Personal, Philosophical, and Political: Educating the Next Generation

I don't have kids, but I have noticed that there has been a shift in social consciousness recently that's been very negative towards parents, teachers, and other caregivers. Part of it is the pedophilia scare. Part of it is the anti-discipline crusade. Most of it comes down to what George Carlin termed "Child worship" - the idea that kids are pure and perfect and we ought to encourage and support whatever they want to do instead of trying to make them into little versions of us.

There are several problems with this attitude in application, and there are plenty of people willing to explain those problems, in language more emotional than I'm prepared to publish.  What I'd like to do is list some of the things I think the next generation needs to be taught, by teachers, parents, and all the rest of us adults in their region of influence. It's not my responsibility as a single, childless person to try to parent a child or to give parenting advice to a parent. But it is my responsibility, as a human, as an American, as a Christian, and most importantly as an adult to model the behavior I want to see in others and to explain to people who ask why I do what I do, and why I do it that way.

These are the things I want kids to learn -

1. You are special. Cynical people will tell you you're not, and they're wrong. Naïve people will tell you that's enough, and they're wrong too. You are not unique. There are other people in the world similar to you, but no one just like you. You can do things other people can't, or can do things better than other people can. But being special isn't enough. You can't just say "I'm special" and expect people to give you whatever you want, or even what you need. It's up to you to figure out what makes you special and find some way to use that to better yourself and those around you. If you don't do anything with your specialness, it stops being special.

2. Nothing is always right or always wrong. You can't judge things without context. Sometimes you won't know what is right, and maybe there's no way you can. Sometimes you have to accept that you just don't know the answer.

3. There is a difference in someone doing things you don't like and someone being a bad person.

4. You will not always do better or worse than anyone else. It's natural that you will compare your own state to the state of the people around you, but you shouldn't put a lot of importance on your observations. Sometimes the people you think aren't doing as well as you have done much better in the past, or will do much better in the future, and vice-versa. People are successful and unsuccessful in different quantities at different times. Also, this doesn't mean that any of the people you compare yourself to are any better or worse than you are.

5. You need to decide for yourself what constitutes success and failure, and also what degrees of each you're willing to live with for the short term. You also need to know what society considers a success and a failure, and to be prepared for harsh criticism if your standards are different. Criticism doesn't mean you should change, but it is a cost you have to pay to do things your own way.

6. People will lie to you all the time. Sometimes because they want something from you, sometimes just to be mean, sometimes as a reflex without even thinking about it. You won't always know which is which. Try not to rely on information you can't verify, and try not to make decisions based solely on what other people tell you.

7. People can change, but they won't unless they want to and think they need to, and even then there's a lot of work involved. People who want to change usually try and fail many times, but if they never stop trying they will eventually succeed. "Wanting to" isn't the same as trying, either. Acknowledging the need for change is important, but doesn't usually cause the change on its own.

8. Don't be afraid to chase your dreams, but remember you can't chase all of them, and some of them won't come true no matter what. Does your dream seem unreasonable? If you want it, go for it anyway. If it doesn't work out, try again. If it doesn't work that time, try a different approach. But if it seems like it never works, no matter what, then you should probably let go and chase a different dream.

9. A lot of times, people will present you with choices limited to two extremes. Usually, the more emotional the issue, the more simple they want the extremes to seem. It's almost never true. Remember, if the right choice is easy, people don't argue about it. If they're arguing, it's not because one is right and one is wrong. It's because they both think they're right, and really there may be more than one good answer or even no good answer at all.

10. Most difficult things in life aren't tests, challenges, or secret riddles disguised as problems. They're just difficult. Most things worth having are difficult to get. That's why people want them.

11. There's nothing wrong with being idealistic, but there's a difference in being idealistic and being naïve. Idealists find something they want to change about the world, talk about it, come up with a plan to make it happen, work the plan, solve problems to the plan as they arise, and keep working and re-working until they make their vision a reality. Naïve people find something they want to change about the world, talk about it, and then pretend they already have it.

12. There's nothing wrong with being cynical, either, and while it is likely to make you smarter, it's not likely to make you happier.

13. People have a right to be wrong. If you disagree with someone, even if you're right, most of the time you're better off letting them be wrong than trying to change them. Also, most people will say they see the world differently than they really do. They will say they see it the way they wish they saw it. You'll never make any progress arguing with them.

14. Most of the people who get what they want out of life do so according to a time-tested and nearly foolproof formula - you have to have natural talent, you have to develop that talent into a useful skill, you have to have a workable plan for that skill, you have to work really hard, and you have to be really lucky. Most people will acknowledge everything but the luck.

15. You should learn where to draw the line on the following things. They are all gray areas with no absolute answer, and wherever you draw it, you will run into someone who disagrees with you eventually. You should know the differences in:

quitting and accepting defeat and moving on
persisting and uselessly banging your head against a wall
telling someone the truth, telling someone what they want to hear, and telling someone something that's unnecessarily cruel
what is right and what you want; and vice versa
winning and not losing; and vice versa
chasing a dream and tilting at a windmill
being cautious and being cowardly
being brave and being foolhardy
being successful and being respectable
being successful and having prestige
being feared and being respected
being feared and being loved
being accepted and being tolerated
loving someone and liking someone
friends and contacts
hurting someone and harming someone
encouraging someone, criticizing someone, and helping someone
living with a purpose and living without one

16. Most importantly, you should know that you are responsible for you. It's increasingly popular to find something, a concept, an illness, a group, a person, a policy, an adversary, etc for all the problems in life. The truth is problems exist for everyone, everywhere, all the time, and they always have. They're not the same, and they're not all the same degree of severity, but they're always there. You will never be happy if you wait for them to go away, and especially not if you wait for someone to take them away. You have to make your own choices and accept the consequences of them. Bad things will happen to you that are not your fault, but if you just wait for them to get better, or for someone to make them better for you, they become your fault. You must either make them better or decide how to proceed in spite of them.

Personal and Religious: Maybe I Finally Get It

“Let your light so shine before men, that they may see your good works, and glorify your Father which is in Heaven.” - Matthew 5:16

I've thought for years about that verse, and that the concept of personal ministry begins with that idea. Nobody ever converts people by scolding them and telling them how awful they are, although that technique is still popular no matter how ineffective it is. I've always thought the only effective way to lead someone to Christ is to show them that there's something in being a Christian that you just don't have otherwise. No matter how righteous your behavior, and no matter what good you do in the world, if you can't make it visible that it's only because God lives in you, you won't save any souls.

Therefore, I reasoned, my principle duty as a Christian is to live a life that makes Christianity look attractive to others, and makes following Jesus look like a good idea and a desirable choice in life. That's caused me a lot of consternation because I'm generally not a happy person, and I'm not good at hiding it. If I couldn't be happy in Christ, then how could I convince anyone else that they could? And as I pointed out in a previous entry, if I was so miserable following God and only did what the Bible tells me because I feel like I have to (and usually hate it even while I'm doing it), then what good was I going to be, leading others to the same burden I have to carry?

It now occurs to me I may have been interpreting the verse and its application wrong all along. As I've also pointed out in another entry, a few years back when I realized how unhappy I was I started changing things in my life to fix it. Over the past four years I've changed nearly everything. I've put down all the bad habits I picked up in my college years, changed my diet, picked up my regular exercise routine, and all the other stuff I mentioned. Now I'm beginning to see that my most recent depressed/angry period may have been exacerbated by the fact that all that stuff I changed in an effort to be happy didn't work. Really, all I've changed in potentially lengthening my lifespan with healthier behavior is that I'm going to be a miserable git for a lot longer than I previously anticipated, and that's depressing on its own.

But, through all my struggles, and with everything else I've tried to change, my faith is the only thing I haven't given up. I've looked for ways I might be able to, and I haven't found any. No matter how I feel, whether I'm angry, sad, frustrated, or hopeless, I've never been able to let go of God. Maybe that's the way I need to look at personal ministry – I can't make a life for God look like something that's fun to do and a path to happiness and fulfillment. But I can make sure people know that I'm willing to give up whatever I have to for health and happiness, except God. My faith is the only thing in my life I can't live without. That is the light I shine.

Single Issue: The Four Whys of Conspiracy Theories



All images used without permission, because permission is the only thing you can't find online.

