that the man who is the Literal Father of God’s Chosen People slept with at least two women while they were both alive. Look at what Jesus said about divorce and lust, and what those he spoke to understood from that. How that has implications today. Look at how Paul addressed the various churches in his letters about sexual immorality, and how he defined it.

We didn’t get that presentation. We were instead bombarded with hours of statistics about self-identified virgin-at-the-wedding divorce rates, happiness-in-marriage anecdotes and what-ifs of those who’d “compromised”, romantic sop about being equally awkward and learning to be not awkward together.

Why is this an issue? Our morality should come from God, through scripture. Though we may see societal or biological reasons that align with our morality, don’t use them as the foundation of your morality. It’s too easy to come up with arguable counter-examples.

That wasn’t what bothered me most about this presentation. No. What made me angry was the implication (possibly unconscious, but definitely there) that being a virgin made you better than unmarried non-virgins. Because you hadn’t crossed this easily drawn line in this one particular sin, you could consider yourself pure and righteous. And those in that room who had. Well. Too bad. Can’t undo that ‘mistake’ kiddo.

Bull–

Our righteousness is like filthy rags.¹ We have no way to make ourselves right in our own strength. “Saving myself for marriage” doesn’t make me a better person, or more pure, or whatever. Sin is sin. All have sinned.² Just because virginity is easier to define than greed and selfishness, or jealousy, or verbal abuse, or exploitation of workers, or even the broader, messier definition of sexual immorality, doesn’t mean that it’s worse.

We are not pure in our own strength. Our sexual history doesn’t make us pure or not.

Only one thing does.

Christ’s sacrifice is the only righteousness we have that’s worth anything, and it’s worth everything.

I thought I understood that I am privileged. As a white, young, not-hideous, healthy, employed, neurologically “normal”, loan-less, relatively wealthy, degree’d, heterosexual,¹ genetically and physically and traditionally male,² (natively) English-speaking, New Zealand citizen, I’ve hit the jackpot. I win at every category (plus some I haven’t thought of). I know on some level that I benefit from everyone else who is in a different box than I am for any of these categories. Yet I’m repeatedly surprised by just how much freedom I have that other people don’t, not because I’m more deserving, but merely because one of those labels is different.

However I’ve been shocked when talking to friends and finding out how they’ve been taken advantage of by employers and they can’t negotiate because visas and how hard it is to find a job. I need to remember that just because I have the power to demand a fair contract and a reasonable wage (even in this country where that’s supposed to be a given) not everyone has that freedom.

Unless something significant changes I will probably never have an issue with money or finding work because everything is stacked in my favour. Not because I’m good with money or because I somehow deserve to be paid more than, or even necessarily deserve a job over other people.

I need to always remember that just because the system is easier for me doesn’t mean it’s easy for many or most people.
I need to always remember that I’ve done nothing to deserve it being easier for me.
I need to always remember that in many cases it’s zero-sum. That for it to be fairer it has to become harder for me. I have to be ok with this.

I never want to say to someone “The world isn’t fair, get used to it” because I’m one who benefits from that unfairness.

The world isn’t fair, lets try to change it.

White knight/white guilt

I try to remind people when they’re abusing/not realising their privilege. I try to reassure people when they’re on the losing end of the some unfairness - that they’re not at fault because they don’t match any one of those statuses.

However I don’t want to be doing that to assuage guilt, or out of a ‘helping out the lesser beings’ attitude, I also don’t want to encourage a victim mindset - the attitude that the deck is stacked against me so I just won’t try. I want my egalitarianism to be sincere and helpful.

I now have a standing rule to never click on a link that looks like the above. It’s a matter of principle.

I don’t like to feel I’m being manipulated, and when it’s in such a hamfisted way, it’s embarrassing.

It’s also terrible information design. Titles should be clear, they should immediately show you whether or not there’s something you’d be interested in reading further. These kind of titles serve only to entice you to click on something you’d otherwise ignore in order to make whoever runs Upworthy money from ads next to videos and stories he probably has no rights to (he may well get the right publish them, but I doubt it) that’s a very long sentence but I did nanowrimo so I don’t care.

It’s also tediously formulaic.

Don’t link to Upworthy (or the inevitable x-but-for-christians Faithit). Discourage these awful titles.

You can read my post on its planning and meaning
It’s kind of awesome to finally have.

The actual process of getting the tattoo was pretty easy, I asked friends who had tattoos who they recommended, I went with Tim Gau who was a pretty nice guy despite hurting me and giving me indelible scars.

It hurt less than I thought it would, but more than I hoped it would.

I’ve written 35,000 words. It’s not winning Nanowrimo, and it’s not a novel, but it’s still a great many words.

You can read it here: https://gist.github.com/robotdana/7220779 (you should probably stop after part one)

What did I achieve?

1. One vaguely interesting ten thousand word short story.
2. A few other less interesting short stories, haphazardly connected on.
3. Lots of waffling and losing interest in settings and premises.
4. A few thousand words of user interface designing masquerading as a story
5. A large chunk of just writing for the sake of wordcount without any plan or goal.
6. A greater tendency towards the verbose.

I think overall Nano has made me (hopefully temporarily) a worse writer. I’ve become needlessly verbose and less careful, where I used to prefer to use less words I would now write more because all that mattered was wordcount, and it bled into the rest of my writing. On the other side of that coin it has made me a braver writer, in that I’ll just write without caring about what I’m writing so much as long as I’m writing.

Writing fiction seems less like a magical impossible skill now. And writing good fiction seems achievable, as it’s just like writing bad fiction but with hundreds of hours of revisions. And it turns out I can write bad fiction.

I feel more like a writer now. I’ve written a very many lot of all the words. I’ve been through a thing. I’ve survived.

It was clearer who I was writing for while in Germany too - everyone at home who was interested in what I was up to. That audience skewed Christian (or I assumed it did), so I left out a bunch of background.

Without a clear audience things get a bit confused Christianity & science was split between being written for anti-evolutionist Christians and anti-christian evolutionists, The city that crosses continents was as much for my new Turkish friends as it was for my old friends - Christian and non, and didn’t commit to saying much of anything. My programming posts were both written for non-programmers. Some of my posts are publishing notes make myself do things, most are just to straighten out things I’m thinking about, and some are just … semicolons?

Let me know in the (now-working) comments below if you read this. If you’d rather not comment here, hit me up on twitter, or email. I may adjust the comment form with a checkbox to send unpublished feedback so you don’t have to use other things, but I’m lazy, also: publishing your thoughts is good for them.

Ritual serves as a consistent reminder of a too-easily overlooked truth. They’re the automatic ‘I love you’ at the end of a phonecall after an argument. Rituals frequently say to ourselves and others what we mean to say, but don’t want to or remember to.

Communion - what this post is ostensibly about - is a ritual reminder. What is communion? A frequent meal to remind ourselves and each other of Jesus, his sacrifice, and his how readily and generously and violently he gave himself. That ritual can be obscured, by restricting who has access to the communion meal, trouble over whether the elements need to be truly bread and wine, or is ribena ok, or maybe even coke?

Would cake and coffee work as a more present reminder in our café culture? It’s a frequent communal meal; coffee, while not as violently red as wine/ribena, still suffers through a lot to get to you. However merely my loose attitude to the elements carries it’s own symbolism - that of a humanist-inspired anti-traditionalism - which is something I carry and have to be careful of.

Growing up in churches, you become exposed to these rituals being treated as ends in themselves - everything must be just so, and if someone takes communion then that means the church ‘approves’ of them - and you can’t approve of just anyone, goodness!. This is the danger of losing sight of what the ritual points to and assuming the power is in the ritual itself. I grew up in baptist-inspired churches - where baptism is a Thing that must be done right. And while I think there is certainly truth baptism being important, I don’t feel entirely comfortable with the veneration of it, or the negation of traditions where baptism is practiced differently.

Christianity is filled with rituals, and the history of the church is filled with arguments about rituals - what’s essential to Christianity, what’s completely wrong, and what’s just there if you want it. Rituals tend to accrue because they have a good place and purpose: they’re a reminder, a lens, but they can come to overpower what they are meant to signify because they’re more physical and therefore easier to put rules around. And we love rules.

I found a hand-written brain-dump I wrote from before I gave up being a Christian. It had my pastor’s email address scrawled in the corner; I don’t think I ever showed it to him. I wonder what he’d’ve said? I wonder what I’d say now? I wonder if this counts as my letter to my past self blog-roll post?

Published with my permission ;)

The letter

I have no idea what to believe.
I look at my life, and if I strip away any bias of Christian upbringing, I get God doesn’t exist. But I haven’t removed bias. I’ve replaced it. With western atheism. The world around me. 1 bias for another.
Everything is just the way you look at things. And when I change assumptions I get a different result. I don’t like that I can’t answer myself. There is a lot within Christianity that I struggle believing. Why is healing so inconsistent. The ridiculousness of the bible re-interpreted for nice bible stories in a politically correct age.

There are huge clashes between ideologies. Slaves. Women. War. Sex. It doesn’t even seen consistent in the bible itself. I hate that I have so conditioned myself not to swear, this automatic censor to what comes out of my mouth, when it’s so at odds with the sentences in my head. I hate that I can’t say a movie is art because it has nudity, I hate that I don’t pray except in front of people, I hate that I feel like everyone else does the same. I hate that I’m always cynical of Christian successes. I hate that I can go to church and sing the songs and help at youth group, and then come home and it feels like a fucking charade.

Nothing makes sense to me in a concrete way. Everything is shifting. I hate that I argue away Gods love as that nice feeling that someone loves you, as imagined, wishful thinking. I feel so hypocritical, yet I’m so glad the youth believe. Their faith is strong. But I can’t. Every time I return to God I say I want to serve you this time. This time. And people say every time invite the Spirit in. Live by the Spirit every day. It sounds like brainwashing. You repeat something enough, you believe it. Until you stop repeating it, then it vanishes. I hate that I can convince myself to break up with a lovely girl. Hurt her. Just because I can’t see myself marrying her. The was nothing wrong with our relationship. But I convinced myself it was better now than later. Maybe it was.

I talk to myself a lot. I talk to God too. In the same way. Am I just talking to myself?

I don’t even know what I want to believe let alone what is true. I feel like I’m losing my mind. Actually going crazy. I can’t stay by myself too
long. I start to go nuts. So I watch movies, read books, lived in a fantasy place. I’m losing it. I don’t know what’s real.19-year-old me

My Response

It’s ok. Doubt is ok. Swearing is ok. Babel is a great movie.

You don’t have to figure everything out now. You don’t even have everything figured out in 7 years time. Faking it is stressful: relax and be honest with where you’re at. You’re not as smart as you think your are.

Cognitive bias are present no matter what you believe. They’re a red herring though - not part of your struggle with Christianity. Be aware of them yes, if for no other reason than that it’s truly fascinating how our brains are fooled.

