A good friend once asked me why I thought Christian schools are useless. I wrote back a manifesto. Since it was fairly comprehensive, and since I’m short of time at the moment, I thought I’d post it: Read the rest of this entry »

I like to torture babies for fun.

Very few people deny the existence of any ethical truth. Were the statement above true, you’d be rightly outraged. We know that there exists good and bad.

Have you ever considered the question ‘what makes something good?”. If you accept the existence of ethical truth, you must account for its existence. How do you explain it?

Traditionally, there are three possibilities:

1. morality is objective, absolute, and independent of anyone’s opinion – a moral law distinguishing good and evil is just ‘there’ in the universe;
2. morality is subjective – the moral law exists because of the say-so of a moral lawgiver. This might be you as an individual, a certain culture, or an authority such as God.
3. there is no morality.

What do you think? One of the above? Another one? Why?
Over the next few days I’ll unpack some of these, including the difficult question of ‘is it good because God says so, or does God say so because it’s good?’

Daisy blogs her poetry. Read some here. We wrote a poem together a while back, taking turns to write a few lines. It was like a dance, or maybe a battle.

Broken, left ashamed, bare,
open for the world to see.
To judge,
to try to understand,
to love, to help.
Reaching for a moment
pure enough to have meaning.
Untainted from the world.
Thankful, clean, Awake.

The cocoon ripped open.
That ray of light,
blinding, peeling our eyes open,
making us face the truth,
maybe too soon.
Painfully beautiful.
Now restored, now healed,
it’s a joy to be
broken, left ashamed, bare.

For the scientist who has lived by his faith in the power of reason, the story ends like a bad dream. He has scaled the mountains of ignorance; he is about to conquer the highest peak; as he pulls himself over the final rock, he is greeted by a band of theologians who have been sitting there for centuries.

Astrophysicist Robert Jastrow

Food for thought #3

“The things I thought were so important – because of the effort I put into them – have turned out to be of small value. And the things I never thought about, the things I was never able to either to measure or to expect, were the things that mattered.”

Thomas Merton

Out of all that we do, what of these will matter in the end? How do we work it out?

Do the things we consider important line up with what God considers important?

Experiences, thoughts, comments? Leave a comment below.

Excuses For Being Late #249: time does not exist.

I find this sort of stuff fascinating! Do you?

“Time, in this view, is not something that exists apart from the universe. There is no clock ticking outside the cosmos.”

People read differently on the internet. We tend to scan paragraphs, searching for key words. We often decide quickly how much time the page is worth – or move on.

Life is short – it’s probably a good habit on the web, and website writers have become good at catering to this habit. But I have found myself scanning off-line, in newspapers, books, textbooks, even exams!

We can’t scan without losing meaning. At best, comprehension drops as we skip over minor details (statistics, facts, lists of examples like this one), but at worst we can miss the entire meaning completely.

Consider this example. Read the following as you would normally on the net:

Liverpool Street is the finest point of departure in the whole of Southern England because wherever you go from it, whether to Southend or, ultimately, to Outer Mongolia, it cannot fail to be an improvement.

Does the writer like Liverpool Street? Unless you are a more careful reader than me, you read the first few words and skimmed the rest, especially the details in the middle, and so decided that the writer is speaking favourably. But, in fact, they do not “because wherever you go from it … it cannot fail to be an improvement.” By scanning, the content can be completely misunderstood!

My challenge is this: By all means, scan a page to decide if it is worth reading, but if you you consider it worthwhile then read it properly – especially if it is offline.

One of the ‘mantras’ that I try to live my life by is the motto Don’t Waste Your Life.

“I’ve wasted it! I’ve wasted it!”
I never, ever want to come to the end of my life and say that.

My post yesterday about how to (not) succeed at school was a wake-up call. Recently, and on this blog in particular, I’ve been wasting my life. I’m going to try spending less time on stuff that doesn’t matter.

3 ways to waste a life:

• Wasting it in the little things – frittering away time minute by minute. Watching just one more youtube video or pressing the snooze button one more time. I don’t think there is anything bad about these things, but there is the potential and temptation to let them soak up your life. (How to stop)
• Wasting it in the big things – A career, an organisation, a sporting team, a family, friends, and relationships. Have any of these amounted to anything? Did you suck the most juice out of every opportunity at school? When you are with friends, do you spend more time discussing lotto results than important stuff?
• Wasting Jesus – Of all three, this will be the one you disagree with.
  If Jesus was who he said he was, the other two ways are of no importance compared to the tragedy of ignoring him. It is worth it to check him out. (Contact me if you don’t know where to start)
  (Disagree? Leave a comment.)

