Back Tomorrow

I didn't get any of my in-process entries finished for tonight.

Sola Two: Sola Gratia

This is part two in a series considering “the five solas,” the key cries of the Reformation. You can find part one here. Please feel free to discuss, disagree and posit your own thoughts in the comments.

The solas are a series of stepping-stones. Imagine I want to get to point B from point A and a rushing stream runs between those points. Now, I could try to swim across, but the current would likely move me down the river so I'd land at point C rather than B. Let's say point A is the new Christian who wants to come to understand the key doctrines of the Church so as to be able to reach B, a point where one is giving everything that is God's to God (Matt. 22.21). The first stepping-stone to get across the stream is to understand where we ought to get our idea of God from, and we answer that Sola Scriptura, from Scripture alone.

So, we read the Bible and we are told that one must be “born anew” (John 3.3), that is, we must be “saved.” So then, how are we saved? Certainly, this is a key stepping-stone to recognizing what God is really doing, a stepping stone upon which everything afterward hinges. The answer is Sola Gratia, by grace alone.

“And if by grace, then it is no longer of works; otherwise grace is no longer grace. But if it is of works, it is no longer grace; otherwise work is no longer work. “

—Romans 11.6 (WEB)

This is a difficult idea. We do not tend to like it. Salvation by grace alone. Here's the bad news: I cannot save myself! Instead, I must receive the grace provided only by Christ in order to be saved.

We don't like to be told that we cannot do something ourselves, and the idea of being told that one is only going to succeed because an authority is going to extend an exception to us would generally make us feel upset. “I'll just do it myself, thankyouverymuch.” Sure, I do not mind if a few violations are overlooked for me, but the idea that I'm dependent on someone doing me a favor to proceed at all is uncomfortable.

“For the wages of sin is death, but the free gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord.”

—Romans 6.23 (WEB)

Now that is exactly what I did not want to hear! But since we are told that no one is sinless (Romans 3.10) and the cost for my sin — even just one teeny tiny one — is death, suddenly maybe an exception sounds pretty good. I may be proud, but when I am being led to the electric chair, am I really going to refuse a pardon just so that I can say I did not need to depend on anyone's help? Clearly, I will accept it, unless I just have some kind of perverted death wish.

And so it is with Grace. “Amazing Grace, how sweet the sound that saved a wretch like me!”

Next time in my sola series, I shall consider the third motto, which is essential to understanding Sola Gratia: Sola Fide.

Taxes and Economic Profits

Well, everyone knows it is tax time right now. Normally that doesn't bother me much, but this year it was a bit depressing since it forced me to revisit how my business performed last year. Due to some “capital investments” and changes in the services Universal Networks provides, the business was barely in the black in the services segment. Ad revenues helped out, but if I was speaking as an economist, I'd probably say I had an “economic loss” last year (i.e. when I add in non-monetary costs, such as my time, on top of the monetary ones). Note that I am not complaining, I'm not hurting from this, just observing how things went and thinking about how to improve this year.

The past few years have been pretty good, even during the dot-bomb times, so having one bad year isn't all that bad in the big scheme of things. Essentially what I need to do is use this revisiting of the year 2004 to remind me of where I need to focus my energy, where I need to improve and what parts of the business really aren't worth messing around with.

On the other hand, it reinforces my general feeling that unless I want to spend my days cleaning off adware and similar maintenance tasks, my eventual transition out of the computer services industry is probably a good idea from a business standpoint as well as from a personal one.

Mostly Here

Pastor: Are you still alive?

Me: I think so…

That was at 9:00 tonight after a very intense day… the Great Big Move™ of the church office across the street. I got all of the computers running, although our new WAP isn't working quite as well as I hoped. I need to work on that (the high powered antenna I bought seems to decrease the signal).

Anyway, more tomorrow. I'm glad yesterday turned out to be such a nice day to get me prepared for today…

An Unplanned Day

Life comes in moments,
As the bold lightening flashes.
Enjoy the moment,
Savoring the occurrence,
Refreshing as post storm air.

