Month: November 2018

Attach the Stone of Triumph

On By Christopher LansdownIn Atheism, Uncategorized2 Comments

This post is going to be about the false freedom which is won by rejecting God. However, the title is a reference to an early Simpsons episode, so in case you’ve never seen the Stonecutters episode (one of the best), here’s the relevant part:

Human beings have a nature which we did not make, for the very simple reason that we did not make ourselves. This is, properly understood, the source of all of our power to do anything, but since we are finite beings it does come with limitations. And those limitations irk people, sometimes.

The right response to being irked by this is self-examination. If a man is depressed because he cannot fly like a bird, he should figure out what’s wrong with him that he does not appreciate walking like a man. Alas, another response is to try to become a bird. It’s not possible, but every project starts with step 1 so it’s possible to ignore that step 3 is impossible while one is working on step 1.

In this case the first step is to get rid of God from whom our limits come because He’s from whom our nature comes. The problem is that, once God is gone, so is meaning. If there is no God we have no constraints and so anything is possible. The only problem is that nothing is worth the effort.

Suppose you attain enough power to smash planets. Well, so what?

You will of course find those who will say, “then life will have the meaning that I give it!” I tend to assume that they don’t mean this because they’ve clearly never thought about it for even five seconds together. Apart from this just being (by definition) make-believe, if life has the meaning you give it, why not give it a more convenient meaning?

Sure, it’s possible to give life the leaning that after years of work to attain the power, smashing planets makes you great. But as long as you’re the one making up the meaning why not give sitting on the couch drinking beer and watching re-runs of Friends the meaning that you’re great? They’re equally valid.

In short, there’s a reason why, at first, the meaning which atheists choose to give life is always suspiciously close to the meaning which God gives it. But atheism is a degenerative disease. Sooner or later the atheist will notice that this is a lot of work. And it won’t be long before he notices that it’s completely unnecessary work. And at some point he’s going to notice that no work is really necessary, at least if he’s at all wealthy.

He’ll have succeeded in getting rid of the stone of shame. The problem is that he’s exchanged it for the stone of triumph.

And only God is powerful enough to lift a rock that big.

Power Sets and God

On By Christopher LansdownIn Atheism1 Comment

A friend recently posed this question:

Anyone willing to help me answer a Fedora Tipper on this? I’m not an expert on Set Theory.


“Consider the set of all of the things God knows; we’ll call it A. The power set, P(A), of A, the set of all subsets of A, has a higher cardinality than A [this is a theorem of set theory]. Now, consider the set B = {“x is a subset of A”|x∈P(A)}. There exists an obvious [bi]jection between the set of propositions in B and the elements of P(A). Thus, P(A) and B have the same cardinality. So, there exists a set B of truths containing infinitely more truths than the set of all truths known by God”


They assert over and over that this is a “proof against God”.

This argument deserves more to be laughed at than answered. That said,, here is an answer.

The powerset of a set is merely the set of all subsets of that set. So for the set {a} the powerset is {{}, {a}}, i.e. the set containing both the empty set and the set containing a. (Set theory is really hard to say. This helps it to sound more impressive than it is.) You can also write this as {∅, {a}}. It means the same thing.

Now, to see why the Fedora Tipper’s argument is ridiculous (apart from his defining B to be identical to the powerset of A and pretending he did something), let’s consider an example of a finite set of knowledge. Finite sets are easier to work with than infinite sets and the principles are the same. We’ll keep it simple and use a set containing 3 pieces of knowledge: {“11 > 4”, “Beavers mate for life”, “pie is round” }. Now let’s look at its powerset. For clarity (hah!) I’ll offset it:

{∅, {“11 > 4”}, {“Beavers mate for life”}, {“pie is round” }, {“11 > 4”, “Beavers mate for life”} , {“Beavers mate for life”, “pie is round”}, {“11 > 4”, “pie is round”}, {“11 > 4”, “Beavers mate for life”, “pie is round” }}

Now, obviously there are more elements in the powerset than in the original set. For finite sets, it’s actually 2^n elements, in this case 2^3=8. And it’s true that for infinite sets you get a different cardinality than the original set (“a higher order of infinity”). But this is completely irrelevant to the question of knowledge. Let’s go back to our example.