That relationship? She’s married, I’m sure she’s happy. No lasting damage. You’re fine also, unencumberedly single.

You’ve read the Bible. Keep reading it. Read it again. There’s some crazy stuff in there, yes, but when read as a whole it is consistent, it’s just not always made obvious up-close who’s doing wrong and right. (Hint: Everyone is usually wrong).

Read more, study more. There is a wealth of information on how to reconcile the lists of apparent contradictions that you’ve been hit with. All of your intellectual issues are already answered somewhere - there’s nothing new, you don’t have to come up with the answers yourself. Definitely talk to more experienced people of an intellectual bent, they’ll no-doubt have had similar questions, and will know where to find answers.

You have a responsibility to the youth group to not fake your relationship with Christ, if you can’t do it for real (you can’t), set is aside for a time (you do). It’ll remove the whole stress and terror of being found out as a fake Christian (which is a significant part of your mental anguish). Most people will understand. You can even stop calling yourself a Christian for a while; it’ll help you extract the Truth of Christianity from the mushy hollow christian/churchy appearance. (I don’t mean stop praying and seeking God, just that sometimes labels like ‘Christian’ and the expectations that follow them hurt more than they help.)

Above all: God won’t leave you like this. Hang in there. Talk. Don’t just be flaily at bits of paper in secret.

Love.

I’ve always been confused about semicolons;¹ when to use them and, more importantly;² when not to.

Considering I’ve just spent a lot of time caring about good typography on this blog;³ to the point of writing a script to outdent quotes;⁴ I thought I would take the time to learn.

1. Half-full-stop. Joining two sentences

   Secondary to terminating statements in C-style languages, the purpose of a semicolon is to join sentences tighter than full stops:

   1. The two parts must be full sentences in their own right.
   2. There must be some gain or emphasis in meaning from the tighter connection.
   3. There mustn’t be any conjunctiony words. No buts. Our semicolon is the conjunction.
   4. They should be of equalish importance. (Otherwise a parenthetical⁵ would be more appropriate).

2. Super-comma. Disambiguating list separators

   If you have a list whose items contain commas then you need something other than a comma to break it up.

   e.g. Wellington, New Zealand; London, England; and Krögis, Germany.

   I think this looks ugly;⁶ I will rewrite to avoid it.

Hi friends who studied english at university; am I telling the truth?

In the past it seemed like an impossible thing … before this year I didn’t really think of myself as a writer and after November I still doubt I’ll have the gall think of myself as a fiction writer, however I’m now confident I’ll be able to at least write that many words down in a month - especially if I murder my internal editor.

… later …
I just did a wordcount on the totality of my blog: 19490 words. I don’t think I’d fully realised just how many words that I will have to write.

My plan is to publish as I go, to this very blog - so you can see it take shape and watch me write like a crazy person.

And in the interest of ‘developing’ everything in the open, pre-novel-notes: below.

[removed! No spoilers, although I’ll have you know I got up to 2100 words in outline.]

disclaimer: I haven’t any training beyond high-school-level in sciencing, and physics was all I took to the final year at that. So my understanding of science, the philosophy of science, and science in the bible is at best pop-level. Ok? Lets go.

I believe in The Big Bang, I believe in Evolution, I also believe in God - the creator of heaven and earth. I believe that’s not at all mutually exclusive or contradictory.

Teach the controversy.

But it doesn’t matter!

False.

I grew up in a family where we believed Evolution was false (that’s Evolution with a capital E - an important distinction). As a teenager I delved into pop-science websites about evolution and creationism (such as Answers in Genesis) - and believed the creation of life, the universe, and everything happened in 6 literal 24 hour days. I would get into arguments with people on the internet about it (because I was a teenager, and that’s what phpbb was for).

So in my mind the truthiness of Christianity became very tied up with this anti-evolutionism -this was probably a component of my evaporating faith. I remember when I decided I was an atheist, one of my Christian friends said, surprised “But now you have to believe in evolution!” not realising that finally believing in evolution was a kind of intellectual relief.

When I returned to Christianity I brought that belief with me. I satisfied myself that evolution was compatible with Christianity, but I was never going to be as aggressive about the how of creation as I had been in the past.

However I’ve started to realise that a) there is a popular assumption idea that 6-day young-earth creationism is necessary to Christianity, b) this is “scientifically” preposterous, therefore c) Science! is in opposition to Christianity, d) Christianity disbelieves science, and therefore e) Christianity requires you to ignore or legislate against science, and y’know, thinking. ugh.

But the Bible says!

I read Genesis 1–2:4 as a poetical explanation that God created everything, that there was a process to creation, that God works and rests.

Taking the days as literal 24 hour sequential events is unnecessary, expecting it to be a science textbook is unfair to what it was written to (possibly) convey: that none of the listed created things (mostly things that have been worshipped as gods - sun, sky, plants, animals, humans) were greater than, or not created by, God.

As I mentioned in my very long post on the nature of God, I believe God has demonstrated, through the long and people-heavy process of the salvation of the Earth, that does use directed natural processes to achieve His ends, and that He is still the ultimate reason and cause.

But what about Adam and Eve.

I believe they were really the first people. I’m not sure whether they were homo sapiens or neanderthals, I’m not sure God created them directly, or “upgraded” some apes, giving them spirits (making them in image of God). At this point, I happy with all of these theories.

Read more at Biologos

But Atheism is more scientific!

False.

Science is the discovery and understanding of the physical world - how things work, how everything fits together.

Naturistic Atheism, or the belief that there is nothing other than the physical world, is not something that can be either proven or disproven scientifically, because it makes no claims about the physical world, it merely makes a negative claim about there being a spiritual world. This is the philosophy of Dawkins, et al. It’s not a more scientific view. it’s not an unscientific view. it’s an ascientific view.

But evolution means you don’t need a miraculous explanation!

False.

One of the two major holes with Naturistic Atheism is the problem of abiogenesis, or the start of life. Evolution only describes how we get from one species to another, it’s unable to explain how we got from simple chemistry to life at all.

There may be a physical-only plausible hypothesis to this in the future - my answer above about God using processes will easily weather any new discoveries here, but for the atheist this is currently a complete mystery, a “miracle of nature”.

But the big bang explains where the universe came from!

uhhhh… False.

The big bang describes the first moments of matter and energy and where elements came from and why it’s distributed as it is, etc. It is no help when it comes to why the big bang banged, and where the energy/matter came from. Atheists have come up with many increasingly bizarre theories from quantum fluctuations (in what?), to negative time (huh?), to a past-eternal periodically pulsating uni/multiverse (merely moving the problem back a step)

In fact the truth of the big bang is a headache for naturistic atheism; an eternal past would be much nicer and not require anything messy like a moment of creation.

But … um…

I’ve run out of made-up objections, I’m sure you can come up with some, so I’ll be amending this, fixing my grosser errors, etc. I’m aware that I’ve merely traded one authority (Hi parents) for another (Hi general scientific community) as I am in no way an expert in any field of science, let alone evolution. My motivations for believing in evolution are as much about intellectual tidiness, and not building unnecessary barriers, as any conviction of the truth of evolution itself.

I encourage you to read Reasonable Faith, Biologos, and other resources that I would list if I thought anyone would actually look them up.

I feel I’ve finally earned a redesign.

Let me explain it to you in mind-numbing detail.

Colours

You’ll notice the blog actually looks pretty much the same. This might seem like “branding” (said in the most pretentious design-school voice you can affect) - but it’s really just that I quite liked the colour scheme I had going. Done.

Update

So, it turns out the above was a lie, and what I really wanted was brighter colours, bolder lines, and ajaxy-ness.

Layout

The second thing you may notice is that it’s wider - much wider. The narrowness of my blog remained through a great many of my previous designs, primarily to trick you all into thinking I’d written more than I had, and to trick myself into thinking I was writing a lot. Now I have a much more reasonable line-length and therefore nicer typography. Yay.

Engine

The third thing you won’t notice is that I’ve switched from using Toto on Heroku to using Octopress on Github Pages. I made this switch because Toto seems dead, Heroku is slow unless you pay them too much, Octopress was recommended by my workmates, and Github is fast and free.

Circles

I really really like circles (don’t ever get me started on the Japanese flag). So my blog has circles now because they makes me unreasonably happy. Sometimes that’s all the design rationale you need.

I stole them wholesale from Acko.net - a blog design I love but I promise not to emulate more than this (I don’t think I could: go look).

One-post-per-page

Before I had all of the posts on the / page. Now I just have the latest one. The primary reason I changed this was to make you all click the new circle previous & next buttons. I am not even kidding.

Also it feels more focused having the one post - my blog’s topics are pretty eclectic.

Archive

I have an archive now!

URLs

I removed the date! I never liked having the date in the URLs - it prevents them from being timeless. However, I’m redirecting old URLs using javascript, so by making them appear more timeless, I’ve broken the link with the past. Pun.

Comments

Will return. I just don’t want the Disqus interface muddying up my beautiful design any longer.

update

Have returned! I’m now using Juvia - an open source, ruby-on-rails commenting system, which I’m hosting on Heroku, that means I can have 10,000 comments for free, so comment lots everyone. Juvia is leagues better than Disqus for me - it’s open-sourceness means I was able to modify the API to work exactly how I wanted, after hours of fruitless fighting with Disqus.
I now need to clean up my code and make a couple of pull-requests for Juvia - my Disqus migrator and a more json-ly api. Open Source Rocks!

NZ$2.25 per day to spend on food. That’s all. no more.

NZ$2.25 is vaguely the global extreme poverty line. By attempting to do this for one week I can get a sense of what it must be like to experience the hunger of having so little. Except not - because I have access to free clean drinking water, accommodation, warmth, low corruption, hot showers… Except not - because I only do this for 5 days then I go back to spending my 5-days-food-budget on a single meal. Except not - because I don’t have a threat of starvation hanging over me.

I found when I did this last year, that when I was (not) eating with people - almost without fail - they would try to give me some of their food, or offer to buy me some, or try to pay me in food for doing dishes or something. This is an appropriate response of wealth to poverty. I’m just not the impoverished one.

I challenge you - if you’re feeling the littlest bit uncomfortable watching me eat lentils and rice while you eat your excellent food, and you feel compelled to share. Donate instead.

Live below the line is about bringing extreme poverty out of the shadows. For me and for you too. I get to feel more hungry than usual, and you get confronted with a stand-in for poverty. People are starving without, yet if I choose to eat lentils and rice for a week people want to buy me a cheeseburger. I don’t deserve your generosity any more than some stranger who has no resources. I certainly don’t need it more.

While I and others are choosing to go without a bunch next week, realise there are many who don’t get to choose.
Please give to whichever organisation you like - even something not associated with my fundraising - extreme poverty is fixable and we are the wealthy ones.

P.S. I’m sorry that the tone of this post is so very arrogant. I know very little about world economics, and that it’s more complex than just throwing money around. I also know that I am ridiculously better off than a disturbing swathe of the planet - not through my own merit, just through sheer unfairness. That sucks.

