Doomsday Clock

In recent news, the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists advanced their doomsday clock two minutes closer to midnight, so that it now stands at 11:55 PM. This is intriguing to me. It seems to me that ... more people in the west, and perhaps in the world, had a stronger sense of impending disaster from nuclear warfare back in the 60's, 70's, and 80's than do now in the 00's.

What do you think? Do you have a sense of impending danger/doom from either nuclear profileration/warfare, or from global warming/climate change?

My own sense is that though I do have a lot of fear, my fear is generally unjustifiable/irrational--it's not based on things which are actually dangerous or deadly, at least not at the same levels as the fear seems to indicate. This irrational fear tends to drown out the sense of reality based fears which I otherwise might have.

Recommended Event

So if you are planning to be in or around Seattle April 21 this year, May I suggest registering for The Neighborhood Mission Learning Day, an emergent church event: Reimagining Congregational Mission in Today's Culture with Brian McLaren, Karen Ward, Eugene Cho, and Randy Rowland, and MC'd by Dwight Friesen.
For more info or to register follow this link

happy!

happy happy joy joy. =).

Friday Video

Found at Ordinary Attempts: A video about Scott, the Nametag Guy. I guess Scott, who is 27, took to wearing a nametag all the time seven years ago. He wants to help people be friendlier. He estimates that over the last 7 years he has spoken to or with 80,000 people he would have otherwise never met.

32 hours

32 hours 'til I see my loved ones.


This painting by Joel Pelletier, entitled "American Fundamentalists, (Christ's entry into Washington in 2008)" caught my eye today. Click on it to see a bigger version. It's from here. Your reaction?

New nephew

I have a beautiful new nephew. Stokish! Sebastian Ardley Jones is his name. Congratualtions, Tom, Anite, and Eddie!

victim vs. perpetrator

I went to The Kindling's Muse live radio program yesterday with my friends Chris and Laurel. They had a panel discussion of various stories pulled from yesterday's New York Times chosen by Dick Staub, the host. It was fun. I really like Dick's insights and commentary, and I also really like Bill Hogg's insightful comments (there's a little redundancy for you, to make up for the recent oxymoron). One question Dick asked, which I'd like to ask here, was

1. Is peace in the Middle East possible?

Bill Hogg pointed out the magnificent irony of George Bush's repeated use, in his recent Iraq Policy (non) Update Speech, of the phrase "peace in the Middle East". I responded to this question with a question of my own during the "questions from the audience" segment. I shall ask that here as well:

2. Can question "Is peace in the Middle East possible" be rephrased as:

3. "Is it possible for me, for us, to choose to be the victim rather than the perpetrator?"?

Question three, I guess, feeds into the whole area of nonviolence. Is it possible for us to respond to the perpetrator with love? Is it possible to overcome violence with more violence? For me the answer to question three is generally "no". I am too often the perpetrator. I can see that as I mature, this is less often true--more often than before I can answer "yes" to question three. However, I still far too often must answer "no". And if the answer to question two is "yes", then I guess from my perspective the answer to question one is (by implication) also more often than not "no".

What are your answers?

Martin Luther King Jr. Day

Tomorrow (already today for most of the world), Monday the 15th of January, is Martin Luther King Jr. day in the United States. I think Dr. King was pretty kewl, and if being a christian means being a bit like him, overall, it makes being a christian a bit less unattractive.

Two quotes from Dr. King

"Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about things that matter."

"The hope of a secure and livable world lies with disciplined nonconformists who are dedicated to justice, peace and brotherhood."

thought for the day

Addiction sucks worse than
(The Crimson King + Sauron)^infinity.

A whole WEEK!?!

Wow--been a whole week since I posted. This week I learned about: sarcomeres, probability, Taylor series, actin, myosin, Na/K pumps. This week it snowed, and stuck, and all the side roads are still slick and icy in Seattle, and it's *very* cold. This week I *almost* completed a big secret project. Yay! This week I read part of Stephen King's Insomnia. This week I made 4 contacts about getting into the psych honors program at UW.