I don't believe in any conspiracy theories unless you count the neo-conservatives. I know everyone defends their own irrationality, but I think the neo-conservatives don't count as a conspiracy theory because they're pretty open and honest about who they are, what they believe, and how they want to reshape America. As scary as they are, I mean the kind that don't really have evidence to back them up, like the idea that the moon landing was faked, the government is secretly trying to kill us, the pyramids were built by aliens, etc.

They are a hobby of mine, though. I have an entire collection of 2012 Doomsday videos I downloaded just for fun. I spend a lot of time watching videos on everything from ghosts to Illuminati-based theories, and I used to wonder, why do people believe things like this? How do people not only believe things this stupid, but proudly push them out there to convince others? After countless reviews of the videos, talks with the true believers, and attempts to at least raise the shadow of skepticism in the world, I've come up with four motives at the foundation of every theory, either in concept or promotion.

1. Genuine Craziness Seeking a Common Bond

For reasons science doesn't understand yet, one of the most common delusions of people subject to delusions is being contacted by aliens. I believed that myself when I was nine. Because I was a kid, people thought it was cute. If it suddenly overtook me now, people would realize I was crazy. The only people who wouldn't think so were people who also thought they had been contacted by aliens. If you've ever heard stories from people who claim that, you probably noticed that there are usually some vague things they all have in common (they always seem to happen at night, to somebody who's alone and geographically isolated, who is usually contacted by more than one being who appear out of nowhere, you get the idea) and there are a lot of details that don't always add up. For instance, the vague facial traits of most aliens in these experiences are almost universal, but height, build, skin tone, other physical characteristics, as well as details about the space ship if there is one, all vary enormously.

What's more, if you ask someone about the details of the story, they change over time, usually more and more change as time goes by. But they don't realize their stories don't line up. They usually don't even remember the previous version of events. That's another trait common to delusional behavior – since the brain is effectively creating a false memory, it also deletes memories that don't match the current version.

Get enough people with the same type of experiences together, at a UFO convention or on the Internet, and they start to compare details. Some of them get eliminated, some of them don't, some of them divide into separate theories. Looking at the 2012 Doomsday theories, for example, the predicted cause and effects of the end of the world were almost never the same. Some of the predictions included:

A celestial body was going to appear out of nowhere and crash into the earth

Aliens who bred humans into existence were going to come back and kill us

Some sort of energy pulse from space was going to wipe out the planet

There was no agreement on any details. What was the celestial body? A comet? A rogue planet? A brown dwarf? I heard all of these and more, and some variants that combined others, such as the idea that it was going to be a rogue planet carrying the alien overlords back into contact with Earth. But all of these mismatched details are subject to change or be ignored, because the root delusion is the same. Finding other people who believed “the same thing” is a very powerful internal force. Finding a justification that YOU were right all along is pretty strong motivation. If the facts get mangled up a bit to make that happen, it usually doesn't matter, and the people who don't believe you are (part of/victims of) the conspiracy to keep the evidence hidden.

2. People With Something to Gain

At the risk of oversimplifying, people will lie to you if it benefits them. What lie they're willing to tell you varies, but that quasi-rhetorical question “Why would he lie to me?” can usually be answered with “Because he wants your money.” In the Internet age, attention is worth at least as much as money. We've had three mass shootings in America in the past two years, one on Arizona, one in Colorado, and one in Connecticut, that were all intended to get attention. If there are people willing to kill randomly picked strangers for it, you know there are people willing to do less despicable things for it.

The most common manifestation of this reason is somebody who's either trying to (sell something to/win the admiration of) the people in the genuinely crazy group. The second most common is someone at the origin trying to profit from a no-pretext-of-reality work of fiction (like Loose Change or The Da Vinci Code) that gets its fictional context removed by someone looking just for the attention.

I should point out here that there's no such thing as “just” a cry for attention. When it works, they do it again. When it doesn't, they do something bigger next time. Neither ignoring nor indulging them will fix anything. The only solution is to address the underlying problem with that person. Or shoot them first, depending on your point of view.

People who stand to profit one way or another from conspiracy theories usually don't stick to just one, and they work a lot harder to find things that look like evidence and make subsequent “facts” up to support their theories than delusional people do. When you believe because you believe, you don't need proof. When you're trying to sell something, you need to give the buyer an incentive.

A lot of JFK conspiracy theories hinge on some letters written back and forth between the CIA (or FBI depending on the theory) and Lee Harvey Oswald. In the sixties, with the Cold War still raging impotently, the Soviets had some of their best forgers write those letters. Why? They had something to gain from stirring up distrust. They also had millions of dollars in resources and effectively limitless manpower to put into doing so. Of course their product convinced a few people. Apple computers was able to sell an iPhone that doesn't make calls as an iPad Mini. You can convince people of nearly anything if you work hard enough.

With so many people out there either creating or repeating things, more and more people get convinced. If you want a good, modern example, and don't mind some disturbing imagery, look at some of the evidence out there for Slender Man. It's so popular, it was the top suggested result when I entered just the letters “sl” into an image search. Slender Man, if you haven't heard of him, is a modern urban legend bogeyman that was deliberately created as such. I really like it as a case study because you can still see the exact moment and place it was created.

 

The Origin of Slender Man on SomethingAwful.com

Now look around out there and see how many people have already been convinced he's real.

3. People Want to Believe

I've said before that people have an innate need to believe in things. Faith and fear are different sides of the same instinctive coin. We need to believe in something bigger than we are, and we're usually scared of things that are bigger than we are. As long as there are governments, there will be people who don't trust them. Give them a good, sound reason that supports their instinctive need and they'll never let it go.

These days, cynicism rules all public communication. People will tell you they don't believe something like there's a prize for doing so. Many of us have become so insecure about the concept of belief, we have to constantly reassure ourselves and others that we're not gullible idiots and we don't believe the lies the rest of the world does. Sadly, there's a belief system and a market just for that.

Conspiracy theories provide a "faith free" way to satisfy our faith need, because the delusion they center around is usually one of distrust. Where religion provides a place for each and every one of us who follows the religion faithfully, conspiracy theories provide a place for everyone who believes in them, no matter what the ubiquitous THEY say. THEY are just stupid. THEY are blind to the truth. If THEY opened their eyes and looked around, THEY would see the truth as clearly as YOU do. Look at the type of person who usually expounds on their conspiracy theory publicly. For example, the woman I've heard argue the most fervently that Obama is a Muslim and part of an Islamist movement to seize control of the government is the same woman who also insisted the human spine has only four bones in it because it was an answer on a game show. People want to believe in secret information only they and their fellow believers have the sense to spot. They're not crazy, or even all that stupid, but they're insecure about their knowledge of the world, and end up having to make some of it up from time to time if they want to function.


4. Good Old-Fashioned Envy

This one took me a while to see. One of the most popular conspiracies has to do with the goverment, business, religion, the entertainment world, and nearly any other source of authority you can find. The idea is that people get into power because of some secret network of other people in power, and that you can't really accomplish anything unless you're part of that network because they're so intent on keeping the rest of us down. Part of the reason it was hard to see this for what it was is that it is partially true. No matter what area of influence you're in, there are always people at the top. They usually didn't get there by playing by the same rules as everyone else, and they don't want anyone else taking their power away from them. Sad, but true.

You can't get to the top of any field by just hard work and ability. It also takes quite a bit of luck, and a competitive spirit. You have to be willing and able to take out your competition to advance, and the higher you want to go, the more competitive (and lucky) you have to be. Both of those can be turned in your favor if you have friends who are already up there willing to help you. The result is that the top tier of any power struggle is only occupied by the people who did the worst stuff without getting caught and/or had help from people who did the same.

The thing is, we should be able to recognize the competitive nature of the world without having to read some sort of supernatural element into it. Most of the New World Order/Illuminati/Masonic conspiracies have some sort of Satanic pact worked into them. The ones that don't frequently involve that old stand-by, space aliens. Secretly inhuman lizard-people of possibly extra-terrestrial origin make up a few as well. It's depressing that most of us will never be what we dreamed, and it's harsh to realize that it's because the world is competitive and there's only so much awesomeness to go around. Quite a few of us judge ourselves as failures because we didn't get what we wanted, or more futilely, we didn't get what someone else got. A lot of times we want some excuse for our failure. The other guy got lucky, worked harder, and stabbed everyone else in the back seems like a valid excuse to me. The people who believe these theories go a little further - we never had a chance, because we didn't have whatever supernatural abilities the powerful exploited to get what they have.