Suppose that we said that some man, call him George, knows the set above mentioned, i.e. he knows that 11 > 4, beavers mate for life, and pie is round. It would be ridiculous to say:

“Ha ha! But George doesn’t know that 11 > 4 and that beavers mate for life! He only knows that 11 > 4, beavers mate for life, and pie is round! The ignorant fool!”

Which is what the Fedora Tipper above is trying to say. This disproves God about as much as it proves that George knows nothing about beavers. I.e. not in the slightest.

The moral of the story is that powersets are mathematical constructs, not real things. They don’t change reality. If you take a balding man and consider the powerset of his remaining hair, he doesn’t gain a full head of hair. There’s no more hair in the powerset of his hair then in the set of his hair; there are just a lot more ways to consider the little hair he has left.

Or, to invoke an old trope, you can’t use powersets to make a rock so big that God can’t lift it.

Who’s Dreaming of a White Christmas?

On By Christopher LansdownIn UncategorizedLeave a comment

For some reason (a while ago) I decided to look up the history of the song, “I’m Dreaming of a White Christmas”. I think it was after hearing the song and thinking of this XKCD comic:

There’s more to say about this which is not merely about cultural time period or generation, but that’s for another blog post.

White Christmas is itself a nostalgic song which is, I think, part of what connected the two in my mind. It was first published in 1941 (and made famous in the 1942 movie Holiday Inn) but was written a year or two earlier by Irving Berlin. One story is that it was while he was in a hotel in California. This is supported by the (typically omitted) first verse:

The sun is shining, the grass is green,
The orange and palm trees sway.
There’s never been such a day
in Beverly Hills, L.A.
But it’s December the twenty-fourth,—
And I am longing to be up North—

Which brings up the question of Berlin’s history. It turns out that he was a Russian Jew, born Израиль Моисеевич Бейлин (Roughly, Israel Moiseyevich Beileen) in Imperial Russia in 1888 (or 1889—records weren’t as good those days). His family emigrated to the United States in 1893, when his name was changed to Israel Baline. (In 1906, when his first song was published, his name was misspelled as “I. Berlin,” and apparently it stuck. Presumably at some point he changed his name to Irving to avoid anti-Jewish prejudice, but I don’t know.)

Berlin’s family stayed in New York City for years before Irving became a success and started visiting other parts of the country. Thus his youthful memories would be of treetops that “glisten in the snow” in strong contrast to the California treetops which look the same in winter as in every other month.

Which is, of course, quite reasonable—I’ve heard that southern California’s lack of seasons takes some getting used to. The funny thing is that this doesn’t really translate out of the context of someone from New York who’s moved to California (or other southern parts of the US). I was one such person who didn’t have this experience; I grew up in the north-east of the United States in a similar sort of climate to where Berlin did, though around seventy years later. I’d heard the song growing up but didn’t know its context, so I adapted it to the context I knew.

Specifically, to the context where it was snowy on Christmas only one out of every 5 (or so) years. Hence in anticipation of Christmas (when Christmas songs are generally played in the United States) one could dream of a white Christmas like the ones one remembers from years gone by. But this is a very different thing because even a snowless Christmas in the north-eastern United States is still cold and largely dark (happening as it does at most about 5 days after the shortest day of the year). It’s still at a time of year that feels very different to spring-through-fall and still a counter-point to the bleakness of the season.

Thus for me it’s a sort of grass-is-greener wishing for things to be optimal instead of highly different. (If you come from a part of the world that never gets much snow, see my post Snow Is Peaceful for why a white Christmas is nice.) This is a picky sort of nostalgia of which the Boomers are often accused, though in this case unfairly since the song was written much closer to the beginning of the war rather than to the end of it, and by someone who was born in the previous century.

Even saying that this song was part of the Boomer’s childhood, as the XKCD comic does, is not very accurate. Leaving aside the reasonableness of the demarcations of the “baby boom” and using the most expansive definition of it, the Baby Boomers were born from 1945-1964. Assuming that people start forming life-long memories at about the age of 7 this means that White Christmas had been playing for at least ten years before any baby boomers would have remembered it from their childhoods. If the average boomer was born in 1954, the song had been popular for about 19 years before they would remember it from their childhood. And it should be noted that it isn’t seven-year-olds who put songs onto the charts. White Christmas is not a centuries-old tradition but it was clearly an earlier tradition than the childhood of the baby boomers.