Can I also say that I strenuously disagree with Mark Driscoll's recent article on Bible Translation? Not that it really matters, since I mostly can't read the Bible anymore anyway. But "word-for-word translation" is very near (equal to, if you take the limit as n goes to infinity) a, well, (hehe), an oxymoron. Can't be done with any grace/beauty/joy ... most of all, can't be done with any trace of postmodernism/emergent churchishness. It's just a very bad idea all 'round. Translation isn't so much chemistry (in the post-enlightenment sense)--it's more alchemy, and this can't be done from an annoying modernistic point of view. Translation can't be done with pure science. It's got to involve a rather largish proportion of art, or it just sucks, like the mother of all vacuums. Furthermore, I think pastors should be barred from writing papers or speaching sermons on bible translation until they have become at least little "f" fluent in some living language besides their first language. And if it's Hebrew, it has to be more than just using the language to interact with texts. It has to include using the language to interact with people. BICBW.

Here's the Friday Video, Silent Star Wars, stolen from Siamang at eBay Atheist. If you've never been to see a silent movie in a theatre with live organ music, you should see if you can find a chance to sometime. It's fun.

Friday Videos

The New Democratic Congress started this week. Here's Colbert's take on their win.



And here is the rational response squad's blasphemy challenge, which has generated a bit of a stir recently.



To see some of the responses videos, see here.

Mandelbrot Set

This is extremely freaking kewl, and beautiful. Not that I begin to approach understanding the mathematics. The kewl thing is the mathematics is simple enough for me to have some remote clue what it means. Anyway, it's a fractal, and it never stops being complex no matter how far in you zoom. And if you have a good computer, you can zoom *way* in (like 60 billion times, if you start with a typical computer monitor, it's like zooming down to what you are seeing on a typical computer monitor is part of the original image blown up to 20 million kilometers wide). And if you click on the photo, or here, you can see a series of shot of such a zoom. Or click here for the actual wiki article, which has the same series, but with more explanation. This is featured on Wikipedia's featured pictures page, which has some other nice shots on it.

Here's the end of the zoom series at wiki--having zoomed in 60 billion times the original. Remember, it just keeps going.

Help stop the execution of Ronald Chambers

Click here to write a letter to the governor of the state of Texas to help stop the execution of Ronald Chambers, one of six individuals scheduled to be executed in the U.S. this month.

Does it make sense to execute a 50 year old man who has been in prison for 30 years for a crime he committed when he was 20 years old? The idea of this being a deterrent is ludicrous.
He had just become a father, and now he is a grandfather. Do we honestly so completely and totally reject any hope of redemption or reconciliation? This man could conceivably live for another 20 or 30 years, and in that time he could do and say things that could have profound positive impact in the lives of his family and in the lives of many others. Execution seems to me to be the antithesis of hope, and thus the antithesis of christianity.
Your thoughts?

The anti should campaign

What would it look like if everyone stopped using the words "should", "ought", "behoove", and related words which express the same thing? Megan and I undertook this experiment early in our marriage, and have both found it enormously helpful. For me, most of all, my tendency is to use these words on myself, and I call it "shoulding on myself". Since my self concept is so overwhelmingly negative anyway, I find that just cutting out these words actually helps me move in the direction of experiencing the accepting of myself. As my sponsor says "It is what it is", or "I am what I am". But other people regularly attempt to use these words on me as well. If I didn't have this little campaign going, I think I would miss it a lot of times, and just instantly internalize what they were saying. Instead, it has become my habit to instantly reject it. So for instance I was talking to my very lovely and lovable Nana this last week, and telling her how down I have been, and how I have such a depressive personality. She said, quite naturally,

Nana: "You need to work on that and get over it"

Benjamin: (in my head) "Aha, she said 'need to'. That's a 'should' word! Danger! Danger! Danger!."

Benjamin: (out loud). "Well, actually, Nana, I've kind of come to accept myself as being this way. I think God just made some people with melancholic personalities, and I'm okay with that. It actually feels relatively comfortable being me."

(did you catch that whole "in my head" versus "out loud" thing? Pretty kewl, huh? 10 years ago I was utterly incapable of such amazing sophistication (hehe). Here's to crawling and creeping toward maturity.)