While I can understand that position, I don't like it, and I am opposed to spreading it around, because it encourages people to give up without trying. Your life may never be what you think it should, but you can always work a little harder to make it better. If you're unhappy with your life, you have the responsibility for trying to improve it. It's not up to whoever you say victimized you to fix your problems. You can always do better next time. Failure is inevitable, but it never becomes permanent until you stop trying. I don't like competition myself, and I'd rather end up homeless and starving than push someone else out of my way. But it's just as reprehensible to just give up and blame someone else because that's easier.

Single Issue: Fifteen Under-Exploited EDH Combos

This wasn't supposed to be a Magic blog, but then it wasn't supposed to be a recipe collection or a religious rant blog either. Oh well.

I wanted to throw out 15 combos I'm surprised I don't see used more in EDH games. If you don't know what an EDH game is, you can find the official information on it here. If you don't know what Magic: the Gathering is or don't want to read about it, you're in the wrong place.

This post will feature some copyrighted material. My use of it should be protected under the same sort of laws that allow for fanfictions and other fan tribute creations. The name Magic: the Gathering, the mana symbols, the card templates and designs, set names, setting names, card names, and all major character names (if I've mentioned any) are copyright 1993-2013 Wizards of the Coast.

Also, some of these combos are not original. So if you think you've seen this somewhere else before, you may well be right.

15. Thalakos Library

 

Library of Leng with Thalakos Scout

 

Effect - Retrievable creature, no maximum hand size, the ability to toss stuff into your graveyard or library as needed.

 

Combo Type - Resource Management with a decent creature.

 

Pros - Thalakos Scout is hard to block and with the Library hard to kill

Both cards are fairly cheap and easy to get

You only need one color and three mana to make it work

Provides a constant threat that is hard to answer, allowing you to build up your board position

 

Cons - It's still vulnerable to counterspells and any wipe effect that hits both creatures and artifacts

It doesn't win you the game on its own

The Library is open to removal even if the Scout isn't

 

14. Haunted Hanna

 

Hanna, Ship's Navigator with Haunted Crossroads

 

Effect - Easy retrieval of three permanent types.

 

Combo Type - Resource Management

 

Pros - Runs with only three or four mana

Not especially weak to counter magic or removal - you only need one to watch the other

"Budget" recursion

Doesn't give your opponents an "I have to kill that now!" level of threat

 

Cons - Requires three different colors of mana to play and use

Doesn't win you the game on its own

Has the potential to lock you up if you don't have a good draw effect

 

13. Transcendence of Punishment

 

Transcendence with Leyline of Punishment

 

Effect - You can't be killed with damage. Nobody can gain life or prevent damage, and you don't need to.

 

Combo Type - Shield Effect

 

Pros - You're effectively immortal

Fairly easy to assemble

Removes all drawback from spells that damage everyone indiscriminately

 

Cons - You have to wait a while to play Transcendence - you have to be below 20 life to use it

Doesn't protect you against Commander damage

Removing either once you get them out might kill you

Doesn't provide a win condition on its own

 

12. Concerted Protection



 

Guardian of the Guildpact, Enemy of the Guildpact, and Concerted Effort

 

Effect - All your creatures have protection from all colors.

 

Combo Type - Shield Effect

 

Pros - The protection starts over at the beginning of each upkeep

May make your creatures unblockable and unkillable

Budget combo

Fairly easy to assemble

 

Cons - Doesn't help against mass removal

Doesn't address colorless effects

Not a static effect. Your opponents have a chance to respond to the protection each upkeep.

Assuming you have the winning attack, you'll need one turn rotation before you can attack with your invincible army.

11. Rooftop Conspiracy

Rooftop Storm with Conspiracy

Effect - Free creatures

Combo Type - Free creatures

Pros/Cons - All your creatures are Zombies, which opens them up to a lot of other enhancements. Death Baron and Noxious Ghoul affect all your creatures, but then so do Extinction and Slayer of the Wicked. You have to craft your strategy around it, but it should be easy to do.

10. Mirror, Mirror, Mirror, Mirror

Mirror-Sigil Sergeant, Followed Footsteps, and Paradox Haze

Effect - Each of your turns, you get two upkeeps, and each upkeep you copy Mirror-Sigil Sergeant at least twice.

Combo Type - Token Production

Pros - The Paradox Haze and Followed Footsteps trigger Mirror-Sigil Sergeant's own ability.
Even the first double upkeep, you'll get three Sergeants the first time and then four more the second. You go from one to eight immediately, and the next turn it goes to 36.

Cons - No matter how many you have, they're all the same creature, and most of them are tokens, so they're open to even more mass removal spells than usual.
You have one turn rotation before you can attack with any of them.
You put a bulls-eye on your combo and yourself until it's dealt with.

9. Spirit Squall

Squallmonger with Spirit Link

Effect - Damage to all flyers and players, gaining you life.

Combo Type - Creature Enhancement

Pros - Cheap and easy to get and use
Even if it's destroyed, you can massively alter the board state at instant speed first.
Squallmonger's "any player" clause might get opponents to hurt each other for a little bit first.
You can use it without having to build a deck around it.

Cons - Dies to anything

8. Vigorous Wumpus

 

Thrashing Wumpus, Vigor, and Charisma/Basilisk Collar

Effect - Version 1, Steal everything and pump it. Version 2, Kill everything and gain a lot of life.

Combo Type - Creature Combos

Pros/Cons - You can use the Wumpus and Vigor on their own to buff your army. If you go the Charisma route, you also get everyone else's stuff. If you go the Basilisk Collar route, you'll kill everyone else's stuff. You will also kill your own Vigor (and all your own creatures if you activate the Wumpus more than once), but only your creatures will survive. Apart from the obvious removal problems, if you use Charisma and they destroy just that, everyone gets all their creatures back with the counters on them. Also, this uses a lot of color-specific mana in at least two different colors, so you might have a hard time getting it to work in the first place.

7. Unnatural Mirror

Unnatural Selection with Spirit Mirror

Credit for this combo gos to Eric Kretzschmar

Effect - Pay 1 to kill anything.

Combo Type - Abuse of Rules

Pros - Kills nearly anything at instant speed
Ignores renegeration (You just destroy it again)
Easy to use

Cons - Does not work on shroud, hexproof, pro blue, pro white, or indestructible creatures.
Doesn't win the game on its own and does make you a target.

6. Hazy, Lazy Manta

Mistmeadow Witch, Torpor Orb, and Wormfang Manta

 

Effect - Infinite turns

Combo Type - Infinite turns

Pros - Fairly easy to use and maintain
Another budget combo. These aren't hard cards to get

Cons - Your turns don't stack in the queue. You have to repeat it each time.
Wormfang Manta needs seven mana and is really easy to kill in response to you blinking it.
Torpor Orb is a target anyway, and if any of your opponents destroy it, the rest of it becomes useless.

5. Squirrel Craft

Earthcraft with Squirrel Nest (plus a basic land)

Effect - Infinite 1/1 Squirrel tokens and next turn, infinite mana

Combo Type - Token Production, Infinite stuff

Pros/Cons - Works in one color, off three mana. The biggest drawback is that no matter how many you make, all but the last one is tapped. If you had a mass untap effect (like Vitalize) and a mass haste effect (like Concordant Crossroads) you can win that turn, but that takes a lot of luck or some fetch effects. Also, they're both enchantments, and green has no way to fetch enchantments on its own. If you get really lucky, you can win the game your third turn. Otherwise, you're going to have to be able to survive a turn rotation wearing a bulls-eye.

4. Freed Mana

Argothian Elder with Freed from the Real

Effect - Infinite Mana

Combo Type - Infinite Mana

Pros - The cheapest, easiest infinite mana combo in print. All you need is two lands, one of which has to produce blue.

Cons - You still need something to do with the mana.

3. Pact Hive

Hive Mind with any/all of the Futuresight Pacts

Effect - Win the Game

Combo Type - Kill Combo

Pros - Given the color restrictions of EDH, you're almost certain to kill someone. You might well kill everyone (especially if you tap out and cast Exhaustion before the pact). Also you can make it work in any color combination as long as one of them is blue.

