Dreams

I'm fascinated by dreams. I do love hearing about other people’s dreams, because it seems we all dream in ways that are peculiar to the individual, but I'm also fascinated with the process of analyzing my own dreams, particularly when I can remember them well. This post is going to be a random analysis of a dream I had years ago that I still remember very well in part because I documented it in detail after I woke up. I most definitely dream in color Reading the description of the dream actually won’t be necessary for this post, I think, as it's all pretty abstract anyway, but it will probably make it make a bit more sense.

So, one of the things about my dreams I find interesting is backstory. The dream described was only about ten minutes long, I'd say, but there is definitely more than ten minutes of understanding packed into it, and it's interesting how it can be both detailed and patchy at the same time. I'm in a room that's my bedroom, and while the room has no analogue in my waking life, I know the room intimately, not just the furniture, but what's concealed behind the furniture, what can be found outside its two doors, one leading into the rest of the house and one leading into the back yard. I know I live here with my “family” yet somehow, I'm unclear on what the word “family" entails. I know the personality, mannerisms, and recent actions of my three roommates (even the one who never makes an appearance in the dream), but I don't know any of their names. It's interesting that in the dream, there is acceptance of the bizarre fact (in what I sometimes call “dream logic" as in something that makes perfect sense in the context of the dream somehow) that one can travel from the United States to China by simply crawling over the fence in the backyard, and my roommate has access to military-grade weaponry. All of this is simply accepted as established in the course of the first minute of the dream.

The glass shards, while taking up just a small part of the story, are very unsettling. They are cutting my hands, mouth, and feet, and there is actually a lot of blood and pain involved, although I just take it in stride (literally, at the end of this portion) and continue the Sisyphean task of cleaning them up as they never seem to get better. I feel like I hear a lot of people talking about nightmares like this, where there is something unpleasant that they need to do, but can't make progress concerning.

When I leave the bedroom, something markedly different happens. I walk into a room, and while I know the room (despite once again the room having no real world analogue) I have no idea what's going on in the room. There are many people who I don't know, and most of the people I do know are there for unknown reasons. There's actually a rather surprising sheer number of people for such a small room; it's not a particlularly large living room, but there's at least 20 people here, along with two very large objects that nobody is standing close to. The almost indescribable mass on the coffee table is also a complete surprise, although given its level of bizarre, perhaps my muted response is a bit of “dream logic” as it's perhaps not unheard of that something like that would appear in the living room. When my mom says it's a “school project”, I immediately understand it's something she made for one of my younger siblings. (I don't have any younger siblings in real life, and while I was unclear as to the complete family structure I have in the dream, having younger siblings is somehow understood.) It's interesting what will and won’t surprise you in dreams.

I guess it's a bit of “dream logic” that I don't question my mother going to get a vacuum cleaner to clean up what is largely a liquid mess, and one that would surely be beyond the capacity of the vacuum, as it covered the whole of the coffee table over a foot in thickness. However, the buffalo carcass, in contrast to the people, is not a surprise to me. Of course I hunted a buffalo for dinner and dragged the whole thing home myself and butchered it in the living room, because I recall doing this, and it's a perfectly normal thing for me to do! Also, of course, after taking meat for dinner for a handful of people (all these people in the living room weren't here for dinner) we're just going to toss the rest in the garbage! Peak “dream logic”!

So then the dream shifts to another surprise, and one that I once again react to in a rather subdued manner given its bizarreness, the thing under the kitchen counter, and what following it reveals. There's this entire ecosystem of plants, animals, and fungi, none of which I have ever seen before (in the dream or out), some of which is bioluminescent enough to allow me to observe it in that small space. And here comes the “dream logic”: it's obviously all about faulty plumbing, right? It's just a leak, and our lack of thoroughly cleaning up after it! But once I get the flashlight, I realize it's more than just a leak, as there is somehow water in a large puddle (or even a lake?) that stetches, via a crack in the wall, well beyond the confines of the kitchen into unknown space past the wall.