Some days just work out much better than expected. Today was one of those days. I was walking out of my Shakespeare class, planning on doing some network (as in ethernet) planning, when I happened to run into my cousin. She's a high school senior who is planning to come to LU for a BA in Education next year, and today was the day she was suppose to register. I knew that; in fact, I helped her plan her schedule last week, but I did not expect to run into her. She wanted a tour of the campus, which I provided; what a week to do so — the various flowering trees were all in bloom and a warm breeze flowed through the air. Talking a stroll on a spring day like today just makes one feel better. I'm now wishing I had worn my “good” sandals (standard Birkenstocks' with the cork footbed) instead of my less supportive ones (rubber, washable Birkenstocks) today, for my legs are a bit sore, but it was nice.

Then this afternoon, I had an appointment to which the professor I was meeting was about a half hour late. No, this was not a bad thing. A friend of mine works in an office just down the hall, and happened to come in while I was waiting for my appointment. It turned out to be a nice opportunity to chat with her for awhile, something that would not have happened if the meeting had occurred on schedule. She's the type of person that always has something interesting to say, and today was no exception.

At the end of the day, I have not accomplished what I was hoping to (I was hoping to get some web design work done for clients and I needed to return some phone calls), but it worked out as a sort of “accidental vacation day,” which was just what I needed. It wasn't what I planned, but I couldn't have planned it to work out as well as it did had I aimed to.

A Difference of Opinion: Foundations of Religion

Part One in a Three Part Series on C.S. Lewis and Sigmund Freud

To an extent, Schemer may be correct in reference as to why a lot of people come to believe or disbelieve. Few of us are willing to give up the time necessary to do a thorough rational analysis of whether we should believe, instead choosing to simply build up arguments after the fact to support where we stand. However, the cases of C.S. Lewis and Sigmund Freud are not typical cases at all. In these two men we see two of the most brilliant minds of the late nineteenth through the middle twentieth centuries who did more than simply follow an emotional appeal to their positions, and once there, they did not continue to sit idly on a sandy foundation, but continued to build a strong, systematic defense of their respective beliefs. Both grew up in religious homes and both became skeptics in their youth, but one returned to faith and one did not.

The two books under consideration, Mere Christianity and Future of an Illusion, demonstrate the opposite sides that these two men fall on, but with a distinct difference worth mentioning early on. C.S. Lewis builds up to his deeper chapters by first demonstrating the reasonableness of believing in the divine origin of Biblical teachings in a manner that can be judged by the individual, but Freud’s polar theory on the origins of religious teachings does not have a method to verify itself by. As Lewis notes early on, most people will agree that Jesus was a “great moral teacher” (52). The rub is that a man who was just a good teacher would never say the things Jesus said; to the contrary, Lewis asserts, a mere human saying what Jesus did would not be a “great moral teacher” at all. As Lewis put it, that is “patronizing nonsense.”

We must therefore choose one of the following options concerning such a person: that person was an evil liar, an insane person or was exactly what he claimed to be. Now, of course, the case could be made that the early Christians distorted what Jesus said to fit their needs, but it seems that the claim of the deity of Christ was so ingrained in the early church, it is hard to imagine that Jesus did not accept that attribute being applied to him.

Given this, we receive an easy way of testing Jesus’ claims. We should read the words of Christ and, it is likely we will find that these do not sound like the words of a liar or a lunatic. If he was not a liar or a madman, then we have but one choice: we must accept the claims that Jesus gave. Now, someone could argue that Jesus was sincerely mistaken about this issue, but that takes us back to the state of being mad; I might be misguided on my understanding of a certain mathematical formula without being mad, but if I claim to be the God of all the universe and am not, I must be either mad or lying – I cannot just be sincerely mistaken. Lewis says the choice is obvious to him; Jesus was not a liar or a madman (53). If we can say this, then we have established that the origin of Christianity is God Himself.