Cons - Some of the pacts are hard to use, and Hive Mind is a rules problem even without any other weird interactions. The black one requires each player to have a separate target for it to work. The blue one not only requires each player to have a separate target, but it counters a spell. Everyone just picks one that's already been targeted to stop it from resolving. Also, if anyone manages to pay the upkeep cost, you have to have something to follow up, and you'll still have Hive Mind to worry about.

2 and 1. The Cereal Combos - Lucky Charms and Fruity Pebbles
I'm including these together because a lot of their parts are interchangeable and they do the same thing. As a side note, I don't know where the names came from. These are old combos people were using when I was in high school. I thought they were all well-known, but I've learned otherwise.

Fruity Pebbles

Goblin Bombardment, Enduring Renewal, and Memnite or Ornithopter (either)

Lucky Charms 

Aluren, Furious Assault, and Horned Kavu

 

 

Effect - Win the Game

 

Combo Type - Kill Combos

 

Pros - Both of these result in instant kills, and both only need four mana to work. Also, Lucky Charms in particular doesn't require you to have that creature. It also works with Shrieking Drake, Man-o'-War, Cavern Harpy, or anything else that can bounce itself as soon as it comes in.

 

Cons - There are a few ways to shut them down. You are re-casting creatures ad infinitum, so counter magic will break them both. Instant creature removal works on Lucky Charms but not Fruity Pebbles. Enchantment removal kills both. Any effect that punishes you when you cast a spell will hurt quite a bit. An untargetable player can't be killed this way. Also, Aluren affects everyone, not just you, so your opponents may have some tricky cheap creatures they can drop and screw up everything.





Political: Guns and Banks - Taking Scapegoating To a New Level

I'm absolutely disgusted by how much the Newtown shooting last month has been co-opted for political gain in this country. The sad fact is that it was a horrible tragedy, but the school did everything it could have. They had a security camera system, they had intruder drills, and they had locked the doors by the time the shooter arrived. They evacuated the school according to a rehearsed method into a pre-arranged meeting place, and everything they practiced went through according to plan. It just wasn't enough. They did everything right, and it might have saved more lives than we know, but it didn't save the 26 people he got to before the plan could be put into motion.

What we don't want to hear is, under the circumstances it couldn't have gone any better than it did. This simply couldn't have been prevented any better. What we are hearing is that if only the shooter hadn't been able to get his hands on the guns, it wouldn't have happened. That if only there weren't any guns he knew about anywhere between New Jersey and Connecticut, he wouldn't have been able to come up with some other sort of plan and would have gone about his business like everyone else that day.

There are people in this country who want guns outlawed no matter what it takes to make that happen. I acknowledge that guns are responsible for a lot of deaths, and more importantly they don't have any other purpose. Guns were invented to make it easier to kill things, and every improvement and modification to them over the years has been to make them even better at it. They're not useful for anything else. But I really don't buy that if the shooter had been unable to get his hands on a gun that day he would've just climbed in his car and driven to work. He had snapped. He was going to do something that day, and there really wasn't any stopping him. Blaming the tool he used to do it is a stretch. It just so happens that it's a stretch some people were already trying to make anyway.

On a different subject, do you know how the current recession started in this country? I can remember the first market crash in the spring of 2007 because I was a senior in college at the time. One of my friends who was about to graduate with a finance degree was watching the international reports and told me the markets had just crashed in China and we needed to sell most or all of our stock immediately because it was about to happen over here too. He was right. By noon that day, the markets had plunged about a thousand points and kept falling all week. It seems that a lot of the banks backing the market had been counting on that not happening, because they didn't have any other source of income because they were overburdened with loans people weren't paying.

The story of the bad debt begins a lot further back though, in the late 1990s. Prior to that, there were some really stringent laws about what constituted a bank, what sort of bank it was, and what it could do. Savings, lendings, checking, and credit were all treated quite a bit differently than they are now. Your local bank where you had a savings or checking account couldn't also issue you a credit card, for example, and businesses didn't have their own financing divisions. Nowadays you can get a credit card from department stores and gas stations. That was illegal twenty years ago. The change in the law meant that credit was a lot more available than it had been. The result was that people used it a lot more.

The other change in the law at about the same time was in regard to loan approval. Basically, banks used a person's credit rating to determine how likely they were to be able to pay back a loan, and set an interest rate and assessed a monthly payment based on each individual person's record with debt. Somehow, the government decided that this process was discriminatory against particular races. I don't want to make any claims about skin color having anything to do with ability to pay back loans, but the result was that banks were basically forbidden from denying people loans, even if a person's credit indicated there was no way they could pay it back. What's more, the banks weren't allowed to tell people that they didn't think they could pay a loan back and maybe it wasn't a good idea for them to get one. The only thing they were allowed to do is charge whatever interest rate seemed fair based on the person's credit. This ended up producing the now-dreaded adjustable mortgage. In order to allow for the increasing number of people out there who couldn't pay off their mortgages, and still basically forbidden to refuse one, they had to charge higher and higher rates just to keep enough money on hand to make the next loan.

After the first market crash in 2007, it became more and more obvious that the banks couldn't keep up with the staggering number of defaults. Mortgage companies in particular were selling their loans to whoever they could just to try to keep their own companies open, and even repossessing the houses they'd lent the money on wasn't helping anymore because nobody could afford to get another mortgage to buy the house back from the bank. Then from somewhere, we got the idea that all this had happened on purpose. We got the image of the greedy banker, sitting in his office, smoking a cigar and drinking brandy and making plans to get everyone's houses by loaning them money.

Who is a banker? Is the teller at the window a banker? She's just a low-level employee, like me. Her boss, the branch manager, is no different than the manager of a McDonalds or Payless Shoes. They don't make the rules. They're just in charge of making sure everyone else there follows them. What about the middle managers who balance all the accounts and make sure there's enough money in one area to cover all the debts the banks in that area have? They're salaried people, but they're still just paper-pushers and don't get any more money when the bank records a higher profit. So it must be the top-level executives. After all they're the ones that get the huge bonuses all the time. They must be the ones who pushed all the loans onto the public. If you know anything about high-ranking executives, you know that it's all numbers and long-term management. Although they set the policies and procedure in place, they're only carrying out what they've been told to do by their board of directors, who are in turn looking at the stock price and trying to protect the interests of their shareholders. Their bonuses are awarded for how closely they follow their instructions, which, if developed correctly, should mean increased profits. So it's those greedy shareholders at the bottom of everything, huh? Who are those guys?

Holy crap, I'm one of those guys!

Seriously, I own stock in Citigroup, effectively making me one of the people responsible for the price of the stock and the decisions that people make to keep it up. Am I a banker? Am I the guy everyone hates? I'm just an assistant manager in a gas station. I wasn't trying to take anyone's house. I don't even own one myself.

The problem gets a little clearer - what's happened here is that we the public borrowed a bunch of money we couldn't pay back from a bunch of banks that weren't allowed to say no, and then when it all went to pieces we were quick to blame a fictional construct for it so we didn't have to face the reality that it was our own fault. Guns similarly make a good scapegoat beause they're inanimate objects.

We've blamed all our problems on things that either don't really exist or aren't alive so we can face the reality before us secure in the knowledge that it's not our fault and we don't have to change anything to fix it. We're the victims here, which means it's not our responsibility to fix our lives. It's the responsibility of the bankers to quit demanding their money back and the guns to stop firing bullets at the things we point them at.

It's true AIG made the embarrassing decision not to re-schedule their conference in the Bahamas. After all, the tickets were already bought and the rooms were already rented. That money was already spent. It looked bad that the conference fell about two days after they got their bailout money from the government. But that was one bank, making one bad decision, that wasn't all that obviously bad until after the fact. Most of the rest of the idea that greedy corporations were out to plunder all they could take from the American public remains a fictional construct. Why does it exist? So we can keep irresponsibly pouring all our money into those corporations and screaming about victimization when we go broke.

The scary thing about this new level of scapegoating is that we didn't find something to blame our problems on so nobody noticed while we fix them behind the scenes. What we've moved on to is continuously blaming them on things that aren't real so we don't have to try to fix anything.

Personal and Religious: Not Your Average Christian

“...because thou hast seen me, thou hast believed. Blessed are they that have not seen, and yet believe.” John 20:29

“Faith is the denial of observation so that belief can be preserved.” - Tim Minchin

I may be the only Christian you ever meet who doesn't want to go to heaven. This post has been 2 weeks in the writing, but really it's been about 14 years in the making.