A time I reinvented myself

I was losing my faith. I was crushed by ever-increasing doubts about God - trying to hide it and continue to appear to be a Christian, hating myself for my hypocrisies and failure to live up to my own standards, angry that I had to have standards - why should I follow these moral code when I wasn’t even sure if it mattered at all, especially when so many other Christians I saw didn’t.

I was sitting on the bathroom floor of my flat. Cracked tiles, water-damaged flooring, I didn’t care. I’d finally, in full awareness, admitted to myself that I didn’t believe God existed. At all. The earth rushed away and everything faded to black as I thought about my complete insignificance, the meaninglessness of everything I loved and cared about - the pointlessness of the entire human species. Everything. Meaningless.

A time I uninvented myself

I was angry at God for not existing, at myself for not believing, for caring still. I was angry for not being happy - there were many good things in my life - I had no hardships external to my mind, no difficulties I hadn’t made for myself out of thin air.

I was walking down the street, thinking about the cars zipping past. What it would be like to just step out in front of one. Crunch? squelch? thud? What would it do to the driver who killed me. Would it even work? would I even get the nerve to? (Spoiler warning: Hi)

I was in a church, silently standing next to people singing songs to a God I’d given up believing in. Yet I was crying, sobbing. I realised how close I’d come, I couldn’t trust my mind to give me sensible options any more if I was in a place where suicide was reasonable. I released my hold on my life. I told my friend what I’d been thinking. He told my parents. We told my doctor. I told a counsellor. People cared. Not just the still-theoretical driver.

I was unable to continue trying to appear as a Christian, trying to claim to be a Christian without a shred of faith. I turned to myself again, and fled from everything internal. I declared myself an Atheist. Problem solved. Ignoring the darkness. Living as a shadow of myself, but at least an untroubled one. I was still loved and accepted by my friends and family which took me (unreasonably) by surprise.

A time I re-reinvented myself

I was bored. Hollow. I saw no more reason to be an Atheist than to be a Christian if Atheism was true. Truth has no value in a universe with no value. I remembered the goodness of Christ, the desire for God, I began to doubt my disbelief and think about my motives for disbelieving. To think about all the things I knew about God, and was ignoring for the purposes of thinking my atheism obvious. I am now convinced this return was orchestrated by God - I had to reject God to learn the truth. Christianity is not a game or a test of yourself. It’s not a series of practices and appearances, or a lifestyle choice.

A time I was reinvented

I was frustrated. I had been a Christian again for a year or more. I wasn’t in the place I’d been before, but I felt stuck. I felt trapped. I was always seeing myself being incredibly violent in my mind’s eye. I knew the cause: I was once again trying to appear Christian under my own steam - although this time round I was fully aware of it. I was trying to manufacture belief.

I felt God tell me he was going to show me a good vision. Then I had an overwhelming sense of Truth. It was thick. Red. I felt an inexplicable sense of complete conviction. I knew, without doubt, God is real. I knew that sense of truth was both more than I could handle and yet only the tiniest fragment. I knew then that faith wasn’t by careful reason, it wasn’t by enacting rituals, it wasn’t by anything I could do myself. Faith is a gift, undeserved. Like salvation. Like life. It’s not something innate - we pushed it away and picked up sin instead. It’s not something we can build or earn.

God taught me all this the long was round. I pray your journey doesn’t go as low or as broken. But I pray that whatever it takes you will meet Truth.

We spent last week in Istanbul, Turkey.

The main reason I went originally was to better understand Islam, and what it’s like to be in a dominantly Muslim nation. Now my main reason for having gone was to make many new Turkish friends. :)

The people are wonderful - so open and friendly, the food is incredible (I have a whole different understanding of iskender, and a new favourite drink - ayran), the historical architecture is amazing, and the weather was gorgeous. We didn’t go to sight-see, but even the sights we did see were incredible.

We stayed in Asia, but each day we went across to Europe on a ferry, to the more touristy areas where there were more English (and Portuguese) speakers.

Some students we met invited to join in İftar (the evening meal breaking the ramadan fast). They were all lovely, open, friendly fun, people. We had great cross-cultural conversations. We learned about their lives, about our differences, about how Turks think of Americans, and how Turks think Americans think of Turks/Muslims, and how no-one thinks of New Zealanders. We also established that you can go absolutely anywhere in the world and people have opinions about Justin Beiber and One Direction - they have a level of infamy that mad scientists can only dream of.

By talking with this group we were able to learn about Islam and Christianity from their perspective and to share ours. My question about how ramadan works in the arctic circle was finally explained - you only have to fast 21 hours at most - reasonable. One of the girls without a head-scarf explained how she reads the Qur’an and is comfortable with not needing to cover her hair while still being a devout Muslim - another (man) interjected to say that she was wrong - a familiar kind of unexplained disagreement ;).

We traded books - I was given an English translation of the Qur’an, we gave Turkish New Testaments, we traded Facebooks, it was a great time of cross-cultural/cross-religion sharing.

I will be back.

This is a tattoo I’ve designed while in krögis. (About 3/4 of the people here have tattoos - it’s inspired me). I’m thinking the inside of my wrist/forearm - something I can see that isn’t aggressively “Tattoo!”.

Why these symbols?

If you squint it says LOVE

The symbols themselves are phrases, I’ve come up with three, I need your help for more
Triangle (God) Square (opens) the Circle (eyes) of my Heart (heart).
Triangle (out) of the Circle (fullness) of the Heart (heart) the Square (mouth) speaks)
God Triangle (lifts) my Circle (head), I’ll Heart (love) outside the Square (box)

I’m sure you and I can come up with more.
Triangle: Trinity (God), Arrow, Upward…
Circle: Eye, Whole/Fullness, Sun…
Heart: Heart, Love…
Square: ⼝ (Mouth, Opening), Box

I want to keep my Heart/heart/love for others simple and straightforward - like the basic shapes that surround it

I like minimalism/simplicity and a tattoo of basic shapes seems very appealing. (Also: quick and cheap)

done!

Because defining complex things is fun.

Christianity is absolutely, completely, fundamentally about Christ. More than churches, Christians, religion, creeds, sacraments, or anything else, it is Christ.

In four ways:

Faith in Christ

Believing Jesus who he said he is - God. Trusting his goodness, and believing his revelation. This is the trigger for the other three.

Relating with Christ

Pursuing a relationship with Him. This is the most insane thing. We can have a relationship with God, by his grace and his love we can know him personally. This should revolutionise your life. This is the reward for the other three.

Following after Christ

Learning to be obedient to what he tells us. This is where all the meat of what is usually seen as Christianity hangs out - rituals, morality, churches, evangelism, etc. It’s the response to the other three.

Salvation by Christ.

We don’t save ourselves. It’s not even by our effort or righteousness that we can believe, follow, or relate to God. It’s by his grace. It’s by his grace and his sacrifice we can approach him at all. It’s the way we are saved. This is the enabler for the other three.

Everything else is secondary. And much is flexible. These four things though are fundamental, they are the core of Christianity. I’m pretty broad when it comes to denominations, even to groups and beliefs others may be wary of, but I see these as essential, these are what makes christianity christianity, even when we disagree on sometimes fairly substantial doctrines.

I stole most of this commentary on Phillipians I’ve been reading, and I wrote this in 10 minutes so it needs a lot of work.

This post is pretty much just about me me me.

The primary thing I’ve learned here and will take away is a sense of my gifts and calling and how that fits with the rest of the Church as a whole.

I have more of an idea of who I’m not, and how that’s ok. I’m more comfortable with not having the same gifts as others - I am not an evangelist, I am not a pastor. Those are not the only ways for a committed follower of Christ to serve. Obviously I knew that in the past, but now I’m starting to actually believe it. And because I know those aren’t my gifts I have more comfort with the times I am evangelising and pastoraling.

I have more of an idea of who I am, and how I’m still in progress, and that’s ok. I see the natural gifts and desires God has given me - I can see them more as gifts than as ‘ways I’m better than others’. I can also see my weaknesses as ways others are better than me and be excited for them rather than jealous.

I have more of an understanding of the scripture that talks about it being silly for an eye to try to be a foot or a nose to wish it was an eye. And that comes from meeting eyes and feet and understanding more of my nose-ness.

The most important thing I’ve learned over these last six weeks is

1. Trust God.
2. Trust God has plans.
3. Trust God with my plans.
4. Trust God made me the way I am on purpose - to not try to be someone else.

These aren’t really the things you come to a christian school to learn, but they’re definitely things I needed to learn, and I’m glad I’m here, I’m glad I learned them and am still learning them, and I’m confident and excited about now and the future.

In a lecture on apologetics, we stumbled into the problem of the judgement of the uninformed. That those who’ve never had the opportunity to hear about Jesus can’t accept him and the gift of redemption, therefore, they will be condemned to hell.

The question was opened to the us all in the room, and we shared very familiar answers, but they were still incomplete. There is an injustice that was still unaddressed. Something started formulating in my mind (unfortunately too slowly to be part of my two mic-hogging sessions of the morning). I don’t think I’ve read this argument before, so I thought I’d share it with you in case you haven’t read it before either.

We have free will to choose Jesus, yes. But we also have the freedom to choose to prevent others maliciously, accidentally, or simply by inaction from hearing the message at all. The positive side of this is the reason for Christian mission. We go so they hear. But the negative side is rarely mentioned. We didn’t go, so they didn’t hear.

We don’t like to think of our actions having negative consequences for others around and after us, but nothing we do is in isolation. The bible mentions this. Though children don’t have to bear the guilt of the sins of their ancestors, they do have to bear the consequences of their actions. Jesus talks about people causing others to stumble in their faith. (Extra credit: find the references yourself.)

We can trace the causes for the uninformed’s condemnation back to the free actions of others. Adam and Eve for the original disobedience, those at Babel for creating a situation where communication needed to become difficult and humanity spread, active Anti-christians throughout history (e.g. Dawkins), and actively wrong or merely inactive Christians throughout history, including today, including me.

You could say: ‘but God has the power to just appear to people, he shouldn’t be relying on humans’. And I think he does do that occasionally, I have heard more than one story (second-hand) of Jesus revealing himself to searching people without the presence of missionaries - but that is a tiny minority because people are usually not ready for that level of revelation.

It’s not fair, yes. but the fault is not God’s. We know the only way to redemption is through Jesus’ death and resurrection. He entrusted us with the task of spreading the news. If people don’t have the opportunity to respond to that then the fault is ours.

The fault is ours. The injustice is ours. We have to own this, repent for it, and work as hard as we can to prevent it from continuing. Go into all the world!

P.S. The evening lecture on apologetics after I wrote the above was continually drawn to Free-will vs Pre-determination, I stayed quiet and noted that that is something I haven’t studied enough - obviously what I’ve said here is all nonsense to someone who believes free will is nothing more than an illusion (a view I haven’t really been faced with before).