So the dream concludes (although it's not much of an ending narrative-wise) with this mystery door. Of course I remember the conversation with the landlord over it from years ago (backstory again) , but now I'm not satisfied with ignoring it anymore. For the sake of what I saw under the kitchen counter, I have to know what is behind it, because I suspect it's more than just a crawlspace. Is it strange in the dream that I can break down a door so easily? How sturdy is this door supposed to be anyway? It's clearly in a state of disrepair, that's clear enough, so maybe it’s not so dreamlike. And then the dream just ends. Not many of my dreams have a satisfying narrative structure, starting out of nowhere (which I understand is common for dreams) following a plot that barely deserves to be called that, and then simply ending. Whatever I saw beyond the door was so shocking and indescribable that I just woke up. A lot of dreams end this way for me. And so does this post.

Thoughts?

For the love of money...

I've always had an uneasy relationship with capitalism. I actually don't understand the love of money at all.

Sometimes I wonder if it was an irregularity of my brain that I was born with or if it was learned at an early age, because I always got the impression that while my father loved me, he loved money more. My parents divorced when I was only two years old, and I would see my father on occasional visits. When I visited, he was always working long hours at his job, bragging about how much money he was making; I would wonder why he didn't cut back on work or even take a vacation while I was around. I vowed that I wouldn't be like him when I grew up.

Anyway, I actually have a hard time understanding money on a deep level. I understand that there are wants and needs in my life that I can acquire with money, but still have a hard time seeing the need for acquisition and saving of money. I have to remind myself when looking for work that I need to consider how much money a job will make in addition to whether the job will be pleasant; in fact, sometimes it's more important, I guess.

I do have a hard time understanding why the needs in particular are not something one acquires whether one has money or not. It seems deeply wrong to me that we withhold food and medical care from people who don't have money, and I tend to distrust people who are okay with this. I'm not okay with it at all.

I wanted to tell a bit of a personal story, though; it's sort of a story about how all of this broke me.

Years ago, I was out of work and searching. I wasn't really worried, because I've always managed to find work, and, of course, I don't worry about money. However, I was married with two kids, and I recognized there was a need. I had good marketable skills; I had a lot of IT experience, and I'd been working for about a decade as a database programmer. I knew there was a good job out there somewhere.

A friend from church told me there was an opening at his company for a database programmer. It was quite a distance away, but he was sure the pay was good, so I went and interviewed. The interview was full of red flags. When I had studied database administration at Oracle years before, I had an instructor who gave us some advice. He said, "If you ever get an interview for a job, and they can't fully articulate what they want, don't take the job. It's going to go poorly, and it's going to be a waste of your time and their money." In the interview, I kept asking for specifics, and they kept giving me vagueness. "Well, we're sort of... We're thinking along the lines of... We know we're going to need a database for part of what we're doing."

I said I'd consider it, and went home. They seemed very interested in me, and kept sending me emails asking if I was interested, and what salary I wanted. So there were two problems: One, I didn't think this was a goid idea, both because of the vagueness, and the commute (it would be about an hour via train). Two, they kept asking me to name a salary, but I had always been told to never be the first one to talk about salary, because they would work down from your number.

So finally, I made a decision. I'd ask for more than I thought they would give me, and when they refused, I'd turn the job down. So I told them I wouldn't do the job for less than $70k. They offered me $73.5k. It was nearly twice what I'd ever made on a job before. I felt like I couldn't turn down the offer, so I agreed.

I showed up for work not knowing why I was there, and I told everyone who was supervising me, and many of my coworkers. Surely someone would tell me what I was there for. The first few days nothing much happened, which wasn't highly irregular. I figured it would take time. I got to know my coworkers, sat in on some meetings, took tours around the buildings. (It was actually an interesting place to work, as they were a contractor that mainly designed amusement park rides, including for Disneyland. There are rides currently at Disneyland that I saw visualized on computer screens before they existed.) I was told someone would get together with me and talk to me about my role in the larger project. Any day now.