 

1 – My Problem with God

I was baptized when I was 13 for the remission of my sins, because the Bible told me to. The Bible told me if I wasn't a Christian I was going to hell. The problem is, it also says if I am a Christian, I'm going to heaven.
 

My problem with God starts with that fact – there's no third option. God created the heavens and the earth, created hell (or maybe just put Lucifer there and it formed in reaction. I'm not sure), created sheol, but didn't create an option for His faithful servants who don't want to live forever. He sent Jesus to die for our sins, and gave us a gift of grace that would allow us to get into heaven and avoid hell, but the gift has very limited options and strings attached.

I don't wish to come off as blasphemous. God is God and I can't change what God's going to do. It's His right. But I don't like it. I can't change what I like and what I want. God has to do that for me.

I might be able to rationalize it a little better, and take some comfort in working diligently for the Lord in exchange for a reward I don't want if I at least knew why God's plan is the way it is a little better. But one personality trait God exhibits all the way through the Bible is that He's very secretive. From the Book of Genesis when He gave Adam and Eve the tools of self awareness and told them not to use them to the Book of Revelation where He showed John a great mystery and told him not to write it down, God is always depicted as being very protective not only of His will but also knowledge of His will. In the book of Job, after Job spends an entire chapter praising and beseeching God once his torment is over, God blasts him for the next four chapters for daring to ask Him why he had to suffer. Jesus, even after he performs miracles, tells his followers not to mention them to anybody.

Kee-ripes, God. You put us here, gave us very little information, filled us with curiosity, and scold us for trying to sate it. I'm not questioning Your judgment, but it's really hard to live with. I have to “deny myself, taking up my cross daily (Mt 16:24)” “without looking back (Lk 9:62)” based on “no sign but the sign of Jonah (Mt 12:39)” and do the “good works ordained beforehand (Eph 2:10)” in such a way that people “see the light of the Father (Mt 5:6)” in order to “teach the Gospel to all creatures (Mk 16:16)”. What comfort do I have, Lord? This is the “easy yoke and light burden (Mt 11:30)” Jesus put before me? I'd almost rather have the damnation I've earned (Rom 6:23) than accept a gift that bleak. Almost.

I keep trying to live a good life, a life according to the Word, and hope and pray that one day God will change my heart. But as I said at the beginning, I've been a Christian for 14 years, from age 13. That's now more than half my life and it hasn't happened yet. I'm running out of hope.

2 – My Problem with Atheism

“Well if you feel that way about it, why don't you just join the atheists?” you might wonder. The trouble is, as attractive as their ideas are, I'm not an atheist. I can't just stop believing in God and Christianity and more than I can stop being six-foot-six with brown eyes and graying brown hair. I can choose what I believe, to an extent. I can change my opinions based on evidence. I can choose what I'm going to follow and what I'm going to do with my faith, but I don't choose to have faith. Faith is a need, like hunger, thirst, or shelter. It's a touch more complicated than the basic body needs, on the same plane as fears and sexuality. My problem with atheism is that it largely says the need doesn't or shouldn't exist.

I should make it clear that I'm not talking about a blind faith here. I have read the Bible and made my own decisions about it. If you'll look back at the two quotations I put at the start of this post, there's a difference in believing in things unseen and refusing to believe in things that are seen. If you can't believe in things unseen, you can't really be an empiricist either. I've never been to a dinosaur excavation but I believe they existed. I've never set a match to hydrogen but I still know it would explode. You have to accept that things have happened that you haven't seen. Otherwise the world ceases to exist while you're asleep.

I have two big problems with atheists, even though I like their skeptical and rational approach to the world. One is that because they don't feel the need of faith, they don't really understand that it isn't something you can just turn off. The second is that they're bullies about it.

I don't blame them completely for being angry and aggressive in their approach. That is partially our fault. If you ever watch a debate on the issue, the atheists always get riled up about the horrible things Christians (particularly Catholics) and other religious groups have done throughout history, and they're not wrong. But if you've see how nasty those debates get, you know that it's not really about casting down the “lies” of religion and freeing the minds of mankind. It's about getting even with the religious authorities for all the crap they've done over the millennia. Most activist atheists don't just want religious people to stop being religious; they want us punished for everything our spiritual forefathers did wrong in God's name. And if they hadn't done such great evils in the name of such great goodness, the atheists wouldn't be nearly as popular in their attacks.

The problem there is that they're either missing or ignoring the thing I said a few paragraphs back. Faith is a need. Religion fills that need. Pointing to all the horrific inhumanity done in the name of religion is proof that we don't need to do any of that horrific inhumanity anymore. The Spanish Inquisition provides an excellent argument against the Spanish Inquisition. The sale of indulgences illustrates just how wrong the sale of indulgences was. Showing the awful stuff done wrong in the name of religion and saying it proves there shouldn't be any religion is like showing all the stuff people have done in pursuit of money and saying it proves there shouldn't be any money. But there will always be money just like there will always be religion, because they fill a basic need in a way nothing else does.

Even if they had a valid point, though, they're not doing a very good job of practicing what they preach when it comes to proving it.

 

 

 

 

That is a picture taken from Atheist Resource on Facebook. If you go to their page and scroll through their other pictures, you'll find at least one example of a logical fallacy in each one.

What you find in their arguments is what happened in the Intelligence Squared debate I mentioned the other day. John Onaiyekan, the Catholic Archbishop from Nigeria stood up and talked about all the great things he's witnessed as a Catholic priest, and all the wonderful things his Church has done in his life and the lives of people he knows. Christopher Hitchens took the stand next and listed item after item of all the terrible things the Catholic Church has done throughout history. Then Anne Widdecombe took her turn and began striking back against everything Hitchins had said. Finally Stephen Fry took to the podium and continued pointing out horrible things the Church had done and is still doing.

If you watch the debate, you get a real sense of how atheists usually make their points. What you don't see a lot of is good firm debate on the merits and demerits of the Catholic Church and whether it's a net force for good in the world (which was the topic). What you see is one guy who believes the Catholic Church is great and three angry people hurling accusations and insults at each other.

Atheists nearly always spread their message by talking about everything done wrong in the name of religion, with cleverly worded insults all the way. I already said, using the bad done wrong in the name of religion as an argument against religion doesn't hold up because it's a bad argument, and mocking and insulting your opponent, however cleverly you may do so, is not evidence of correctness or intellectual superiority. It just proves you know better insults.

On the subject of the great mass of human atrocity that has been done by people with religious authority, I should say that we know power corrupts. If we want to prevent that from continuing, we should limit the power of people, and keep watch on those with authority to make sure they don't abuse it. We shouldn't dismantle the institutions and hand control over to the atheists. Why?

 

(Not the product of any religion)

Atheists don't have as long a history as religious people of doing terrible things, but it's because they don't have as long a history period. But they're poised to do just as much if not more if they get the control they want. Taking away faith and a spiritual conscience and replacing it with a humanist conscience ensure that your adherents are going to do what's best for the greatest number, not what's morally, objectively right. Historically, sometimes what produced the greatest good for the greatest number was inhumanly terrible to the rest. Taking religion and God out of morality won't stop people from doing awful things. It will take away any internal motivation to avoid those things if the reward is great enough.

3 – My problem with other Christians

I am a true fundamentalist. I believe in a literal interpretation of the Bible. I don't believe in a literal interpretation of what someone else told me about the Bible. There is a long list of stuff we have to stop doing if we're ever going to be taken seriously again. Again, looking back at the two quotes I used to introduce this post, we are called to believe in things unseen. That doesn't mean we have to keep coming up with stupid arguments against things that have been seen. It also doesn't mean we have to keep coming up with stupid arguments in support of things that just aren't right.

My complaints here are almost to numerous to list. I'm going to give each one and an explanation and then try to discuss them all.

 

Evolution. It happened. It happens. There is proof.
The Big Bang. See evolution.
Demonic possession. It doesn't happen. It did, but not anymore.
Divine Retribution. It doesn't happen, particularly not in the form of natural disasters.
Speaking in tongues. It doesn't mean what you think it means.
The Rapture. It isn't going to happen the way you think it is.
Homosexuality. I agree it's a sin. That doesn't give anyone the excuse to hurt them.
Acceptance. No more “well if we can't pick on them anymore, who are we going to pick on now?”
Science is not evil. It's not man-made. It's as true as anything else.
Ignorance does not justify making stuff up.