This week we had a lecture on the basics of Islam, on how to talk about Christianity with Muslims. As well as general details about the history of Muhammad and the Muslim view of the Qur’an vs the Christian view of the Bible, we spent a good deal of time talking about the different picture of God/Allah.

From this I wanted to make sure I had a somewhat coherent view of God, so I began to write. Here I am trying to describe God as far as I understand. This is to be very difficult because 1. I have very little understanding, 2. I have theology students/graduates/masters who I’ll get to read this, and 3. the picture in my head is very fluid anyway.

So this post will contain a lot of mistakes, heresy, and over-simplification. It will contain very little scripture and reference because I’m writing this without the internet, and I rely on Google to tell me where to find the passages and research I know. It will be a kind of overview of bits of knowledge I’ve got from here and there and simmered down to a tasty sauce.

God is inconceivably complex.

This post is a napkin-sketch-map compared to a real neighbourhood. Times a billion. We say this, this, and this is what God is like, and this he isn’t, but we just draw caricatures. We will always have a smudged view of God. 1 Cor 13:something.

And as my good friend John Green likes to say: the truth resists simplicity. We shouldn’t find it harder to believe merely because God is difficult to understand or comprehend, it should actually make it easier.

God is not immutable.

Some christians would say He is immutable, unchangeable. But how could an immutable God become a man? God enters the time He created. God can change. His essential qualities don’t change, but some things do. Petitioning prayer can change His mind. He forgives sins so thoroughly He forgets them. He died and rose.

God is superior to time.

God has always existed and will always existed.
Time started in the moment of creation. Prior to that there wasn’t time as we know it. There was not really a ‘before’ chronologically. God did not sit around for millennia before he created. There was no such thing. He caused creation. Made time, matter, energy, the physical rules and constants… Everything at all.

I personally think that the idea of being outside of time is harder to grasp than the trinitarian nature of God - but that’s probably because I’m wildly misunderstanding both. Carry on.

God doesn’t have to follow the laws of physics, but He likes to.

I believe God loves to create things using processes. Setting things in motion - a tweak or two here. All of creation is a song; He is a conductor. I find it easy to believe God does use natural processes to create stars, planets, creatures, people, healings… because everything in the universe is, at the beginning and throughout history, a miraculous creation anyway. He’s very patient. Don’t get me wrong, He does intervene sometimes, often as the result of petitioning prayer, but also just because he wills it.

God doesn’t have to use people, but He likes to.

The people of Israel, Jesus’ disciples, prophets, etc. God clearly likes to partner with us to bring the whole world back to relationship with Him. That seems crazy, inefficient, whatever - I don’t really understand the why of this, but that’s how it goes.
God doesn’t only use people, sometimes He’s more direct - Jonah, Paul, Samuel… but these are the exceptions - and you have to start somewhere, God went on to use these people to bring parts of the world back into relationship with Him.

God is patient - He used the entire history of Israel through to Jesus to get to the first phase of redeeming creation - after Adam and Eve first sinned.

God is trinity.

This is the point that prompted this post, and a very difficult thing to understand.
For all of Israel’s history God was regarded as a solid unit. Indivisible. Atomic.
Picture a solid triangle (here’s one I prepared earlier - for those with sensible browsers: ▲). When Jesus came He showed us more of the nature of God - much more, one of the things that was revealed was that God is made up of three parts: Triangle an open triangle. The parts are distinct. They are different persons who share knowledge (but not completely), They share power, They love each other completely, and they are eternally part of the same being - God. They can be referred to as a whole or by. They each are fully God (metaphors tend to fail here) - each have all of the attributes mentioned in this post. Even when Jesus shed His power and became a man he was still always in unity (I and the father are one, I only do what I see my father doing). They are not different roles taken by the same being, or different faces, they are 3 persons who are so intimately and lovingly, and eternally connected that they are one.

God is the source of all the good in us.

Many of the good attributes we have require more than one person. God as the source of all perfection must be multiple persons, otherwise he would depend on us. Perfect love, perfect obedience, perfect trust, perfect generosity, and many other things require more than one person.

God is also perfectly creative, funny, gentle, patient, hopeful…
Because the God who created us has these attributes we have imperfect shadows of them.

God is love.

I kind of pressed this in the trinity point, but I want to emphasise this more. God is the perfect representation of love. Not self-love, but the deepest inter-personal love - deeper than we can possibly imagine. Out of this complete devotion within the Trinity, He also loves us with perfect love.

God is worthy of worship.

This can make us uncomfortable. We don’t like to admit that we worship things. But we worship everything. our favourite T.V. shows, celebrities, coca-cola, our parents, partners, whatever. God is the only being truly worthy of that worship.

Not only is he the perfectly good, and greatest being, he’s also spent great personal cost (Jesus on the cross) so we are able to come to him and know him and worship him.

God wants us to know him personally as God.

God wants us to know him, but he has to be patient with it. Which is why he doesn’t just appear in the sky every Sunday and say ‘look at me I’m here’. We wouldn’t believe he was approachable, and when he came as a man we didn’t really believe he was God.

So he has to be patient with us, give us a little bit of himself here and there, and eventually we can know Him.

God is omnipresent/everywhere

Hey I got to omni-attributes.
This is not the pan-theism God is everything, but something subtly different. God is in everything. in a couple of ways - the most obvious is: he is unrestricted by space and time, why wouldn’t he be everywhere and everywhen.

God is omnipotent/all-powerful.

God doesn’t do illogical things (square circle, make a rock he can’t lift). That’s not all-powerful, that just betrays a very flawed understanding of what all powerful is. God can create the entire universe from absolutely nothing.

There’s this old joke: Some scientists came to God and said “We’ve done it, we’ve found a way to make a man from dust as you did”. So God says: “Show me”. They start to scoop up some earth into a man-shaped bucket and God says: “Wait a minute: use your own dirt”. We sometimes forget that absolutely everything we know came initially from God.

God is omniscient/all-knowing.

God knows all the things that happened in the past. God knows everything that’s in your mind, and the unconscious things: the motivations that even you don’t see.

He also knows the future, though how that works will depends what the reality of the future is, the nature of time, and that’s a fascinating topic, but very tangential to this post: look up A and B theories of time. whether it’s that he knows all the things that could possibly happen and what we will, in the not-yet-existent future choose, or that space-time is a solid thing and he sees the whole of it stretched out on a line, it’s complex and interesting.

God understands human suffering.

God in the person of Jesus reduced himself and came to earth. He experienced many many human sufferings: he was a refugee, he was starving, he was tortured, he was rejected and disowned by those closest to him, he was executed in the most horrific way… Even outside the person of Jesus we vilify Him, we reject him. God doesn’t ignore human suffering. Jesus had compassion on the sick and rejected he met. He cried for the death of Lazarus.

God has an ideal creation.

Initially creation was perfect. I don’t have a picture of that for you, Genesis and Revelation kind of do, though it’s very hard to imagine. The sin entered the world through us and we broke the universe.

God has a plan.

We broke the universe, but God has a way to fix it without destroying everything and starting from scratch. He’s doing surgery on creation, which means sometimes that things appear to get worse. But God is using long processes to fix things, Jesus death and resurrection was a major step in that and he was very patient to get there - that was part of the plan from the beginning, He waited almost all of human history. We’re still working toward the day when the universe will be renewed and all creation will be perfectly restored. God doesn’t ignore our plight, he is patiently healing us from the root cause, and we will be able to live in this renewed creation.

God doesn’t fit in my head.

There are many things I don’t understand. and many things I think I understand that are incredible oversimplifications or just completely wrong.

Please leave comments telling me where I’m wrong, where I’m confusing, where I’m just not detailed enough. Ask me questions, Tell me what to read as well, things that helped you in your understanding of God, and helped you ask more interesting questions. Thanks for reading.

This week the teaching has been on personal development again - this time more focused on the being in the presence of God, gifts of the spirit, and the fruit of the spirit. (I’m happy to explain that in more detail when I get back).

Friday was once again our seek-God day. It was closer to God than I’ve ever felt before - it was amazing.

Saturday we went to Dresden and claimed a tree for ourselves - we set up music and a drama and free haircuts and free tea and had conversations with a bunch of locals. it’s fun.

I want to start learning Arabic when I get home - (This is not a new thing, it’s just something I meant to do but I never actually did).

Tonight will be our last night on dishes duty - I feel sorry for those who’re now stuck with the never-ending task, although I think our dishes team is close and tight-knit team - we’ve been though great adversity together :)

Today in the church I was dragged up in front of everyone, got my age wrong (my mistakes were translated into four languages). He asked me what I would do If I only had one more year to live, which was very difficult to answer as I feel like God has told me to set aside the next couple years for preparing, he hasn’t told me what comes next. So. That was interesting.

Thanks for your prayers for those who are of the praying sort. Thanks anyway for those who aren’t.

I love you all.

Once there was a man at a missions training school where the men’s showers were always cold. Two weeks passed. The man began to think himself quite adept at having cold showers - to the point of writing a blog post: about it.

Finally there came a day he felt he couldn’t face the cold shower - He knew one of the showers in the women’s block had been made available to men. So, crossing the courtyard, he found ‘room 13’.

It was the most glorious, awesome, beautiful shower he had ever had - though he’d only been having cold showers for 2 weeks.

The man and shower represent a person and their relationship with God. We can let the incredible fact that we can have a relationship to God/hot running water in our homes become routine and familiar, and forget the miracle of it. Then when that hot water ceases we can feel we’re doing ok. It’s doable, I’m coping. But when we once again go in search of the truth. after a time of cold showers we can find it easier to respect the miracle, the amazing grace of having access to hot showers/God.

Seek out the hot shower - it’s amazing. If you have access to hot showers now then enjoy them more fully. See the wonder of it.

Which man is more likely to be an enthusiastic missionary for showers? The man who has just had his first hot shower in years? or the one to whom daily hot showers have become routine? What can you do to once again see the majesty of the hot water cylinder?

My mind is being stretched here, and also simplified.

My relationship with God is getting stronger here, and the simplicity and incredibility of Christianity as just knowing God is becoming more and more of a reality in my life.

I’ve spent some of the time here feeling very out-of-place - I’m not the gregarious evangelistic sort. But I know that the reality of Christ is such that that shouldn’t matter. I’m not likely to be a front-line evangelist full time in my life, but I could definitely be part of an organisation like this with the skills that I have and the willingness to serve God in any way that I’m gaining.

I’m growing in boldness here, ‘public’ prayer, sharing and praying, worship-leading next week… I still feel very uncomfortable in street evangelism, but I know that it’s an uncomfortable thing, and I’m willing anyway.

My faith is growing daily, and I’m learning more and more about God.

There is still so much more I need to get, so much closer to God I need to be… I need to study the word more and more.

Thank you all for your prayers.

Love.