My lovely Nana was rather accepting of this take on things, and just said something like "Oh. Ok."

Benjamin published at Porpoise Diving Life

The January '07 edition of the Porpoise Diving Life E-zine is out, and it contains an article by me! Yippee. You can read it here.

Grey areas

In case you can't read the labels, the left one says "Satan's Kingdom", and the right one says "God's Kingdom". I relate a vignette relating to this diagram on CatE, here. The questions are:

1. How far does Satan's Kingdom extend?
2. How far does God's Kingdom extend?
3. Are either of the first 2 questions relevant, and/or more important than the other question?
4. Does this diagram represent reality in any way? Why or why not?

american military death toll in iraq passes 3000

Replacements needed has been producing these posters every week for quite a while now. I think they speak very eloquently. The more significant number, perhaps, is the 22,000 american military wounded. Or ... how about this question: How is the death or injury of 25,000 americans in iraq related to the US$28 Billion in revenues and US$1.6 Billion in profits in 2006 of the biggest arms producer in our nation, Honeywell International, which is ranked 71 in the country by Fortune 500? Hmmmm... Do Bush and co. own any honeywell stock?

We've spent $400 billion to figure out what the French could have told us for free--you can't fix centuries old civil wars in 4 years, no matter *how* much money or military power you can bring to bear. period.

On a similar note: How would you like to have this guy's nightmares, or responsibility? This is Dan Murphy, CEO of Alliant Tech Systems, the biggest small arms ammunition manufacturer in the country. ATK had sales of US$3.2 Billion in '06. As producer of ~90% of the small arms ammunition for both the US military *and* the "sports enthusiast and law enforcement" markets, they produced the ammunition which killed around 27,000 individuals who died through the use of firearms in 2004. That's based on approximately 30,000 firearms related deaths in 2004 reported by the CDC. They also no doubt produced the ammunition which killed some significant percentage of the 57,000 dead iraqi military mentioned in the poster above, whom you will probably never hear talked about on mainstream american media. You can check out their annual report here (You'll need high speed connection--it's big)

about Saddam

The Vatican joined Human Rights Watch today in calling for clemency for Saddam, saying that executing him would simply be responding to crime with more crime. I suspect there's not really much chance this will have any effect, and that come jan 31 2007, saddam hussein will be dead.

As I understand it, average evangelicals believe he will experience "eternal conscious torment" in hell. George Macdonald would argue that he'll eventually repent and get out of hell. I haven't read Brian Mclaren's latest book, but it is my understanding that he would argue against the eternal consious torment position.

I wonder what the average Muslim belief is as to Saddam's experiences after death?

I honestly wonder how *anyone* can ascribe to the eternal consious suffering position and at the same time claim to experience communion and love for and with and from god.

thoughts?

Quote of the week

This from Byron's post Fearless Service III. For me, it captured perfectly and instantly what it feels like to be human

We are all dying, giving birth astride a grave.

Blog Tag

I've been tagged in a game of blog tag by Helen Middenhall of Love is the Most Excellent Way (although I know her from conversation at the edge, which is closed for a week for the holidays). The way the game works is if you get tagged, you have to post five things about yourself that people probably don't know. Here's my five.

1. I used to spend time playing the guitar and singing, and even wrote some songs quite a while ago.

2. I was the acting associate manager of a domino's pizza store for a little over a year back in the 90's, and we were held up at gun point and all bound with duct tape. Fortunately, no one got hurt. They never found the bad guys or the money.

3. I have a 4.0 grade point average over my most recent 60 credits (I can hardly believe it). I'm expanding my undergrad degree from bachelor of arts in psychology to bachelor of arts in psychology and international studies.

4. My favorite type of schoolwork is mathematics--I find it beautiful and orderly and it just works really well for me.

5. I've travelled to 25 countries in my (still relatively short) lifetime.

(I'm tagging Jim at Doable Evangelism, Jonathan at The Nautical File, Paul at People Against Fundamentalism, Banzai at The Banzai Chronicles, R at Dragons Fly and Monkey Tea, Megan at Bag End and Justin at Ramblin' Again)