I'm going to talk in the last section of this post about reconciliation and how religion and science are currently holding both halves of the creation puzzle in their hands and can't fit them together. For the trickier issues, hang on and be prepared for me to tell you stuff may never have heard before.

First of all, demonic possession was something that only happened when Jesus was on earth. There are no scriptural records of it before, and there are only a few briefly after. The Bible does not always go in chronological order. If you want proof of that read in the Revelation (If you're still calling it the Book of Revelations then you've never looked that closely at the title and you probably don't know the rest very well either) where John's description of the Rapture comes before his description of the birth of Christ. This is important because Lucifer was kicked out of heaven at the same time Jesus came to earth (and possibly is the star that led the Magi to Bethlehem). Lucifer and all his angels were wandering the earth when Jesus was on it. Lucifer tried one last time to tempt Jesus, and then never appeared again. If you read further into the Revelation you get an idea why. There were still some other demons on the planet for a while until they were driven out by one source or another. On the Day of Pentecost the Holy Spirit came on the Apostles and they received a measure of Godly power. They could speak in tongues (more on that in a sec), cast out demons, know things they hadn't seen, and a few other such divine powers. Why? Because they needed those things to establish the church, protect themselves, and carry out the Great Commission.

They were not given the authority to transmit these gifts any further.

Read the New Testament. The other disciples traveling with them could not cast out demons unless they had an Apostle present. Paul was given the same gifts by Jesus in Damascus, but he was unable to pass them on to Timothy. That's why he kept having to write letters to people while he was in prison.

Once their missions on earth were completed, the Apostles (except John) were all martyred and their powers went with them. John had to stay alive with his divine authority because he had one more prophecy to write. There are no demons in the world today. If there were, no mortal has the ability to cast them out. That all went away about 2000 years ago.

Speaking in tongues is not the same as speaking gibberish. It's a very perverse interpretation of the miracle. The miracle was that when the Apostles spoke, people could understand them. In Acts, the people marveled that though they were all Galileans each man heard them speak as though in his native language. The miracle was that they could speak so everyone of every tongue could understand, not so they could babble nonsense in public. If you've seen people doing that, they're under something akin to mass hysteria – they're doing it because they believe that's what they're supposed to do so strongly that their brain makes it happen. It's not a miracle, it's an insult to the miracle. The same goes for people who seem to be demon-possessed.

What about the Rapture? We don't know what will happen, how it will happen, or when. If anyone tells you otherwise, they're either lying or wrong. How do I know? Because Jesus said so. “Watch therefore and wait, for ye know not the day nor the hour when the Son of Man cometh (Mt 25:13).” We don't know what will happen or how because of the misinterpretations of the prophecies leading up to the birth of Christ, apart from anything else. From the birth of Isaac to the birth of Jesus, when God tells people what will happen, He always keeps His word and the people never expect it. Besides that, as I said way back at the beginning, God guards the secrets of His will very closely. When Jesus says “no one will see it coming” I have no trouble believing it. One thing God's really good at is taking us by surprise, and there's a whole Bible full of stories of men trying and failing miserably to predict how and when God's plans would come to fruition.

Why would people tell you that if they don't know? Because, like I said way back at the beginning, we're full of curiosity. A lot of times religious leaders have either made up an answer or found what they think might be the answer because their followers expected them to have it. That has caused doctrinal problems from the time of the Apostles on down, and many of the aforementioned atrocities committed in the name of God were done because people either wanted to know something or worse, were sure they already did. We have to accept that when it comes to God, we may never know the answer. He won't tell us until He's ready. If you try to fill in the blanks with your own answer, look what happened to Saul, Nebuchadnezzar, the Pharisees, Judas, etc. It never works.

There is no scriptural evidence for modern divine retribution. Only three people were so struck after Jesus' Ascension – Ananaias, Sephira, and Herod. Ananaias and Sephira committed the first sin in the church, lying to the Apostles and the Holy Spirit and were struck dead by the Spirit because Peter said so. Herod was the only one struck dead without an Apostle present, and he died suddenly of a parasitic infection, rather than just falling down dead like the other two. Jesus said he was going to prepare a place for us in heaven. He's not sitting up there with God using sinners for target practice with natural disasters. Those things just happen. God makes the sun rise on the good and the evil, sends rain on the just and the unjust (Mt 5:45). Reading some supernatural meaning into those things is in fact a violation of the scriptures against divination, not receipt of some divine message.

This leads to that all-important question both atheists and Christians ask – Why does God let bad things happen? Why did God let Hurricane Katrina level New Orleans? Why did God let an earthquake wreck the Fukushima reactor in Japan? A better question might be who builds a major city below sea level next to a giant lake and builds a nuclear reactor on a fault line? God's warnings were in place well in advance. Well, what about the other stuff? Why is there so much poverty, hunger, war, and disease in the world? What's God's plan for that?

It's us. It's the church. Fixing all the suffering in the world is our job. It's a job carried out by those man-made forces of agriculture, medicine, diplomacy, and economics. Those are really powerful, world-changing forces. We can either use them as good stewards, helping each other and giving God the glory, or we can use them selfishly for personal gain. Look at the world and its history and see which does better, and which is more prevalent. God told us what to do and how to do it. He isn't going to do it for us. Waiting for God to fix all the world's problems is like sitting in your car and waiting for it to drive you to work.

Those things aren't currently in the hands of Christians because Christians have rejected them. We turned our backs on learning how to carry out our assignments so we could tear the Bible apart looking for whatever secret messages God was really trying to send us. That's why we have to accept knowledge, no matter the source. We need to stop looking for writing on the walls and read what's in the textbooks. If you do see anything written on a wall, you can bet your soul it was a mortal who wrote it.

We also have to stop persecuting people out of habit. I'm not sure why, but ever since the Civil Rights movement really took off, Christians as a group have tried to figure out who's left for us to scapegoat. Currently it's the gays. Stop! God did not make anything bad happen to any nation because it had gay people in it. God isn't punishing Israel for being full of Jews (their neighbors are punishing them for being bad neighbors but that's another post), He isn't punishing Africa for being full of black people, He isn't punishing Europe for being full of liberal atheists, and He isn't punishing America for failing to stop any of this. Bad stuff is happening in the world because we're all too busy trying to figure out who God hates instead of being the vessels of God's love we're supposed to be. It's our fault there is still suffering in the world because we haven't fixed it yet, and it's our fault there's still hate in the world because we haven't stopped that yet too.

 

4 – Looking for the Reconciliation

A team of people won the Nobel Prize in physics in 2011 for determining that the universe is not only expanding, but its rate of expansion is accelerating. It's been over a year, and I have yet to hear anyone else realize what this means for the oldest, bitterest fight between religion and science.

Why is this so significant? Because the expansion of the universe is what causes the progression of time. I cannot overstate this – Proof that the universe's expansion is accelerating is proof that time itself is getting faster. Proof that time is getting faster is proof that time has gotten faster.

Why does that matter? Because it proves that what we think of as a day isn't the same as what a day was right after the birth of the universe!

“In the beginning, God created the Heavens and the Earth, and the Earth was lifeless and without form, and darkness covered the face of the deep, and the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters. And God said “Let their be light, and their was light, and God saw the light” Genesis 1:1-3

 

A day as we see it today is not the same as a day at the dawn of the universe. Everything the smartest people in the world have asked about his subject for 120 years is answered right there.

“I will open my mouth in parables. I will utter things which have been kept secret from the foundation of the world. (Mt 13:35)”

Why has no one found this before? Because no one's looking for it. Religious people and scientific people are dismissing each other. They have two things that don't agree and each immediately assumes the other is wrong. Neither side looks for how the two conflicting ideas might exist together.

This is the answer we must try to find in the world. The Bible tells us what our mission is. Science tells us how to do it. Science tells us what we might do later. The Bible tells us what our choice should be. Ignoring either side because you don't like what they have to say doesn't help anything. It just holds everyone back.

Political: The Big Six – My Opinions on Gay Rights, Immigration, Abortion & Death Penalty, Drugs, and Global Warming

Gay Rights

(Specifically marriage. I haven't heard of gay people being knocked off voting rolls or anything)
Position: Gay marriage is probably immoral, but still ought to be legalized.