I don’t claim to be perfect in any of these. I find the temptation to waste life in the little things the hardest to resist and the easiest to forget. Procrastinating is dumb – do the stupid assignment and then get out and enjoy life. (Preaching to myself on this one.)

What do you think? Do you ever catch yourself wasting your life? Disagree with me completely? Leave a comment.

Food for thought #2

(Stolen from savagechickens.com)

Surely there’s more?
savage chickens takes on the meaning of life in 8 easy steps. Sleep, coffee, drive, work, computer, traffic, tv, bed. Repeat steps 1-7 until death occurs.

Food for thought #1:

Waiting For Godot, by Samuel Beckett, is a very thought provoking play. I’ve been reading it for English. There’s stacks of challenging stuff in there, but I won’t unpack it all.

 I just wanted to share one of my favourite bits. (Is it cool to have a favourite part of an English text?)

V: Say you are, even if it’s not true.
E: What am I to say?
V: Say, I am happy.
E: I am happy.
V: So am I.
E: So am I.
V: We are happy.
E: We are happy. [Silence.] What do we do now, now that we are happy?

I’ve been thinking about it for a while now. What do you make of it?

We’ve had some lovely weather this week. Yesterday felt like late Spring (hooray!). Days are getting longer, the air warmer, and the sun brighter.

And it has occured to me that my mood is dependent on the weather. Not completely, but substantially. When the sun is shining, the sky is blue, the colours vivid – I feel great. When it is overcast, dark, or dull, I feel flat.
Has anyone else experienced this? Do you have a different ‘mood trigger’?

I’ve been trying to work out if it is a good thing or a bad thing. I am sure it is good to take pleasure in the wonders of God’s creation, but I’m not so sure that I should feel so low when the sky is grey. If a cloud impacts my joy, how much will real suffering impact me?

I wonder if it is like many of life’s pleasures:

delighting in a taste, enjoying the company of a friend, reveling in the ecstasy of sport, immersing yourself in a movie, discovering new places and travelling the world…

Enjoy them and be thankful for them, but remember that they are transient and will pass away, so don’t pin your joy on the things of this world, but on the eternal.

I’m still thinking about it all, and I’d love to hear your thoughts – leave a comment.

[Photo: the crazy australian (also the studious australian) making the most of the weather! I often ask if I can work outside, I love it!]

The last two posts (this one and this one) gave an overview of some weird stuff that science says about the world. But who cares?

Who cares if time slows down when you speed up? Why should you care if you are made of particles or waves (or both)? Why spend time trying to understand it?

This doesn’t just apply to science, but anything you care to think about. Why do it?

1. It’s interesting – this may be just me, but hopefully by the end of this list you will agree.
2. It makes you more interesting – the more you know, the broader your range of interests, and the broader the range of areas you are familiar with, the more you are able to talk about.
3. It’s fun – (Don’t throw anything too heavy at me!) Being challenged, being confused, struggling to understand things…. is fun!
4. Its good to know stuff – (and have a broad vocabulary with synonyms for ’stuff’) No-one has ever run out of room in their brain. Use it!
5. New types of thinking create neural connections in the brain – erm… yeah, something like that. See here and here
6. It is humbling – It is way too easy to think you’re all that, to think you know a lot. Wrestling with something as hard as relativity prevents you from thinking you know it all. (If you understand it, you are the third person! I’d appreciate it if you could explain it to me )Two more – and they are my favourites:
7. 
   It gives insight into the nature and character of God!
   Why did God do it this way? I don’t know, but it’s good to think about.
   Even better is this: the universe is ordered. We can discover it’s laws. Thats cool. But we can’t understand them – thats even cooler! If even his creation is difficult to wrap your head around, what then of God?
   God is a God who is beyond our comprehension: what we know, we know in part and imperfectly. And it shouldn’t surprise us that this is the case – why wouldn’t the Creator be more complex than the created.
8. It’s useful for when you want to out-nerd your friends.
   ‘Nuff said, really.

[Aside: this can be applied to stuff you do at school, college, university, and even at work]

Have I sparked your curiosity? Have I missed anything you love about nutting stuff out? Do you disagree? Leave a comment.
Update: Don’t miss Vinchuco’s excellent additions in the comments.