Even without the excellent teaching we’re getting - living here is incredible. There are about 100 people living here - staff and students.

Everyone speaks different languages - but we now have 3 translators going: Polish, Russian, and Portuguese (For our Poles, Ukrainians, and Brazilians) - and when someone isn’t speaking English they have to be translated twice (say Russian to English then English to Portuguese). I’m learning how incredibly awful the New Zealand accent is - running our words together, never saying our ‘r’s, and with our wildly different vowel sounds it can be a challenge to understand, let alone my usual incomprehensibleness. I was playing cards on Friday evening with Ukrainians and Brazilians who don’t have perfect English, and we were all trying to learn each others languages, then French and Japanese were getting thrown in too (and there are no French or Japanese here).

I’m sharing a room with 6 others - 2 Australians, 3 Brazilians, 1 Belarussian, and 1 other Kiwi. (For those who are paying attention/good at maths - One of the Australians is also Brazilian).

Monday is our day off, so we went on a day trip to Prague - seeing as it’s just over there, and why not. So about 15 of us loaded into a bus (The people here have a BUS!) and drove across the border (this might not be that amazing to many of you but it was my very first time driving into a country). We walked through old Prague and saw so many old buildings - I took so many photos that I need a bigger camera battery (also a bigger camera)

Dinner dishes have become a feature of my life. We all have chores: I’m in the team in charge of setting up and cleaning up dinner. Even with a commercial dishwasher we get a lot of time to sing. And everyone here sings.

We have an exercise program that some of us do: called ‘Insanity’. It is well named. I’ve made it the whole way through the last time I did it, but it’s pretty tough.

Our schedule here is at once intense and spacious - we have teaching morning and evening on Tuesday Wednesday and Thursday, Work projects (Hard manual labour) on Tuesday afternoon, planning for our outreach on Thursday afternoon. Friday is our seek-God-monks-in-a-monastery day. Saturday we go into Dresden to outreach, Sunday is worship and teaching and internet-home-time, and Monday is our rest day.

Earlier in the history of this blog I wrote about the Christian concept of ‘calling’.

It is time for an update!

Here at school we had some awesome teaching on this very topic (and many others).
It explained it much better than I could what I was trying to say, but also a lot of things I just didn’t understand.
Now my role is to pass it on to you.

There are different layers of the call of God.

Firstly, there is the general call - this is the call to pursue/seek and love/worship God, and to become more Christlike. This our primary calling - it’s like 4 to 1 to any other teaching about calling in the bible. It is the same or everyone.

Secondly, there is the personal call - this is the pastors/teachers/evangelists passage mentioned in my last post - the call to a role or roles. Example - Paul’s call to be a missionary to the gentiles.

Thirdly, there is the current vision or goal. For example: Paul’s call to go to Rome.

So the general call is for all, but the call to a role and a vision comes from a combination of one or many of hearing direct from God, examining our gifts/personality, and our passion/what’s on our heart.

I was really encouraged in hearing this framework - from it I can hang all the various teachings I’ve heard about calling in my life - they don’t seem so much in conflict.

What’s been going on here?

Today I:

1. Had some teaching about evangelism
2. Did some graphic design - aping one of the other designer’s style for consistency.
3. Learned some songs for playing worship tomorrow
4. Played a bunch more guitar than I have in a while
5. Went into Dresden on another exploratory mission - We talked to a homeless guy and a couple of U.S soldiers on break
6. Ate beans and rice, did dishes duty
7. Had some awesome conversations with some of my many new friends here
8. Listened to an incredibly American worship song on repeat while writing this post. “You’re a good, good daddy” I will try to take it seriously - everything but that line is pretty good.

Now what? I should probably be in sleep now. I’m sorry y’all (american song is bleeding in), I meant to write you more real posts this week but it’s been so full on. I have like 3 posts queued up in my brain, and 100s of photos - hopefully I’ll get to share some throughout the day-of-rest that is today and tomorrow.

Everything here is in English and Portuguese. The translators are amazing - they do more speaking than anyone - all the prayer, all the scripture reading, instructions, confessions, questions, answers… I never expected to learn Portuguese by coming to Germany, but I’m learning just by semi-immersion: - in the prayer before lunch I understood almost half of it - mostly because of the nature of the words I’ve learnt: “God”, “Lord”, “thanks”, “name of Jesus”, “extreme beauty”…

The Brazilians are impressive - many of them had pretty limited English when they first arrived - and in the first week they’ve improved so much. A group of us pray over the school each night, and the Brazilians committed to praying in English, occasionally asking for a word.

I’m challenged in language learning - One of the Australians here has made an effort at learning Portuguese - taking advantage of the environment: writing things down and asking questions and practising sentences. I intend on learning languages when I get back - probably Arabic and/or Turkish - it depends where I go next. But for now I’m learning the learning of languages.

Bom Dia

There are 100 people.
There are 2 hot water cylinders.
There are many cold showers.

My system:

1. You don’t have to stay under the water - point the shower-head away from you.
2. Get your hands wet - they’re the most invincible to temperature - wet skin with hands.
3. Stick hair under the shower-head: my hair is too thick for the wet-by-hands trick.
4. Shampoo & Soap. staying well clear of the water-of-pain.
5. To rinse: detach shower-head and spray close to localise the pain.

Important things to remember:

1. Don’t forget to breathe.
2. It’s ok to scream.

Options I’ve considered:

1. Taking over the girls’ shower block because they apparently have more hot water. They have more hot water because there are less girls, they still run out sometimes.
2. Taking showers at different times of the day - I’ve tried 6am, 11pm, and many in between. It’s just not happening
3. Not showering. Not fair to my room-mates.

Please suggest other options in the comments below.

I’ll have a serious post about what I’m doing here soon, I’m still processing what we’ve been learning though, I’m not ready to post about it yet.

I was thinking today about the post I’d made in haste last month, where I mentioned briefly I was ok with swearing. The comments to that revealed I really needed to do a follow-up where I explained what I meant.

Here is that follow-up

I’ll examine the are different kinds of swearing and what I’m ok with and what I’m not.

Four-letter words

They’re pretty much all just scatological or sexual. Suppose I was to call someone ‘fucking worthless’. I feel the ‘worthless’ should be worse than ‘fuck’. These don’t have power - they don’t push people down, they just trivialise toilets and sex. ‘Fuck’ is a fairly powerful intensifier. Though give it a few years and it’ll be powerless, like ‘crap’ or ‘ass’ are heading towards.

Cursing

e.g. GDIAF (That’s ‘Go Die In A Fire’ - for the non-internet citizenry), wishing prison rape on prisoners
This is awful. I don’t want to ever have the dehumanizing attitude that leads to this. I don’t want to even joke about wishing death or rape on people. Regardless of how horrible they’ve been, even if they have literally killed and raped - they still don’t deserve death or rape (now we’re heading away from just language and toward my beliefs about sin, forgiveness, retribution, response, that’s maybe another post)

Referring to traits negatively, or assuming they’re negative and using them as insults

e.g. N, Gay, R</strong>*, Bastard, Whore, Fat…</em>
All of these are frequently used to push someone down. Whether the label rightly applies or not to the person (or thing!?) it’s directed at, it’s damaging to those who belong to it and to those it’s directed at.

Blasphemy

e.g. Oh my God.
“It trivialises and shrinks the majestic in minds” is what I wrote in the last post. This has been emphasised even more during my time so far at SMS. I want my use of ‘Oh my God’ or ‘Jesus’ to be sincere, to know who I’m talking to or about, to not use words of praise lightly. ‘Holy’, ‘Hallelujah’, or even jokes about prayer, the bible, or specific scriptures.

“Billions of blue blistering barnacles”

The swearing of Captain Haddock of Hergé’s Tintin is the ideal form. It’s inoffensive, entertaining, and disarming, while properly conveying the intensity of emotion. It’s also printable anywhere in the world and requires more creativity than just swearing.

A lot of this makes it look like I have no sense of humour - it’s just a joke, lighten up, I don’t really mean it… But I don’t want my words to hurt people, to cause me to see others as less than me, or to shrink or distract or confuse my and others understanding of God. There are plenty of room for jokes in the absurd and wordplay - you don’t have to shrink God, others and yourself to get a laugh.

I want to watch my words and what they will do - not just avoid saying a set of words because they’re wrong or be ok with saying another set of things because they’re not ‘bad words’.

As I was taking the final trains and busses in I was surprised how nervous I was. I didn’t know what to expect, I was a day late because of the wedding, It was my first time in a country where the signage isn’t at least mostly in English, and I wasn’t confident in my phrasebook prowess - I knew as I went further away from the city I’d be further away from strong English speakers, and I only had a map of the train and bus route that didn’t even have Krögis on it (it’s too small).

Very quickly after I arrived the nervousness vanished. We’re already a family - friends were made in just a few days.
I am meant to be here.

I don’t know how to write about what this week has been like - but I will try soon.

It’s creative.

Everyone has the potential to be creative, but many don’t take it much. The act of creation is taking something that isn’t, and making it. Making order where there’s disorder, and ending up with a thing, here let me show you this thing I made. Look at the cool thing it does (which might be why I enjoy drawing programming most of all as you can see it do things)

It’s control.

This is a huge part of programming. I heard a good quote recently (uncited because I’m writing this on the train without Internet) programming makes you switch between feeling like you’re the stupidest person and the champion of the world multiple times every hour. Programming is full of tiny victories - every time you bend the computer to your will just a little bit more.

It’s constructive.

Programming as a creative endeavour is different than much of art. It’s not commentary, it’s doesn’t make statements, it’s purpose is clear, and it gives a localised purpose to the programmer. Right now my task is to make this thing to solve this persons problem and everything is done in light of that goal, with TDD being a microcosm of that (the most annoying projects are those where you can feel you’re not helping anyone but a clients ego and poorly conveyed expectations)

It’s communal.

A big part of programming is building this with people. Contrary to popular belief - it’s a social activity. I love creating things with people. And for other people to use (I’m terrible at making my own tools)

You’ll find programming easy to grasp if you’re good at logic and languages. Maths doesn’t matter - that’s what the computer is for. Programming is just breaking a problem into recognisable solvable chunks, and then telling the computer precisely what to do. Improving that precision is 90% of the work. The other 90% is making the code understandable for the people who will have to change it later even if that people is future-you.

This topic came up on the blog roll a couple of months ago, and I wanted to write on it, but I was scared - scared because of what the answer might be and what that would mean.

Love is squishy, it’s difficult to define. (Which is why you’re asking this question in the first place.) It means all the things! Affection, caring, adoration, vague appreciation, excitement, commitment, loyalty…

How do you know when you love someone? When you trust them. Truly, completely, enough for them to destroy you, and that’s fine.

It’s when you can be completely vulnerable: You don’t have the masks, the editing, the polish, and rather than retreating into your own turtlely shell when everything goes wrong, you retreat into your love’s (which sounds like it would be quite uncomfortable for turtles).