I'm firmly of four opinions on gay marriage. On the one hand, I do think homosexual behavior is immoral. I'm not going to throw out the five Bible passages that get misinterpreted both ways on the subject. If it matters to you, you already know them and I'm not going to change your mind about what they mean and how they should be applied. What I am going to say is that it's only been around 150 years, since Victorian England specifically, that there was any such thing as a homosexual. Victoria's parliament legislated against gay acts between men, and Oscar Wilde was the first famous case tried under the new law. Before that period, monogamy in general wasn't as big a deal as it is today. People got married men and women, and sometimes they took lovers on the side, and sometimes they were lovers of the same sex. There weren't any clear lines yet of what was “normal” and what was “deviant.” When the anti-gay legislation came in, it got really clear really fast. Men either had to stop all the fooling around with other men or at least keep really quiet about it. So what was the law about?

Basically, popular opinion was (and still is) that men having sex with other men is just a gross thing to do. Every argument against it boils down to that. Nobody's really been able to explain why, but they're sure it's a nasty behavior. Laws, customs, and now Bible verses have been applied to rationalize that position. The Victorian era was when the Catholic Church and others adopted their current position on the subject and applied the popular interpretations to the relevant verses. But underlying all of that is that what had been socially acceptable in practice, if not in polite discussion, for many years suddenly wasn't anymore. The majority of the public agreed, and a few decided that it didn't matter what anyone else thought, they were going to carry on anyway.

That's sort of the definition of immoral – there was a consensus on what was right and wrong, and even though it was different from what it had been, it was still standard. The people who decided their own desires were more important than everyone else's, well that's what deviance is. Now, whether it's objectively right or wrong, I don't know, but for all our lives it has certainly been on the contrary side of the cultural morality. To me, that's what “immoral” means. Of course, that opinion only came in 150 years ago and it is beginning to change. If the common morality is changing, it won't be immoral anymore.

My second of the four opinions on the subject though, is that just because something's immoral doesn't mean it should be illegal. One of the most common arguments against legalizing gay marriage in the US is that it is going to cheapen the institution of marriage. I don't think that's true. I think divorce has cheapened the institution a lot more than every other factor. People don't take their vows seriously (or any other vows for that matter) anymore, and people get divorced just because they don't like their spouse at the moment. The often-quoted statistic is that half of all marriages end in divorce. This, incidentally, isn't true – the statistic is that there are 2 marriages each year for every divorce. When you count how many people are getting married for the second or third or however many times, and divorced for the same number, that still means it's more common to stay married for life than not.

Apart from divorce, there are already a lot of forms of immoral marriage that are legal, as long as they take place between a man and a woman. The image of a horny old rich guy marrying a sexy young gold digger is positively cliché and is basically a long-term prostitution arrangement. It wasn't that long ago that people thought interracial marriages were wrong, and some people out there still do. People are still allowed to get married for political or other advantage, for money, and under duress (as in “shotgun weddings”). It's pretty stupid and hypocritical to say that gay marriage can't be allowed but all those others are just fine. I say legalize them all or criminalize them all, and since I believe in letting people decide for themselves what's best for them, I vote legalize them all. You can still say snarky things about them behind their back.

On the third hand, marriage isn't a guaranteed right in the US. The idea of picking who you get to marry is still pretty recent as well. Arranged marriages were the norm all over the place for a long time (and probably the reason for all those affairs in history). There's nothing in the national constitution about it, and if it's covered under the tenth amendment, then it's up to the states to decide. And if some states vote one way and you don't like it, move to a state that voted the other way. The borders are open. If enough people migrate into one or the other for that reason, the affect on the economy in those states will be enough to force the others to follow suit.

On the fourth hand, even though marriage isn't a legally defined right in this country, most people seem to think it is and act accordingly. If we're going to say marriage is a right, then it has to be open to any and all, and discriminating against any group goes against the grain of the national conscience. If it's a right, it's more wrong to deny it to a group because the majority doesn't like them than it is for them to do all the nasty stuff that majority doesn't like. We are absolutely not allowed to oppress any minority just because we don't like them.

 

Immigration

(Specficially the illegal immigration from Mexico and other Latin American countries that's so controversial right now)
Position: There shouldn't be any such thing as illegal immigration. Let them come in.

This one's pretty self-explanatory. Go back 90 years and you could have listened to all the people who already lived here complaining about all the immigrants coming in from Poland, Ireland, Russia, Italy, or what have you. The arguments were exactly the same – we don't know who might be a cirminal, they look a little different, they don't have the same values as the rest of us, and horror of horrors THEY DON'T SPEAK ENGLISH!

Get over it. The country survived. We added all those other groups to the pool, the better parts of their cultures became part of the American patchwork and the worse parts went away. Yeah, every now and then a violent criminal sneaks in, and we still need to watch out for those guys, but we're not going to catch all of them. Most people don't come to this country because they see a lot of innocent people to murder. Most of the people with that view were born here. So do what it says on the Statue of Liberty's base. If they're willing to make the trip, let 'em in. Even if they never learn English, their kids will. How far back in your family tree do we have to go to find someone who didn't speak English? Didn't affect your ability at all, did it?

 

 

Abortion & the Death Penalty

Position: Both should be available; both should be a last resort.

I put these two topics together for a reason. I've never met anyone who's in favor of both, or against both. They both involve legalized forms of killing people, and they're both allowed under the current federal laws. The liberal view is that abortion is fine but the death penalty isn't, and the conservative view is the reverse. It looks like one set is based on choices already made and their consequences while the other is on choices not yet made and the opportunities. I don't think either of these is a good basis for policy. Similar to my position on gay marriage, I think both probably shouldn't happen, but I know there are times when both are called for. Therefore they should be legally permitted but we shouldn't be so gung-ho to ring the bell on either.

Abortion has become a “right” in the wrong category in my opinion. It's become an entitlement, like the right to life, freedom, and safety, that people have to go out of their way to make sure everyone who wants one can get it. I think it ought to be more like the right to bear arms – You're allowed to have one, if you can afford it and go through the proper channels to get it, but expect that if you get one some people are always going to say you're a bad person. Nobody has the right to be free from being called names when they do something other people don't like. Roe v Wade gives women the right to get one, but the First Amendment still gives the right to criticize her for it. On the flip side, the anti-abortion view seems to be more based on forcing the screw-up parents to live as screw-up parents as a punishment to them than having anything to do with the baby. There's not a problem in the world that wouldn't be solved with fewer people. Every soul is sacred. Lives on the other hand are frequently a waste of good material.

The death penalty definitely gets pushed more than necessary, but that doesn't mean it needs to be eliminated. Serious, repeat offenders that are never going to stop being violent unless the state kills them first, that's fine. That's basic public defense. Somebody who lost his temper once and beat someone to death, and is now consumed with remorse for it, let him live. Not let him out, but don't kill him back. It isn't going to make anything better at that point. Criminal prosecutors keep up with how many death sentences they can get just like their won/lost ratio, like they're stats on a freakin' baseball card. That's just sick. No matter what they did, nobody should die so someone else can advance their career.

 

 

Drugs

Position: I have no problem with drugs, but I can't stand the users

On this one, I'm going to my Bible. Obviously, if you're not a Christian, this won't really mean much to you. But since a lot of our modern attitudes on the subject come from a religious context, that's where I'm going to start. The New Testament, particularly the liberty doctrine found in Romans 14, is quite clear on personal behaviors, particularly when it comes to what you put into your body.

Matthew 15:17-18 “Know ye not, that whatever enters at the mouth goes into the belly, and is cast out into the ditch? Those things which come out of the mouth come from the heart, and they defile a man.”

Romans 14:1-14 “Him that is weak in the faith receive ye, but not to doubtful disputations. For one believes that he may eat all things. Another, who is week, eats (only) herbs. Let not him that eats despise him that eats not, and let not him which eats not judge him that eats, for God hath received him.

