So Charleston...

I thought up this blog for the selfish purpose of staying in a very good, very interesting, very well-written, and very one-sided conversation with everyone I know back home...

The problem with the 'back home' concept is unfortunately it really doesn't mean anything to me anymore...

Even though said place feels a little bit like home, and I sometimes say 'back home' in reference to said place, I have to think that it's no more than a rest stop in search of a real home. I've heard that you have to live in one place for at least 2, maybe 3 years before it really starts to be a home for you... A place where you have set down some roots, and have friends, and are working towards a career and not just a job... and most importantly you have found some really nice person wth an open invitation to bring you golfing at the nice private course in the area...

...the course you know must be really good because you don't see cash registers anywhere... the one where if your phone goes off you will lose the phone...

Charleston has been home to Danelle for long enough that it actually does feel like home for her. And makes it that much harder for her to leave than it is for me...

And why? Well here are the cool things about Charleston that she'll be missing...

There are five major church steeples downtown and no building in the whole of downtown can be built taller than these steeples.

You cannot cut down any tree that's older than 100 years. So even thought Charleston roads do not support the population causing way too much traffic, there's no way they will cut down the trees to make double lanes.

The houses along 'the battery' are THE MOST PAINTED row of houses in the world.... it's a whole lot of really big houses, and yay cool and all... but c'mon what a whole lot of paint.

Laws in Charleston are so out of date... Any game at all involving cards or dice are illegal in South Carolina... this includes monopoly, uno, and yahtzee... You can't buy anything retail Sunday morning before 12, because, silly rabbit, Sundays are for church... It's illegal to have sex any other position than Missionary...

And Folley beach, a great surf spot on the East Coast, which is nothing like the West Coast, but is still a great time...

Thousands of amazing golf courses around here, or Myrtle Beach (50 minutes away), none of which I have golfed unfortunately...

Lucky number Seven is there's a history of flight museum that's set up on an air craft carrier with it's very own submarine and remake vietnam army base on the side...

Ugh! Drivers here... as Boston, as New York, do not let you in... always cut you off... pull out behind you from the merge lane onto the highway and then speeding up essetially cutting you off from merging yourself and forcing you to either stop or go off the road... and speed up if you signal to change lanes on instinct to prevent you from changing. The city worst city planning I've ever seen includes dangerous roads, suicide lanes, ultra-fast speed limits, and very very short merging lanes ending in cement barriers. And alongside the highway every day are countless untowed broken-down cars that nobody does anything about... Equals a ridiculous amount of car accidents every day in this city and the worst drivers in America... according to me... I heard the city actually makes money on car accidents... I wonder...

And biggest of all is warmth... warmth is great... warmth is awesome and I'm all about it... Only problem is that anywhere with warmth means hockey doesn't even make sports highlights down here, there's no outdoor ice, and hockey players probably aren't that cool in highschool.

Soul Survivor

And so to offset a book like 'The God Delusion' you read a book like 'Soul Survivor'. And the most standout part about this book is how every one of the so-called heroes of the faith are such broken people... Not the least bit perfect... the all have a dark-side... maybe two. And I was reminded of how the fallen part of man makes the forgiving aspect of God so powerful for Christianity. Coming in close second to this part of the book was a little nagging feeling of how watered-down faith looks like by the end of this book. I have very little patience for anyone that closes their eyes and shuts down their thoughts in order to play pretend about how think things should be... BUT the good thing about religious fundamentalists is at least they stand for something... I'm not really sure what I'm standing for by the end of 'Soul Survivor'. Not as a criticism of the book, but because of the situations Yancey presents that have no easy answer...

The God Delusion # 2

Lest I'm labelled with presenting my own Straw Man Dawkins in return...

...Dawkins states claims on the bad ways religion affects society like the crusades or 9/11... And if you say the Crusades were the Christians fault for attacking in 1101 AD or the Muslims fault for attacking 300 years EARLIER in the process almost conquering Spain it doesn't matter because BOTH groups were religious...