And all this in reverse too. You have to both be vulnerable and honour vulnerability.

I’m bad at communicating, I’m very bad at being vulnerable. This whole thing is scary in very uncomfortable ways (perhaps why my metaphor tortures turtles). I hope I’m learning from my mistakes and failures but I suspect I’m not.

15 year old me: I’m amazed you thought you’d be married by the time you were 22, did you not know how immature you are? (This is called a teaser for my next post)

Maybe love is not necessarily the ability to be that vulnerable, and that gentle with vulnerability, but the promise to try. Over and over again.

Ah, a far more reasonable one-blog-post-per-day.

12:30-1am-ish

Set my alarm for stupid-early because I need to be at church at 7:30 for practice and it takes me an hour to get in, with the walking and the training and the walking. 6 seemed like a good time.

8:02am

Open my eyes and look at my cellphone.

Look again in disbelief.

AAAHHHHHHHHHHH! alarm you have failed me! did I not click some button? Did I place you with your speaker against something muffly? Panic panic panic. Dress and run.

8:10am

Call Jamie (Who organised me to do sound this Sunday) to let her know I’ll be pushing it.

Ring ring. groggy “Hello?”

Oh oops, sorry sorry, I thought you were on, I’m just running very late, sorry.

8:20 something

At linden station, trying to figure out if bussing from the station would be quicker than walking. Probably not, and I have to trust the bus is on time. I’m not very good at trusting busses.

9:00 exactly

train arrives at Wellington station, walk walk walk. I’m glad this is the same as my route to work, I know the quickest path.

9:03

I walk past a mum with two small kids who I could’ve sworn were on the same train as me. So I don’t know what kind of dark magic they were doing … apparently I don’t know the fastest way. but. but. but. triangles.

9:20

I get to the Elim building! aaaaaa finally!!!!

9:21

I apologise to Tali (on words) for not showering that morning.

9:30

The band starts, and I am reminded by the setup he left me that Ric likes the bass to be a lot heavier than I would ever have it. I turn it down slightly and we’re off.

10:00ish

Global day of prayer, how could I have forgotten you were happening?
The message this morning is an interview with a cross section of the Church about how they pray, and then a bunch of people praying in their own languages for various regions of the world. It’s so good.

11:00ish.

And we do it again. but first, a muesli bar. I’ve taken to having muesli bars in my satchel as I am so disorganised that if I didn’t I would never ever eat.

12:15ish.

Lunch is a speed dating of mentors and mentees at church. It’s the first such event and a success, though we needed narrower tables, and more space between them. It was a bit too noisy, but fun.

2:30

Practice again, at least this time I can be sound for the set up.

5:00

Church Service number 3.

5:20ish

Mitch speaks about prayer (I was wondering about the pattern lately of a couple speaking per Sunday, one in the morning the other in the evening service), having our single lady pastor speak in the evening after a morning of not having a preacher, that makes sense. carry on…

5:50ish

Josh’s bass stops working (in his mind only, it was actually working fine). So he does the totally logical thing. He puts the bass on away, removes his microphone from its stand, and throws the stand off the stage.

what?

6:30ish

Josh and I have dinner and talk about the Philippines and married life and owning houses and purple shirts. (all hypothetical)

8:44

I plan trains badly

9:14

On my way home…

9:40

My flatmates are lovely and pick me up so I don’t have to walk all the way up my hill.

Trying my hand at a journal post. I fear I used too many details and not enough stories.

The last two topics I was behind on the blogroll list of topics I actually want to do a decent job of, so cramming two whole complete thoughts into 15 minutes seems like a bad idea.

Instead, I’ve come to the conclusion that I don’t care about swearing any more. I don’t think it’s particularly wrong, and it doesn’t really offend me. I’ll still avoid it to be polite, but I’m personally not bothered by it any more. This is your four-letter-word type dealios, I’m not so keen being nasty - the ‘go-die-in-a-fire’ type or ‘f-you’ type cursing, but just as incidental words, sure.

I am trying to lessen my use of blaspheming though. the little ‘meaningless’ oh em gees, and whatnot. I want to put a stop to doing that. It trivialises and shrinks the majestic in minds. so. no more.

So, that’s been on my mind lately.

6 of 7. I have so got this.

I haven’t consumed any caffeine on purpose for at least two years. possibly more possibly less - I might be misremembering and I’m trying to write fast, and obviously - having no caffeine in my system means I can’t think as well as the rest of humanity.

I used to consume a lot of caffeine, to the point where I was not only very definitely addicted, but also probably doing my heart damage, and my sleep patterns absolutely no favours.

Part of the reason for that is that sleep and I have a very adversarial relationship. I don’t want to sleep. It takes up my valuable time and gives me nothing except sanity and health in return.

So after the time of drinking Coke as water, and energy drinks as pretty much water, I decided, along with my good friend Gus, to not drink any fizzy drinks for a year. And I haven’t had any caffeinated beverages since. (one of the side effects of not being a coffee drinker).

And honestly, it doesn’t seem that much different. I still don’t sleep like a human person, but I spend a lot less money on sugary water, and my teeth probably like me more, (and my dentist less - money money money).

My favourite time before the great cutoff of year-whatever, was a time I’d tried giving up caffeine before. I’d gone with the avoid for 6 days and then have as much as you want on the 7th day philosophy of giving up things. (This actually works pretty well for some things, it makes it easier to get back on the horse, and because you only have to be without for 6 days it’s not such a hardship) back to the story. So I hadn’t had any caffeine for like a week, after being used being fairly caffeinated all the time, and I decided to buy one of those big cans of energy drink that you’re supposed to have less than one of per day. and then I thought I’d get a different brand just cos. and another different brand. and after the fourth I realised “I’ve made a terrible mistake.” I hadn’t counted on having lost the tolerance so quickly. I could feel my heart trying to escape every which way, I felt like I was some kind of x-man - flitting between dimensions.

So yeah, not what you meant by tolerance, but honestly, I don’t care. Tolerate that.

5 out of 7. the last post will be a haiku or something.

One of the topics for the blogroll is fate. I don’t really have anything to say about fate so I skipped it.
But here I am with a deadline and I need a topic. Don’t wanna be doing 49 blogs tomorrow.

So one of my favourite movies of all time is the matrix. And it’s a source of many quotes that stick in my mind. One of which is the following:

Morpheus: “Do You believe in fate neo?”,
Neo: “No”
Morpheus: “And why not?”
Neo: “I don’t like the idea that I’m not in charge of my own life”

This is from memory because I have literally seen this movie 100 million times.

This always struck me as the worst possible reason not to believe in something. You either believe it because it’s you believe it to be true, or you disbelieve it because you believe it to be false. You don’t believe or not because you don’t like the idea of it.

Another of my all time favourite quotes from that movie is as Neo is just before that. Neo is back in the matrix for the first time, and as they’re driving down the street he says “Hey, I used to eat there.” which just hits me as a demonstration of just how much his life has changed in the last few weeks. What was mundane is now completely alien, and what was once alien is mundane (well it’s a movie - so: never a dull moment). I think that’s an interesting slice of personal change.

4 of 7

A few friends with blogs decided it would be ‘fun’ to do a blog post every day for a week. Cool.

Then I missed Friday, so now I have to do 7 posts today. … Which is more posts in one day than I’ve ever done in one week, after a week of doing more posts than I had this whole year. Now I have 5 posts to write in an hour which is seriously cramping my usual style of edit lots and write little, compress until the goodness remains. Nope. This time you get lots of extraneous stuff. Also the gooey edges I won’t usually share. Fun.

I’ve been really enjoying this more compressed forced creation. I realised a couple of years ago what I really missed about design school was the forced creativity. There’s the deadlines and the stupid art-school-pretension and the stress of marks and inscrutable lecturer-taste and whatever, but I really really loved “you must make a thing. Here are the parameters. Go.” and this, though nothing at all to do with design, is like that in a way. Structured creativity under pressure; where the best creativity comes from.

3 of 7 on the fateful Saturday of blogs (funnily enough fate might be the next topic).

I was going to do a movie review, but then I tried to start and I realised I haven’t done a movie review before and have no idea how to think critically about movies. I’ve done media study-type things, but they’re quite a different spaceship.

So: see it if you like grand sci-fi with lots of running and leaping and punching and things blowing up.
(But then, if you like that you were going to see it anyway, right?)

There are, however, truly awful subtitles. I just… no. they are only subseded by the papyrus subtitles in avatar. What were they thinking?
Just use the same plain white/outlined titles for alien speech that gets used for translated movies.

Subtitles are there to be read and not seen - like novel typography, they’re NOT PART OF YOUR BRANDING.

hmm, I shouldn’t’ve started with a ranty post today, it set me off on the wrong foot.

One more rant. about trailers. …

I really really really DO NOT LIKE suspense movies. I don’t like the suspense/terror/tension they drag you along into. And for running before this unscary movie? Totally not cool. I didn’t want to be jumped by a super-tense trailer.

Ugh, please quarantine all your suspensy trailers with the suspensy movies, and put them all in a box labeled suspense that I never have to go near.

I’ve come to terms with how much I don’t like this kind of movie, and as soon as I knew where it was going: fingers in ears and closure of eyes. I don’t mind looking like a see-no-evil-hear-no-evil monkey for a bit, (not that suspense is evil, just so not my thing). This attitude to suspensy/terror movies in the past cost me a chance at a relationship, whatever - I don’t want to watch SAW for any lady.

Live long and prosper.

2/7 blog posts today.

It isn’t. because I lost the bit of paper.

When I get very frustrated about things, perhaps (as in this case) the user interface of a website I’m working on improving, I have to stop and make lists. I write out by hand all of the ways it’s broken and get very excited about why everything is so wrong. If I don’t do this I will spend the rest of the day being shouty about select boxes at my workmates. And no-one wants that.

This one particular rant had like 30 items, and some of them were excellently succinct nuggets of user interface wisdom (if I do say so myself) but as I lost the bit of paper, you only have my word for it.

Instead, here is a less angry rant about user interface abstraction.

The ultimate goal of a user interface is to be an understandable fiction. People must think they know what’s going on so completely that they trust it and trust themselves with it.

So, you simplify the structure, use patterns, make like things like and unalike things unalike.

The goal is people can just like something, rather than

1. click the button labeled like, and it
2. triggers a javascript event, that
3. triggers a http post request, that
4. validates that their user account is able to ‘like’ this, that then
5. adds an association between the liked thing and their user account, that then
6. reloads the page,
7. increments the like count, and
8. adds their user account’s photo in position

It’s hard to properly abstract the thing, because as a developer you already have the whole system in your head - you can see all the steps, and all the edge cases, and know what went wrong, but if someone (ideally) just has the simpler abstraction in their head, when it doesn’t work consistently it breaks the whole assumption, thus computers are hard, I’m a stupid user and your thing made me angry. That’s the source of the bane of all bug reports: “It’s broken! <eom>”.