Who art thou that judges another man's servant? To his own Master shall he stand or fall. Yea, he shall be held up, for God is able to make him stand. One man esteems one day above another; another esteems every day alike. Let every man be persuaded in his own mind. He that regards the day regards it to the Lord, and he that regards not the day, to the Lord does he not regard it. He that eats, eats to the Lord, and he gives thanks. He that eats not, to the Lord does he not eat, and he gives thanks.
For none of us lives to himself, and no man dies to himself. For whether we live, we live to the Lord, and whether we die, we die unto the Lord, therefore whether we live or die, we are the Lord's. For to this end Christ both died, and rose, and revived, that he might be Lord of both the dead and the living.
But why dost thou judge thy brother? Or why dost thou set at nought thy brother? For we all stand before the judgment seat of Christ. For it is written, 'As I live,' saith the Lord, 'that every knee shall bow to me, and every tongue shall confess to God.' So then every one of us shall give account of himself to God.
Let us not therefore judge one another anymore, but judge this rather, that no man put a stumbling-block or occasion to fall in his brother's way. I know and am persuaded by the Lord Jesus, that there is nothing unclean of itself, but to him that esteems anything to be unclean, to him it is unclean.”

Well said, Paul.

This is one of the most overlooked passages in the Bible when it comes to what is an acceptable behavior and what isn't. What gets in the way of one person isn't going to get in the way of another. We're supposed to make our own decisions about what we can handle and what we can't in life. Those who can handle a little more stimulation than others, may, and those who can't may not. Your call. This is probably why it isn't quoted in church much – it's a passage that strips Christians of their right to tell people off for doing stuff they don't like or don't do themselves.

I don't use any form of illegal drugs, and I never have. I used to smoke tobacco and drink alcohol, although I've quit both. I can't tell you you should or shouldn't drink, smoke, smoke weed, eat meat, celebrate Christmas, shoot up heroin, or any other form of behavior. And you can't tell me what I should or shouldn't do either. It's up to each of us to make that call. But if you know I don't like a particular kind of thing, you're not to do it around me, and vice-versa.

That said, I do not like being around drunks and stoners. They are some of the most annoying people I've ever been exposed to. At my job, they both make up a lot of my customer base, and I can't tell them not to get drunk or high. But if you're going to, do it at home, and leave the rest of us alone!

Global Warming, Global Climate Change, Global Climate Destabilization, or whatever other label you want to use.

Position: Open-minded skeptic. Neither denier nor believer.

I am still a skeptic where global warming is concerned. I don't actively disbelieve and argue against any and all evidence that might support it, but I haven't been convinced that it's happening yet either.

I am not a scientist. I have to admit that I don't understand the physics behind global warming. I know the basic principle is that light (and other radiation) from the sun passes through our atmosphere and warms the surface of the planet. The underlying argument is that carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases in the atmosphere make it harder for the heat produced by this radiation to escape the planet and therefore the planet is getting hotter.

Why do these gases prevent heat, which is a form of radiant energy, from escaping the planet, but don't prevent light, which is also a form of radiant energy, from escaping it? Why is the planet getting hotter but not brighter? If the increased gases make it harder for heat to get out, why don't they also make it harder for the radiation causing it to get in? I understand that it has been conclusively proven that there is more CO2 in the atmosphere than there used to be. Regardless of any effect on the planet's temperature, I do know that carbon dioxide is heavier than average air. Why is there a danger of flooding in low-lying areas but no danger that this heavy suffocating gas might accumulate in those areas and kill everyone?

National Geographic's website, which came up first in my initial search, provides lots of concise factoids – the temperature has risen 1.4ºC around the world since 1880. The rate of warming is increasing and the last two decades of the 20^th century were the warmest for several millennia. Eleven of the past 12 years were the warmest since 1850.

Has the temperature risen around the world? What was the temperature where I live twenty years ago? A hundred and twenty years ago? Last week? Even if they provided me with that data, it's pretty hard for me to verify. I have a suspicion that if I dug around in records from 1880 I could probably find numbers indicating “the temperature” that would not agree with each other. I can't even remember what the high was here four days ago. There is a lot of “citation by exhaustion” going on here to back up this claim. Their millions of data points do lend them credibility, but they're all virtually unconfirmable to the average person. And what makes me more cautious is they don't seem to want me to. The argument is “We've looked at the evidence. It says we're right. You'll have to take our word for it.”

My biggest problem with the whole global warming debate is just that – it's a debate. You don't debate scientific principles. They are or they aren't. We can debate what to do about them, but we shouldn't have to argue about whether or not the facts are the facts. If they are true, there should be lots of indisputable evidence backing them up. Instead, what I've seen is a scientist presents findings that support the hypothesis, someone like me questions the findings, and then someone attacks the questioner, impugning the motives of whoever is asking the question instead of answering the question.

Everyone is focused on which side has the most support – who agrees with them – rather than which side has the most evidence – who is correct.

Al Gore and others have said that there's a lot of money to be made in just arguing that he's wrong. That's true. There is a lot of money at stake either way. There's a lot of money to be made in proving or disproving global warming, and there's also a lot of money threatened by proving something that would mean massive, worldwide, and permanent changes in our lives. Whether it's a threat to commerce doesn't change whether global warming is or isn't happening, but any matter with such enormous consequences needs to be given that level of consideration. If the truth really is that destructive either way, then we need to be absolutely positive we have the right answer. Nobody gets to claim that they have the truth just because their side is easier to accept.

Also, there is no distinct separation between the question of fact of global warming and the genuine debate about what to do about it, and all of the debate part needs to wait until the factual question is settled. I know it is settled in the minds of a lot of people, but the muddying of the two issues is a lot of why I can't understand the true/false part of the question. After Hiroshima, there was a lot of debate about the ethics of using atomic weapons, but not whether or not it was possible to split an atom.

There isn't enough evidence to prove that the factual question has been answered because the people who ought to be presenting that evidence have already started arguing for or against the social change they say must follow. What started as a question of fact with a definite right and wrong answer has been transformed into a fight with a victory at the end. What scares me is that the people who think the right answer might permanently disrupt life as we know it act as though that's an added bonus. Proving there's money in burning fossil fuels doesn't prove we need to stop. First you have to prove that burning fossil fuels is part of the problem, and then we can argue about whether the benefit outweighs the cost. From what I remember of college chemistry, when it comes to the scientific method, until the burden of proof is met, until the hypothesis is conclusively and repeatably shown to be true, the status quo is the default conclusion. So why is so much time and effort spent arguing against that rather than objectively proving something right or wrong?

One of the strongest supporting points in any scientific hypothesis as I understand it is that the results should be able to be reproduced. Naturally we can't build another earth but we can build greenhouses. Why hasn't someone built a few hundred greenhouses, carefully controlled the contents and the environment around them, and then filled them with different specified and controlled concentrations of greenhouse gases and measured the temperature? Some sort of duplicable experiment like that would go a long way to cementing the validity of the hypothesis, but none have been presented.

Then there's the constant, vicious mud-slinging and outright intellectual bullying that always goes along with questioning the accuracy of the global warming claims.

The first example of that is the argument that shifts the burden of proof onto the skeptics – that because climate change is such a great threat to the world, action has to be taken even if it's a possibility and it's up to the people who think otherwise to prove so. That argument is not only specious but it's dangerous. That's almost the exact line of reasoning that was used to justify the war in Iraq – Saddam is a threat, and even though we're not exactly sure how, we are sure he is, and we have to act now before it's too late. That's intellectual strong-arming. “I know better than you, and we should do what I say until you can prove otherwise.”

The second example is the suggestion of a bias on the part of the skeptics, which is true but irrelevant. People whose salaries depend on cars stand to lose a lot if everyone stops driving cars. That is a valid objection to sweeping social change that might result if global warming is proved to be a) happening, b) the fault of humans, and c) mostly the fault of cars. It doesn't mean that you no longer have to prove a, b, or c just because people won't like those results. I don't think people will refuse to change jobs, but they will insist you give them a really good reason first. As I said before, proving your own unpopularity doesn't prove you're right.

The third example is the attack that's always made on the intelligence of the skeptics – Either the condescending attitude that we just don't understand what's going on, or the challenge of, anyone who doesn't agree with us is an idiot. I admit I don't understand the physics, I don't know what would make a good solution, and I don't understand how any of the solutions I've heard, like a carbon tax, are going to really solve anything. That doesn't mean I'm stupid. It means you haven't presented and defended your evidence very well.

I am open to the possibility of nearly everything I've heard argued about global warming – the planet might be warming up, it might be our fault, and we might need to do something about it in a hurry. But I remain unconvinced that any of those are true. And I probably will remain unconvinced until someone stops calling me an idiot long enough to enlighten me.

Whew! If you made it this far, you should now know what my personal opinions are on the six most controversial subjects are of the day. Thanks for your patience.