...And Dawkins absolutely destroys the ideas of creationism and intelligent design in favor of evolution... anyone that has read 'The Language of God' by Collins may have to finally give some credence to it. CS Lewis did 100 years earlier...

...and finally there are some interesting ideas at the end wondering why humans are predisposed to believing in God and religion...

1) About how children are born predisposed to believe in the duality of body and spirit from birth... (Useful, he states, only in the past when physical survival depended on this sense of dualism but to be done away with in modern society... OR is that possibly a sign that a God wants us to be able to commune with Him if we're set up as humans to believe in some sort of duality...?)..

2) About how belief as an important tool for survival so they take serious the command to steer clear of swimming with alligators or playing with fire... (Used instead to believe in the whole set of belief systems of their parents which, as is established over and over in this book, can be absolutely absurd)...

...BUT he doesn't even answer any of the criticisms that run outside of his specialty in science... Example of this would be when someone argued that without God there is no absolute judge of right and wrong and thus a group of people could decide anything could be right or wrong so long as it worked for them. Ie. Hitler is the same as Gandhi. His answer was that Kant had these moral imperatives that, if followed, would assure that immoral actions could not be done... ummm... I studied Kant in university and the problem to the theory is that people have no reason to follow these moral imperatives than their own selfish ambition...

... another example would be his theory on how 'love thy neighbor' OR 'love your enemies' really meant only as far as fellow Jews... meaning he really hasn't read the New Testament...

...or when he says how atheism has nothing but positive effects for society... lest we forget that he justifies in this very book the grounds for abortion all the way up till birth...

... A couple great ideas in the midst of a whole lot of frustrating ones.

Richard Dawkins 'The God Delusion'

I just read Richard Dawkins book "The God Delusion". It's an incredibly frustrating book to get through because every couple pages there is a jab at some straw man religious person or idea. The conclusion of each very apparent stupidity is that it thus proves that God doesn't exist... And the rule is if you say it enough times it makes it true...

...AND he isn't even an athiest. The position of atheism, as anyone smart enough to actually think about it knows (including Dawkins), is a logical contradiction. The only way to say that God doesn't exist is if you know everything about everything... but if you did know everything about everything then You would be God because that is a necessary quality of what it is to be God...

...But even this doesn't stop him talking about atheism the rest of the book or encouraging others towards that path...?

...And connundrum...

...His main theory is something that he can't prove, but IF he could prove would mean that God doesn't exist...

...That theory being an offspring of the anthropic principle... the anthropic principle for the theory of evolution says that life can be possible on a privileged planet with privileged conditions given enough chance and time. Privileged in this case meaning that of all the planets in the Universe (billions possibly) the earth is one of those with the right balance of heat and other elements to have the possibility to form life. The amount of time that life had a chance to be formed in the 'primordial soup' gives enough possibility that on one of these privileged planets, in one of these lightning strikes, that life was created... and the proof that this theory is true is that we exist now...

...Impeccable logic...

...Something along the lines of the infinite improbability drive in the "Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy", where if you can figure out the chance of some improbable event happening in the universe it would necessarily happen...?

...To carry this anthropic principle to Dawkins theory he says that this same anthropic principle of probability could be used with this galaxy if there were an incredibly large amount of galaxies and the one we're in just happened to be the one that supported life... These numbers of galaxies could possibly be created in black holes... but we don't know yet... and it's this unproven theory that Dawkins is basing his atheism on... unproven!?

...And even with all of these theories it still doesn't even begin to answer what originally brought all of these things into existence... Not saying God, but if we don't know then how can we make a judgment call on it...

...And, oh ya, God isn't an answer for all of this because according to Dawkins the simple answer is always the best answer and a God that could design everything in the universe would be too complicated to be plausible in comparison with said unproven theory...? And that's it... case closed...?

...I'm reminded of a prof I had in university that quoted some other famous dude when he said that 'for every complex problem there is usually a simple, neat and elegant solution, and that solution is usually wrong.'...

...almost the whole rest of the book is dedicated to discrediting and making fun of the old testament, dark age thinkers, and religious fundamentalists... aimed at what I believe to be impressionable minds just leaving their fundamentalist backgrounds... and in hopes that the ridiculousness of the stories persuades these impressionables to utterly reject God from the beginning and never ever look back to see if maybe there was even one real thing in all that superstition...