(Incidentally, I can’t begin to imagine what this song sounds like to someone who grew up in the southern hemisphere of the world since for them Christmas takes place in the summer and you’d have to live on a mountain or in Antarctica to have snow on Christmas. In fact, in most places in the southern hemisphere I suspect a white Christmas would be an epic disaster since it would mean the death of most of their food crops and probably a good chunk of their livestock.)

Writing a Novel is Hard

On By Christopher LansdownIn Writing1 Comment

The title above is pretty obvious and, to be blunt, a little bit of venting. But I’d like to look at a few of the reasons why with an eye to considering what to do about them.

(To give context, I’m currently about 18,000 words behind in my NaNoWriMo novel and probably not going to finish on time. Which isn’t a big deal since once I finish the next step is just starting with the editing. And the first pass of editing often involves a fair bit of rewriting, so it’s not like I was going to be not-writing once November was over anyway.)

One of the pieces of advice often given to people doing NaNoWriMo is to turn off your inner editor. For some people this is undoubtedly good advice but, personally, I don’t find this useful at all. I write much better when I like what I’ve written so far and feel that it’s what I want to build the rest of my novel on. It’s a little bit slower of a process than a mad-dash approach, but it generally works for me (I won 7 nanowrimos in years gone by).

What I do have trouble with and need to work on, however, is turning off external editors. I’m very good at imaging what other people will say; this is useful for writing characters, of course, but also for things like debate preparation because I can debate people without requiring them to be present. Of course, I don’t make a habit of debating people so this is of limited utility. The bigger problem is that I can imagine all of the criticism I’ll get from others and it’s contradictory criticism because the people involved have different tastes.

Which is fine in real life—only the bible is for everyone, everything else is for the people who like it. But this plays havoc with my ability to write because I can far too easily hear how much someone or other will dislike what I’m writing.  And to be clear, I don’t mean that it’s bad. I meant that people have different tastes. People who want action will dislike too much conversation. People who like conversation will dislike action.  It’s inherently impossible to please people whose tastes don’t overlap. So it’s important to forget about the people for whom the book is not.

Unfortunately, I find this hard. I’m not sure what the solution is.  Part of what works is concentration; concentrating on the story helps me to tune these other voices out at least somewhat.

Another big problem I have is one of time management. I need to have the novel in my head in order to write it, and unfortunately my day job (programmer) means that I have to forget about my novel so I can fit the code into my head instead. Worse, I’ve got a few side-projects going on so they’re taking up space in my memory too. I’ve got no idea what the solution to this is. Multi-tasking is inefficient but I’m also not going to put my other projects down. Possibly the right approach is to decrease the number of time slices but increase the size of the time slices.  Instead of trying to write some each day, perhaps I’d be better off dedicating five hours to writing every 3 days. It’s definitely something to think about.

Which of course is at odds with another of my problem—young children need a lot of time. I’m not sure how to manage this one because my children are simply a higher priority than my novel is.

Another difficulty to throw into this mix is that everything goes better when one gets enough sleep.

One thing I think very important as a coping strategy is to realize that not everything works out and that’s OK. One of the things which has to counterbalance ambition is tolerance for failure. You can accomplish far more if you’re willing to fail sometimes, but you have to be realistic about that and not worry about the failure.

In my case it took something like 3 years for The Dean Died Over Winter Break to finally get published. The fact that I should be able to get Wedding Flowers Will Do for a Funeral out faster is an abstract fact; circumstances will dictate what will actually happen, and that comes under the providential direction of God’s governance of the world. It’s my job to try, it’s God’s job to decide whether or not I succeed.

Also, on a practical level, I need to continue moving away from web-based stuff like google docs. Google docs is only good for tiny projects and, frankly, it’s not even good at that. I’ve switched over to libreoffice and using a script that uses inotifywait to push changes into a git repository. This has been an improvement. I think I need to continue it by moving the character trait document and the what-really-happened document into text files and just keep them in lightweight editors. There’s an advantage there because the web browser has other things which aren’t good for productivity in it, too.