Freud on the other hand begins by demonstrating his theories on the origin of religion, namely, of the primal horde (53-54) and wish fulfillment projection (21). In this text, Freud concentrates primarily on the latter, but he asserts they are not different theories, but rather two parts of the same puzzle (28-29). Therefore, since Freud sees the projection ideas explained in Future of an Illusion as simply adding to his earlier statements, it makes sense to consider the problem of the “son-father relationship” (primal horde) theory of the origin of religion before looking at Freud’s primary theory in the book. There is one problem with the primal horde theory that causes a significant impairment to what he assumes based on it: the historicity of this theory’s occurrence is generally rejected today by experts such as anthropologists (“Freud’s theory”). That is, it would appear that Freud did not properly examine the evidence before positing the theory (Hick 34, Scupin 30) and therefore his own suggestion appears to fit his definition of an illusion (Freud 40). Moreover, as Lewis notes, when wandering away from the area of curing neuroses, as he does when discussing theories of the origin of religions, Freud is merely speaking “as an amateur” (89). The issue of evidence presents a serious difficulty in boosting this theory, needless to say. This is not to say that Freud should be written off wholesale. If we substitute his primal horde for Emile Durkheim’s view on the origin of religion, we end up with a bit more stable theory, and in fact, Freud spends a significant amount of time discussing religion in terms of keeping people civilized (Freud 17), something that sounds a lot like what Durkheim had to say. Freud also posits religion as a calming agent for keeping the status quo of society, rather like Marx (62).

However, the theory of religion as an abstraction of society has serious flaws too. Many religions, especially the ones that command the majority of adherents today, have at sometime, past or present, been destructive to the status quo of society rather than helpful in keeping it unified (Hick 32). Christianity may have helped unify the Roman Empire, but before that, it was a schismatic movement that was divisive to the ideas of the Jews and the Romans. Likewise, we can look throughout history and find cases concerning Islam, Buddhism and so on, wherein the religious sentiment did anything but aid in the status quo of society. This is a theory on shaky ground, to say the least.

Now, so far, it has been demonstrated that Freud’s attempt to get his foot in the door of arguing against religion can be quickly rebuffed, but C.S. Lewis’s argument, while not able to convince everyone who reads it, is much harder to dismiss wholesale as a flawed argument. Generally people do like to think that we can tell the difference between the writings of a “great teacher” and a madman, and C.S. Lewis puts the reader to the challenge of doing just that. In other words, the foundation of Freud’s assumptions, the “horde” and “civilization” theories, both seem to be less easily testable than what Lewis uses to base his rationale for arguing for Christ.

In the next part of this three part series, I shall consider the implications and counter-arguments concerning Freud's second theory on the origin of religion and consider the issue of moral law and where it originates.

Brain on Vacation

My brain is presently on vacation.

Today, I visited the local CompUSA, which is about a 30 minute drive away, to pick up some networking equipment for the Great Big Office Move™ at Church. In the process of moving, I'm installing a new wi-fi access point (an Airport Extreme), an extra switch (Linksys 5-Port), a WDS range extender (Airport Express) and, after all of this, I am suppose to get all eight computers back on the network. Did I mention all of this is suppose to happen on Saturday?

Anyway… back to my story. Two days ago I set a copy of the church tax ID certificate on my desk so that I'd remember to bring it to the store. Did I remember to do this? Yes, I did remember it… once I was in the CompUSA parking lot. The story worked out well enough, they still had a copy on file in the commercial sales department from the last time I was there, but it could have been a major hassle otherwise.

My brain has also been MIA the last two nights while trying to write papers. Last night, I tried to write up a 2.5-3 page paper on the problems inherent in Theravada Buddhism (i.e. most people aren't satisfied with a religion without a Supreme Being). This was an easy topic that I've written on a lot before, but it took me an hour to get two and a half measly pages written.

Tonight, I tried to wrap up a paper comparing some key points about Sigmund Freud and C.S. Lewis. Another topic of interest to me, and one I've spent a lot of time on lately. It has been a really big struggle. I've spent the better part of ten hours on it just to get together a rough draft nine pages in length (3000 words). That's terrible for me.

I'm not sure if its daylight savings time (likely) or something else, but whatever the case, I do hope my brain comes home soon. Or at least sends a post card. If you see a brain sneaking through your neck of the woods, let me know, it might be mine.

How's your week going?

Voting

Municipal elections are always disappointing; it never seems like there is enough to vote on to make it worth one's while to come in. Take today: there was some construction at the church where my precinct is, so I had to walk a ways to the entrance, then wait while they looked up my record and so on. It probably took five minutes from the car until I received my ballot. I then went to the Vote-o-Matic and was pushing my ballot into the ballot box less than one minute later. sigh

At least I got one of those nice “I Voted” stickers out of the deal.