...In conclusion I think the book is more about Dawkins' bias towards God and his intent to get people to reject the church and reject God based on the straw man religion and the straw man God that he outlines in the book than it is about actually discovering truth about anything. He's obiously a smart guy so why doesn't he do what we're taught in University and use the strongest arguments situated in their best light for both sides... not the weakest ones for God and the strongest ones for science? The End.

'So Close'

2 hours was the difference between kicking myself and free tickets to the Masters at Augusta National... it hurts to think about it right now.. but a consolation prize is that Danelle and I are in the books for a free day pass to the Masters next year as long as we make it there...if Danelle's family, the warm weather, beaches, and an excuse to wear crokies, pennyloafers, and short shorts while holding a koozie weren't enough...

Charleston

We're now back in South Carolina and living out of everyone's spare bedroom. Few things worse than living out of spare bedrooms, tiptoeing around, not knowing house courtesy on what to borrow or use, silently getting on everyones nerves, and every once in a while unknowingly step over the line. I've come to the conclusion that it usually takes between 3 to 8 weeks living with someone before you've really worked through the small things that go into being someones roommate...

My Second Biggest Regret...

... is not going to Rome. And pouring salt on the wound was the guy I sat next to all the way from Amsterdam to Philledelphia that had just been telling me just how wonderful and amazing the place is.

Ask any European and they will tell you the top 3 must see cities in Europe are Paris, Rome, and Barcelona. All so different from each other. To really simplify things... Paris has culture, Rome has history, and Barcelona has beaches... being a history major you can bet where I'm drawn.

So these are just a few of the totally amazing things that I've learned about Rome in my life...

When the city was rich, the men were poor... in the founding of Rome the great men gave themselves up to the city, and the city prospered.

When the men were rich, the city was poor... near Rome's downfall the leading men gave no more thought to their city or it's people and cared only for ammassing wealth and power for themselves. Shame the Americans election process favors people with money...

Examples:

1) Lucius Velerius... was Consul of Rome, yet so poor at his death that his funeral had to be paid for from a collection of the people.
2) Quintus Cincinnatus... Owned four acres of land and plowed them with his own hand, was asked of the people to be dictator (even greater than the consul), yet after his victory on the field of battle went back to plowing his fields.
3) Fabricius... offered 1/4th the kingdom by Pyrrhus king of the Epirots and yet preferred the poverty of being a private individual in Rome because he would not forsake his city.

And talk about putting the city ahead of your own interests... they were willing to kill and die for it... when we talk about zeal for our countries we fool ourselves:

1) Torquatus... put to death his own son because he disobeyed his command as general and rushed in to do battle with an enemy against his father's command. The son slew the other man yet was still put to death.
2) Mucius... put his own hand into the fire to show his commitment to killing his enemy. He had snuck into Porsenna's palace in order to kill him (the leader of the nation they were at war against). Unfortunately he slew the wrong man mistaking him for the king. He was caught, and before he could be completely taken down he put his hand into the fire saying that in Rome there were a great many men with the same kind of zeal as he... This display awed the king and very quickly afterwards he made peace with Rome.
3) Curtius... drove his steed off a cliff as the oracles commanded the Romans throw their greatest possession into the gulf in order to gain the gods favor... since their greatest possession was their military might in men, and Curtius was their best soldier, he obeyed the Oracles and spurred himself off into the gulf.
4) The Deceii... a group who dedicated themselves to death in hopes that the Roman army would succeed on the field of battle.
5) Regulus... he had a chance for freedom in Rome as his Carthagian captors brought him there to barter for his release. Instead Regulus argued against paying for his freedom, and instead killing his captors and taking his freedom in Rome, he kept his oath to his captors and returned to Carthage. The Carthagians executed him by standing him upright inside a box lined with spikes all one inch from his body in every direction... he could not lie down or get any rest or he would be pricked by a spike, and thus he died from lack of sleep.