No real conclusion to this, just some thoughts as I’m thinking through them. I hope it helps someone, or at least was mildly interesting. God bless you.

Dr. Syn, The Scarecrow of Romney Marsh

On By Christopher LansdownIn Uncategorized, WritingLeave a comment

In an odd series of events I happened to stumble across this book, which is a kindle reprint of a book now in the public domain. It’s the first in a series by Russell Thorndike about the character Dr. Syn, The Scarecrow of Romney Marsh.

The first book was published in 1915, the last in 1944. They’re set in the mid 1700s and the hero of the story is quite a brigand. First a parson, then a man on a quest for revenge, then a pirate, then again on a quest for revenge, then again a pirate, then finally again a parson and in that role also the leader of a band of smugglers who rides a giant black stallion and wears a phosphorescent scarecrow outfit to lead them.

For some reason this reminds me of the Legend of Sleepy Hollow. I’m not sure why, except for the obvious element of being set in the 1700s and there being a ghostly horse-rider. Anyway, there’s something about the outlandishness of the tale which I find interesting. I think part of it is that it feels like it should have been written about 100 years before it actually was. It’s contemporaneous with the beginnings of Science Fiction, for example. A good example of how one can write any story in any age, I suppose.

The foreward by the author’s sister (who was a famous actress) I found particularly interesting:

DEAR RUSSEL,
Do you remember a long jounrey to Spartanburg, Georgia—I, rigid with fear and thrill, open-mouthed—you, unfolding horror upon horror—the day “Dr. Syn” was born?
Do you remember how on arriving at the hotel, some kindly fate playing up to us so nobly, arranged for a perfectly good murder to take place on the front steps right under our windows—and how the corpse lay there all night, and we being too frightened to go to bed so sitting up most of the night, I making countless pots of tea, while you with bulging eyes gloated over the double-dyings and doings of that splendid criminal, “Dr Syn”?
It was a far cry from Georgia to the Romney Marsh, but I think it was some longing for hom and the Kent lands that made you develop his story with that background instead of the more obviously thrilling country in which we were travelling.
What a pal the old parson-smuggler became to us! I know for me he joined the merry band—the Men of Kent—the Dickens Men of Kent who made the white roads famous.
I envy those who are to make his acuqaintance for the first time. I remember with thrill the feeling i had when you first showed him to me. Here was another of those creature sof the family of Daniel Quilp (Our first great love, wasn’t he?) Creatures that are above the ordinary standards of right and wrong—tho, even if they murdered their favorite aunt would have been forgiven—they being so much large rand more labable than aforesaid Aunt.
Was Syn a play or a novel first? I forget—He walks in Romance and it matter snot al all to me if I meet him again in prose or verse or in actuality—poking his head out of a dyke in our dear beloved Marsh. I shall say Good Luck to him in wahtever form he may appear—the souls like us who love a thrill will be jollier for the meeting.
SYBIL

Deflatheism 3 Year Anniversary Special

On By Christopher LansdownIn Atheism, YouTube ChannelLeave a comment

To celebrate his third year on YouTube Deflatheism had a hangout and invited other YouTube Christians to join him. In this 8 hour extravaganza I made it there around the two hour mark, I think, and stayed for close to two hours.

Unlike for the 2.5k sub special, Rob and I didn’t team up on a Logicked parody. If you didn’t see that parody, here it is:

Anyway, in the 3 year special, there was a part I especially liked where Fabulous Agnostic suggested we each name our favorite YouTube atheist, and I named Deconverted Man. This was met with a bit of incredulity, but of the YouTube atheists I’ve dealt with (excluding Arad of Zarathustra’s Serpent who’s head-and-shoulders above the rest, since he’s doing different stuff), Deconverted Man seems to be the most sincere. As I said when I was explaining myself in the hangout: while no one is going to mistake him for a genius he at least seems to mean the things he says. Or at least tries to, to the best of his ability. That really doesn’t seem to be the case for the other YouTube atheists I’ve dealt with.