Idiotic

My Case Again Ad Blocking for Ethical Reasons
Written February 13-16, 2005

Just to elaborate a bit more, since you seem interested and I am glad to provide the view from the other side. My main point I like to make is that I too am paying for bandwidth (quite a bit, actually!). If you block the ads, you are taking everything and giving nothing in return. I make nothing off the fact that you pay your ISP money — just like an musician makes nothing off the fact that you pay your ISP to download their music off of a P2P site. A better analogy, perhaps: if you pay money to go into a theme park and then take some small craft vendor's product without paying for it, will that vendor be comforted by the fact that you had to pay to get in and take their product? Probably not, because, just like you, they pay to be in the park with the hope that you will buy their product.

Anyway, while the end user is usually on an unmetered plan, my bandwidth is metered and will cost more if I use up my quota. To the tune of $1-$2 per GB, which can add up fast. If you allow the ads to come through, I take some form of “payment” and you take some “product” and we both come out (hopefully) ahead. I'm all for advocating blocking popups, since they invade your screen rather than staying within the page you requested, but if I trusted government more, I'd push to make general ad blocking illegal, since that is only a little site vendor placing a way of recooping costs on the page you requested.

I've considered setting things up so that my sites would refuse to work if ads were blocked with the option of paying with cash as an alternative. I've never gotten that far, though. I think it would serve its purpose though: few people would want to pay money to read my site, they'd probably much rather ignore my ad banners. Just think, if everyone blocked ads, every site would either have to be non-commercial or subscriber only, which would severely limit what we could find on the Internet without a giant bank account.

As an aside, when people complain about ads, I often encourage the use of Lynx or elinks. Since a text based browser uses less of my bandwidth when visiting my site, less harm is done than if people come and load all the “pretty stuff” but block the only thing that generates the profit that keeps the site going.

Well, anyway, I don't mean to keep going on about this. As you can tell, I've thought a lot about this over the years (I've been serving ads on my sites since 1997).

[…]

Now, to confirm what Ed said, the hit count is totally disconnected from revenue (although a high hit count might make you look interesting to advertisers that figure you must have something good to say). There are two types of major ads — CPM and CPC. CPM is cost per impressions, where I am paid for each ad viewed as in downloaded. Most ad blockers block the ad from being downloaded, therefore I am not paid anything. Then there are the CPC's, which have come to be the advert of choice, and of which I only get paid if you click on the ad. Therefore, in both cases, the ad blocking tools do deprive the site owner of revenue (unlike the similar situation on TV).

The other thing to remember is that since click throughs can be measured quite easily (in fact, every one is counted even on CPM ads), advertisers will notice if a site doesn't provide good click through results, even if an ad blocker was kind enough to download the ad prior to removing it from the page.

[…]

Personally, what I would like to see is a consortium of major ad networks get together and offer a “network wide” service that spans all of their networks. In this system, I could pay a certain dollar amount to avoid seeing so many ads on any network site.

Most people, I believe, given proper education of how revenue is generated from ads (i.e. that ad blocking does indeed stop revenue) and this choice to pay to opt out, would choose to keep viewing ads. I would. But some people hate ads enough that it might be worth $20 extra month not to see any ads.

Personally, I don't mind ads on a page that much. I do block popups/popunders and refuse to carry them on my sites as a matter of principle. I see those as invading the user's computer, even if they don't install adware. But, I don't mind having ads pop up on the sites I use otherwise.

[…]

Back in the day, the internet was free and text based. It can still be free and text based with a browser such as lynx. Lynx never loads the ads, but as I noted, it also doesn't load any other graphics, keeping my bandwidth bill down.

Sonnet IX

The days grow long and trees do anxious bloom,
Warm breezes flow and conjure up the flowers.
A flower small does wish for warmth to loom,
Returning coldness would his life so sour.
Summer's prophet does gain my attention rapt,
My mind, day dreaming, does ask of future,
But Sping's foretelling doth end up all capped,
Past pending warmth the Spring would telling err.
And so I settle in to watch the birds,
Whose long southern sojourn deprived us so,
And write patient, anticipating words,
As time, ne'er ceasing, does slowly still flow.
    Let the Spring come and happy joy bring here,
    To all those who for this did lend a ear.