Don’t be afraid to build abstractions/illusions into your interface. The closer a person is to feeling like they’re actually interacting with a thing (I LIKED YOUR STATUS!), rather than dealing with bits and steps and requests and cetera, the better.

We don’t want to have to resort to waving magnetic needles around a harddrive platter.

Also: never, ever, ever, use multi select boxes. No-one knows how to use them because the multi-selecting-keys are all different every different platform has it's own set The required help text is so unwieldy I don't even know what they look like on touch screens. Please for the love of everything don't USE THEM!!! Consider using a list of checkboxes Or a select box with a button that duplicates it. Or an autocomplete text field that grabs a list of things. Or a javascripty select box with checkboxes in it. And I'm one who avoids using javascripty select boxes.

Timothy Keller Podcast

I found out about Timothy Keller while browsing around on the itunes for podcasts - and I’m not entirely sure this is a legitimate known-about-by-Timothy-Keller release of these sermons, but whatever. An archive of sermons trickles through and they’re always eye-opening in some way or other. I really enjoy his very structured teaching style.

The Web Ahead

This is an absolute-must-listen for anyone involved in the web industry. Jen Simmons has a different expert-guest each week talking about various general front-end technologies. Her guests range browser writers, web-celebs, to random tiny drupal people, but they’re almost always really informative. There’s also a podcast within a podcast: The Web behind series about the history of the web. Unfortunately it has slowed down lately.

99% Invisible

Everything you could ever want to know about design - This podcast is the most produced of all I listen to. It is, in reality, a radio show, and is all about design - especially the edges, the bits you don’t think of as designed. Roman Mars (who has the coolest name in podcasting), comes at the world from an architectural design bent - many of the episodes are about architecture, but far from all. Some are about music, some product design, some type design, and some are just stories. These are also the shortest - a 15 minute burst of interesting to brighten my day.

Geek Friday

And as a bonus, Faith Korpi and Jason Seifer’s Geek Friday - this has probably turned into an hour long episode of in-jokes and very little actual whatever, so start at the beginning or you’ll be totally lost. Jason is a programmer, and Faith a film geek, and it’s an hour of joyous geekery once a week. Featuring Venn diagrams, pranks, de Loreans, disagreeing completely about movies, and surprise sponsor reads, it’s fun for the whole family.

This evening I went to a friends house, for our weekly discussion about Jesus, a book we’ve been reading together, and what’s going on in our lives. Sometimes we call this Home Group, Life group, or Small group. Regardless, it’s a highlight of my week - we have very excellent discussions. And play with Lego.

Today we talked about the dichotomy of the God’s love and God’s judgement (among many other things), and about how to reconcile those two apparently opposed aspects of Gods attitude toward us.

We discovered that those are both present at the cross.

For those following along at home, the basics of the gospel is that God loves humanity so much that Jesus came to die as the perfect payment for the cost of our sin, which God, in his perfection, judges so incredibly harshly.

God’s incomprehensible love and His perfect judgement are both answers to: “Why did Jesus come to Earth and die?”

That is: God’s judgement requires payment/punishment for sin, and God’s love is providing a way for us to avoid paying that cost as the most outrageous of personal expense. God died. We are safe.

This should invoke both the urgency to spread the gospel, and the gospel to urgently spread.

Yes, this is again a post full of obvious, but sometimes it’s good to have a bit of obvious in your life.

Today’s blog post is about a programming language. Deal with it.

Our story begins one day, 1 million internet-years ago, during the dawn of the browser wars in the 90s (yes, gentle non-webby-reader, they actually call it that).

That day, something historic took place, web pages now had a way to be interactive. and the language to do this was called JavaScript (solely for marketing reasons - it had nothing to do with Java)
This of course, was only available on the eternally popular Netscape Navigator web browser. In time, the language spread (IP laws be damned) to the eternally (un)popular Internet Explorer browser, and so to every browser since.

Programming in this language is what I do all day, and while it got a lot of things right, it gives you many ways to shoot yourself in the foot: defaultly scoping variables globally, weird assumptions about line-endings making semicolons necessary almost everywhere ‘just in case’, a simultaneously incomplete yet overenthusiastic reserved keywords list, overly generous falsy-coercion, fragile looping, and way. too. many. brackets.

Enter Coffeescript:

CoffeeScript is a pretty new programming language that is compiled (translated) into javascript to run ably and natively in browsers and in your head. Look at all the things it makes nicer

Its greatest achievement is the automatic generation of so much of the unnecessary boilerplate from javascript, leaving you to just write logic rather than having to deal an astonishment of brackets, braces, and parentheses, and the words ‘return’ and ‘function’ written out in full over and over and over again.

Why does this matter? when you’re programming you think in the programming language. The more verbose and unwieldy a programming language is, the more verbose and unwieldy your thoughts. (The same is probably true of human language too.) If the programming language will simplify complex ideas, then your thoughts can be simplified too. The same thing happens with mathematical notation. x + x + x + x is the same as 4x, but the latter is much easier to store in your head while doing other things to it. even having 4 × x introduces unnecessary complexity (not the least because x looks like times).

… I’m not sure where I’m going with this. Abrupt end.

Because I have plane tickets?

Why?

Because I paid for them.

Why?

Because I was accepted to go to Steiger Missions School in Germany for 10 weeks.

Why?

Because I applied.

Why?

Because I needed to do something other than just live a familiar but ultimately meaningless life.

Why?

Because life is about much greater things than just living my cushy job, and one day having a family.

Why?

Because Jesus instruction wasn’t ‘have a nice, self-centred life’, but rather

“He said to them, “Therefore, go and make disciples of all the nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit. Teach these new disciples to obey all the commands I have given you.”Matt 28:19–20

I’m conscious that I haven’t really been living that out.

Why?

Partly because I don’t know what I’m doing, but mostly because I don’t really have a decent understanding of what it truly means to live a life devoted to God. I also find it far too easy to live out of my own abilities rather than by faith.

Why?

I haven’t done something like this before.

Why?

I… don’t know.

“Your position is so ridiculous it doesn’t deserve to be addressed fairly, it only deserves ridicule”

I want to see this idea changed.

I see this all the time: in person and on the internet, from those I agree with and those I don’t, about politics, religion, even whether or not to use semicolons in your javascript.

Most people believe themselves reasonable, and don’t believe ridiculous things for no reason - even if their reason is flawed.

Most people will be more willing to accept that those who disagree with them are unreasonable than accept that their own beliefs are unreasonable.

These two facts mean that if we approach all differences as antagonistic no-one will learn anything, everyone will be more sure each other is wrong, and become even more extreme in their views.

All people deserve respect. It doesn’t mean you have to agree with them. It doesn’t even mean you have to pretend to agree with them. At least try to understand why they believe what they believe.

This is a utopian ideal of course, it takes too long to try and understand people, especially when we mostly don’t know why we ourselves believe what we do, it’s easier to just call people names and think that everyone but you is an idiot who just doesn’t get it.

Ugh - look at that previous sentence. I do it to.

I think that music in many modern churches fills the role once occupied by grand architecture, masterful paintings, beautiful cloth, and a lot of precious minerals.

It honours majesty with beauty and extravagance, it draws people in to worship God, it draws out excellence, and it is quite easy to distract itself into production being its own end.

And I’ve got to admit, it’s not as cool or long-lasting as it’s predecessors.

I don’t have a point, but I’ll publish this anyway in the name of deadlines.

I had a realisation about the story of the rich young man today. As well as being about the love of money it’s also about self-righteousness.

This might have been obvious to everyone but me, but I thought I’d share it anyway.

He effectively said “What do I need to do? actually never mind that - I’m pretty awesome - look I’ve followed all these rules”

Why did he come to Jesus? He wanted to be told “Well done. Good rule following. That’s all you needed to do and you’ve done it brilliantly.”

Jesus responded instead: “You still haven’t made yourself righteous. Look, you’re still self-centred in this way. Sort this out and follow me.”

A bit of reading between the lines for y’all.

God has a special task for the rest of your life where everything works out if you just follow the (secret) plan.
Really?

When you are called by God for a task - you’re not going to miss it.
Paul, Moses, Samuel, Isaiah, Gideon, Mary, etc.
However - such callings are the exceptions, not the rule.

We are all called to:

“‘Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.’
This is the first and greatest commandment. And the second is like it: ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’Matthew 22:37–39

And to:

“…go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father
and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, and teaching them to obey everything I have commanded you.”Matthew 28:19–20

“But how do you do that? It’s tooo generic I neeeed you to tell me what to dooooo…” (This is me)

We have different gifts, according to the grace given to each of us. If your gift is prophesying,
then prophesy in accordance with your faith; if it is serving, then serve; if it is teaching,
then teach; if it is to encourage, then give encouragement; if it is giving, then give generously;
if it is to lead, do it diligently; if it is to show mercy, do it cheerfully.Romans 12:6–8

I want you to think about something you know well.
Well enough to go deep on.
Pick one tiny little aspect.
Peel back the layers
Keep in mind all the complexity as you go.

What happens when you load a webpage:

Hundreds of layers of abstraction (of which I soundly know very few) through to electrons in various astonishingly imprecise chips in astonishingly imprecise networks that make you uncomfortable about all data everywhere.

What about when you kick a soccer ball:

Or unconscious complex trigonometry and force evaluation, tactile feedback, neurons firing, electrical pulses causing muscles to tense and release in a precise order and a precise amount - how can the ball possibly ever go where you mean it to?

How does your body heals a tiny cut, or rid itself of a mild cold, how does a CD produce the experience of music.

Even just consider the incredibly complexities in something as simple and mundane as a daisy.

This is just one teeny tiny little thing thing.

multiply by everything.

If you haven’t already exploded in wonderment, be reminded:

Something curious happens when you go as deep as you can.

There is just purity and simplicity.

All of the physical world can be defined by a handful of constants and a few equations.
All of matter is just a few of subatomic particles making only 118 different atoms.
All of life is encoded in merely 4 chemicals in a couple of helical patterns.

A backstory.

I grew up as a Christian. At a certain time in my life I didn’t believe God was real because I felt like objections were too frequent and too frequently unanswered. A certain later time I decided atheism wasn’t all that either, and decided to call myself a Christian again, even though I was unconvinced. I wrote a blog post. I abandoned a blog.

Another backstory.

Blaise Pascal was a brilliant mathematician and inventor. He converted to Christianity later in his life. He started writing a rational defence of christianity to respond to contemporary philosophers, but died before he finished. A collection of his notes were posthumously published as Pensées. Pascal’s Wager comes out of that.

This week someone commented on that post I made nearly 3 years ago.¹

Doesn’t Pascal’s Wager kind of fail in the presence of all other religions? Since most religions seem to consider it as bad (or possibly worse) to believe in a ‘false’ religion as none at all, you seem to lose by picking any specific religion.Jill Skinner

Yes, it does fail as an answer to some (not all) other religions, but it doesn’t matter.
You pick regardless of whether you want to.