One of the more common expressions of this was summed up by Eve Keneinan when she described it as, “I don’t know the answer to this true/false question but true is wrong”. In theory they merely lack a belief but never, ever take seriously that it’s possible that God exists and Christianity is true. According to them, for all they know they are causing people huge damage by leading them away from the truth. Yet they never act like they believe this.

I made a video explaining why I wasn’t going to respond any further to Bionic Dance, and it will generally suffice for all the YouTube atheists I’ve dealt with who aren’t Arad or Deconverted Man.

The Frank Friar on Regrets

On By Christopher LansdownIn Christianity, UncategorizedLeave a comment

In a video which I highly recommend, The Frank Friar talks about regrets:

I really like how he distinguishes a proper resolve to make amends where making amends is possible and an inordinate attachment to the past where action in the present isn’t possible.

Much of life is reducible to: do what you can and trust God for the rest. But it can be very beneficial to see the specifics of that in each circumstance because that sort of fundamental orientation is hard, in this fallen world, to achieve.

Time Isn’t a Thief

On By Christopher LansdownIn Philosophy, Uncategorized2 Comments

Because I was watching a bunch of songs from Patty Gurdy YouTube recommended the song Mad as a Hatter by Larkin Poe. Larkin Poe is a pair of sisters, and Mad as a Hatter is about their grandfather’s mental illness. It’s not a great song, but it’s got catchy elements:

There’s a line in it which really cought my attention, though:

I know what time is
Time is a thief.
It’ll steal into bed
And rob you while you sleep.

Now, I should preface my remarks by saying that I know what’s meant—people’s powers, such as memory, eyesight, etc. tend to diminish with age, though gradually enough that one doesn’t notice, and in older age one is not able to do the things one was able to in one’s youth. And indeed, this is difficult to deal with. That’s not what I’m talking about when I say that time isn’t a thief. It is quite true that those of us who survive to old age will have weaker eyes and slower memories than we did when we were young. These changes can be attenuated, but cannot be prevented.

To quote Master Splinter in the movie Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, death comes for us all.

It’s just that death comes quickly for some and slowly for others.

But time is still not a thief.

The question is one of fundamental orientation, or, if you prefer, the fundamental question of what a human being is.

The idea that time is a thief comes from the idea that there’s a “true” us which we grow into and then eventually lose. It conceives of human beings as self-sufficient beings which merely inhabit the world for a time. Thus the limits which come from being in the world are limits imposed upon the independent creature and frustrate the fullness of its being. The prime of one’s life—when experience and youthful vigor are at their mutual maximum—is thus the time when the human being is least limited by the world.

This is, of course, exactly backwards. It places human beings in the position of being little Gods and makes completely unintelligible why they’re born or die. People don’t bother themselves much with the problems of being born since it’s too convenient, though this is one of the things which a bit of navel gazing would actually help with. They’re very troubled, however, by how growing old and dying makes no sense.

By contrast, if a human being is a creature who did not make himself, every moment of his life is, therefore, a gift. To be born is a gift, to grow stronger and quicker of wit throughout childhood is a gift, and to still be around dispensing wisdom and doing what one can do in old age is a gift. It is true that time gives far more in one kind during a person’s youth and gives those gifts of strength and memory far less during old age. But they are still far more than nothing, which is the right thing to compare them to.

This is where the older wisdom of the idea of the seasons of one’s life comes in. We are given youthful vigor in our youth but not in our old age; it is right, therefore, to make good use of youthful vigor in our youth, and then as we age to turn to making use of the wisdom and knowledge we’re given in our old age. The young and the old complement each other. Wisdom without vigor cannot do anything, while vigor without wisdom cannot do anything worthwhile.

Our modern rejection of the seasons of life and strict separation of people by age has resulted in old people being warehoused until they die while the young are busy wasting their youth. And in both cases people who are not Gods are miserable because real life can’t help but constantly point this out to them. (Which is why Sartre said that hell is other people—encountering other people proves to us that we didn’t create ourselves.)

So while growing old is not easy, time is not a thief. Time is a giver. It just gives us different things at different times.

The alternative is hell.

Quite literally.