“Your reason is no more shocked in choosing one rather than the other, since you must of necessity choose.”Blaise Pascal - Pensées III - Of the Necessity of the Wager

Pascal’s Wager only answers the agnostic with: You have everything to gain and little to lose by believing Jesus, vs everything to lose and little to gain by believing there is no God.

It misses out huge swathes of possible belief. It doesn’t answer Buddhism, or Islam, or Homeopathy. But that wasn’t why it was written, and wasn’t why I used it to convince myself it was rational to believe Christ. It’s only tool. A tool to help you change your belief.

I watched a debate between Christian philosopher William Lane Craig and Humanist Bill Cooke, and both of these apparently extremely rational and intelligent people gave well-ordered well-defended rational reasons for their respective positions. But their closing speeches they each gave non-rational (but not irrational) reasons for believing as they did.

Because rational reasons aren’t really that compelling. They excuse and justify belief rather than provide it. There is a universe of good arguments for God. There are so many reasons to believe Christ. But people will always find their reason to not.

“It is incomprehensible that God should exist, and it is incomprehensible that He should not exist”Blaise Pascal - Pensées III - Of the Necessity of the Wager

The message of the cross is foolish to those who are headed for destruction! But we who are being saved know it is the very power of God. As the Scriptures say,

“I will destroy the wisdom of the wise and discard the intelligence of the intelligent.”

So where does this leave the philosophers, the scholars, and the world’s brilliant debaters? God has made the wisdom of this world look foolish. Since God in his wisdom saw to it that the world would never know him through human wisdom, he has used our foolish preaching to save those who believe.1 Corinthians 1:18–20

We can’t possibly hold the sum of human knowledge in our heads. And all of that is still nowhere near the knowledge of everything. How can we possibly rationalise our way to God? We can only rationalise our own rational objections out of the way.

How do you believe when you’re still unconvinced? Ask God, pursue God. He’s the best revealer of himself. There was a very definite moment when God revealed the truth of himself to me. Just the tiniest fragment, but that was an overwhelming sense of truth, of sureness, of conviction. This didn’t happen at the beginning of my christian-again-ness, but about year later.
I had until that moment assumed I would be forever in a state of doubt, of thinly veiled agnosticism. I know that there is more truth I can’t see yet. I can barely respond adequately to the truth I have seen.

Now we see things imperfectly, like puzzling reflections in a mirror, but then we will see everything with perfect clarity. All that I know now is partial and incomplete, but then I will know everything completely, just as God now knows me completely.1 Corinthians 13:12

How do you pursue God? I’m convinced that when you pursue God, even if you pursue him in the wrong direction, he will show up. There’s the story of Paul, a devout Jew, shutting down Christianity because he thought that’s what God wanted, being totally turned around by meeting Jesus. I’ve heard many (unfortunately unverifiable) stories of devout muslims meeting Jesus in a powerful, lifechanging way.

The only real reason to believe is truth, the wager is only a thought-game.

I love to over-simplify and may have gone too far, but at it’s most basic I see flirting as 3 things. The first two:

1. Appearing interested.
2. Appearing interesting.

The trouble-causing guide tries to bolster the appearance of interest though subterfuge and the careful study and imitation of body language. However just being interesting and being comfortable showing it should be enough, and if you’re interested that should be evident without consciously acting out an attentive persona.

In most people’s cases these act in self-selecting way. What you find interesting in general will make you interested and interesting to the set of people you’re interested in.

The tricky one is the last element:

3. Being aware of the other’s (dis)interest.

Due to being conditioned to assume that all girls are uninterested and having healthy dose of general obliviousness I tend to miss or distrust the signs of attraction I do see. Therefore I have nothing helpful to say here. Thankfully my girlfriend is onto-it enough to know that my lack of awareness wasn’t disinterest, it was just plain-old stupidity - amazingly it didn’t dissuade her. I’m pretty lucky.

The topic: “contentment”.

I really thought I had an opinion on this. I saw contentment as the happy side of the coin from complacency and stagnation, something that sounds good, but also not that good because of its reverseface buddies.

Of course I don’t want to be complacent or stagnant, or living for happiness and comfort alone, but:

“Haven’t I learned that already?”
“I hadn’t realised that before now?”
“Why am I here again?”

I’ve been schooled a bit by my bloggy friends.

Contentment isn’t being satisfied with everything that’s ever happened to you, and happy with everything you’ve ever done. It’s closer to: being ok that you’re still in progress, and not being continually frustrated you’re not perfect yet.

…

Wait… I’m angry I’m not perfect?
Turns out I’m more messed up than I thought I was and have a bunch of learning to do.

This is my fourth attempt at it.

I’m going to talk about building community intentionally. And what I’ve seen work and not work.

After racking my my brain for a week for a definition of community that satisfied me I decided on this:

A community is an open and unstructured interacting group of people not focused on a task.

Open means you can invite yourself or exclude yourself without having to do anything particularly.

Unstructured means no one is the boss. If someone has a title its ignored in a community context.

You can have community within all sorts of families, groups, organisations and rolls but they won’t ever map exactly.

For example - I consider myself to be part of the CU community without ever attending Vic. I don’t consider myself to be part of the Awatapu community as I’ve kept up with no-one from my years there.

So: what does this mean trying to build a sense of community within your organisation or church or whatever?

Encourage an environment of interaction. That’s it. Not everyone will want to be involved, and not everyone who is involved will be of the group you wanted, and it’ll grow or die on the interaction of its members.

Recently at work we’ve been playing a lot more table tennis with each other - one of the guys wrote an online leaderboard, and that’s been a huge boon to the community feel here simply by interacting outside of the task.

Another group of friends have a thing called Team Arts and Culture which is an informal group who watches and creates art together. If we didn’t sit around afterward discussing a play, then we would not be as much of a community

It’s hard to manufacture interaction, especially with a fixed group of people but given an environment that encourages interaction off-task it might happen. But if you give everyone a task (build this _____ together, read this study together, win this soccer game together) be sure to give them space to interact outside of that.

And don’t be surprised if you don’t like the community that develops.

This is nothing at all like draft one.

I think about thinking far too much for a sane person.

I am driven to understand everything - my own mind is just one of those things.

How do I get a more accurate explanation for how things are and how they should be?

By putting my thoughts out there.

I know, for example, that explaining my opinion is the best way to find the holes in reasoning and the shaky premises - even if the explainee doesn’t notice.

Also, by engaging in debate about issues of all kinds and not being closed off to new ideas everyone wins.
Others catch what the rubber duck misses, and provide valuable insight into things I’m glossing over, questions I haven’t answered, and assumptions I’ve only half-finished.
Hopefully I can offer the same in return.

Writing things down changes my mind and sharpens my thoughts.
Publishing those writings might also change and sharpen others.

Here. We. Go.

A sidetrack on presenting opinions

My usual process when confronted with new concept is to say strongly what I understand of it, and see if it fits with my framework of understanding the world.
If it doesn’t then is my comprehension of it wrong, is the concept wrong, or is my framework wrong? frequently all three will need a bit of massaging.

My first step makes it very hard for others to observe the difference between opinions I hold loosely or am just trying out, and very fundamental beliefs and concepts.
I need to learn to express how convinced I am of an idea while I’m presenting it.

Opinion goes unexpressed. Except for the few people I know will care about me no matter what.

In this blog I want to be open about the struggles I have and some of the messy bits of life. Not for it’s own sake, but so I can make and see progress in my own life and hopefully help out others in the process.

I know I’m not the only one who deals with the life issues and thought-black-holes that I do, and to keep it all inside my head is a kind of selfishness.

So. blogging again.

How do I fix this? I need to continually approach things as a beginner. Continually try things too hard for me. And not get discouraged or frustrated when I don’t improve as rapidly as I once did. (the gap between complete novice and base competency is far greater than any further improvement - I need to get past that 0 → 1 is infinitely greater than 1 → 2).

I also need to record where I’ve come from and where I’m going so I can see progression – even when it’s slower than I’d like.

In other news, so far my blog is incredibly selfish. I hope it won’t remain this way.

My previous blogs I’ve deleted, mostly because I’ve been embarrassed at what they contain, my thinking has changed, my life reached a different stage. Whatever. I’ve realised these posts are not about what I think in the future, they are what I think at the moment. That might be kind of obvious in hindsight, but sometimes I can be slow on the uptake with these things.

In that spirit I’ve undeleted the beginning and end of my last attempt at blogging 14 months ago, which conveniently comes with a perfectly serviceable theme I designed last time I decided to get on the blogging band-wagon.

This time I have a goal: and it’s not just being loud:

• I want to be excellent.
• I want to be open.
• I want to be thinking.
• I want to be improving.

I’ll look more at what those mean in my upcoming four blog posts - nothing like a series to get a habit going.

I started writing this with more of an idea of what I was going to say than when I got to the end, which is where I got stuck, rather than a finishing point. But whoever said blog posts needed to be finished, or even coherent.

A little over a year ago I finally decided to be an Atheist because I didn’t believe in God any more.

I think what sparked my conversion to atheism was the conviction that if Christianity is real then the only reasonable response is complete surrender to God, and the question: “What happens next?”

It’s mildly ironic that those same two things in some ways sparked my return.

In the end what drove me back to Jesus was the promise of a relationship with God, and the promise of something to live for. These are more motivations than reasons to believe, and as such I feel like I’m attempting to build faith on a layer of tissue paper spread over a chasm.

Am I a Christian again? Saying “I believe in God” often feels like lying.

I attempt to appease my mostly unbelieving side using Pascal’s Wager with an (un?)healthy dose of Nihilism.

If you’re an Atheist and Christianity is true you’re screwed, if you’re a Christian and Atheism is true then you’re not really any worse off. Not only that but there’s no way to know anything, and it doesn’t matter anyway, it doesn’t matter if you kill or save a million people, if you’re a Christian, Atheist, or think you’re a teapot.

While writing this I realised the chasm is Nihilism and the tissue paper is Pascal’s Wager.

Rather than converting from Atheism to Christianity, I am trying to build faith in God on top of Atheism. No wonder it isn’t working.

I talk little, and don’t often share my ideas. This puts me out of practice for when I do have something to say.

A few weeks ago a friend asked me to speak to a classroom full of girls about web design. Web design is something I’m (a little bit) passionate about, but I had no idea how to talk to them in a way that was interesting. I bored them out of their skulls. I don’t get very nervous about public speaking, I just never feel like I have anything valuable or compelling to talk about.

Merlin Mann suggests all excellent non-fiction, or, indeed, communication, is obsession times voice. I am somewhat obsessed with design and the web, and I do have some useful things to say, I’m just not very loud about it.

So here I am, trying to be loud, for the good of all humanity. (blatant narcissism and/or hyperbole is loud, right?)