And days turned into weeks, and weeks turned into months. I spent a lot of time blogging (late 2008) and going to lunch in restaurants that I could suddenly easily afford. Nobody ever came to tell me why I was there. I idly wrote some code, and looked at databases which were already in use, not really knowing why. Every day was eight hours of "work" with a one-hour break in the middle, and two hours of commute, leaving very little time for my family. I felt like I had become my father.

Finally, one day I came into work, and I couldn't log into the system. I went to IT, but nobody could help me, or even explain what was wrong. I did literally nothing that day. The next day, my boss called me into his office and explained that they didn't need me anymore. They gave me a good chunk of severance pay and kicked me out. The train that would take me back home would arrive at the station around 5:00. So I waited and reflected on the months that I had just wasted of my life.

I had earned a good sum of money doing nothing. Isn't that the dream? Isn't that what you strive for in a capitalistic society? For a time there, wasn't I a success story? It didn't feel that way at all.

I found in the days and months that followed, that this had broken me. If this was success, I wanted no part of it. Like most people, I was afraid of failure, but now, in addition, I was afraid of success. I didn't look for another job. I fell into a deep depression that worsened as the days went by. A year later, my wife had left me, and I was homeless. I eventually went back to live with my mother for a handful of years before I recovered, but I think there's a part of me that will never recover, even though now, years later, I'm back with my family and working full-time. (Although I'm not working with databases anymore, despite feeling back then that it was my calling.)

I don't know if there's a lesson in this, besides to be careful about accepting a job just because it pays well. I still don't like money, although I have to live with it. 1 Timothy 6:10 says, "For the love of money is a root of all kinds of evil." I believe this deeply. I believe that so very much of the evil that is done in the world today is being perpetuated by men who love money more than anything. We live in a system that rewards this pathological greed, and many people look up to the billionaires, despite the fact that they are the cause the problems of our society, and not the immigrants or the LGBTQ community.

Do you love money more than you love people? I think a lot of people do, and it makes me angry and sad and sick all at the same time. It's just pieces of paper.

Mass Extinction Event

It's odd; for the longest time, I always thought the climate was the most important issue in the world. It makes sense, really. If we lose control of the climate, other issues simply do not matter. Human beings create a mass extinction event, likely taking ourselves down with it. Ice caps melt, sea levels rise, ecosystems are destroyed, and weather becomes increasingly chaotic. What could be more important to address?

And then, there was genocide. The whole world is going to hell, but one people on the globe is getting there first. I find that I hardly ever think about the climate anymore, because all I can think about is the suffering of the Palestinians.

My wife says it's ruining my mental health, and there is nothing I can do to stop it, but I can't look away. On October 7th, 2024, my email inbox was flooded with reports from independent journalists about the state of things in Gaza one year in. I couldn't open a single one, because it actually physically hurt at that point to read anymore.

It was my government making this happen. My Congressional representative and Senators voting for another shipment of billions of dollars in weapons, and my President signing off on it. These were all Democrats, who so many of my fellow Americans assured me were the good ones.

“Israel has a right to defend itself!” I was told by many. It seemed to me that helping Israel defend itself should look like shipping Israel a bullet for every member of Hamas, and telling them to aim carefully, not giving them 2,000 pound bombs to drop on hospitals and schools. Yet the President told Netanyahu to stop dropping our bombs on hospitals and schools, and by the way, here are some more bombs; we'll send you more when you run out.

I was raised Jewish, and my family talked often about the atrocities of the Nazis during the Holocaust. It's hard for me to understand how the descendants of the survivors of that horror could be so willing to turn around commit their own genocide. To dehumanize a people from within their own land and force them into ghettos and methodically extinguish their lives? I can't fathom it.

Netanyahu referred to the Palestinians as “Amalekites", the people God told the ancient Israelites to destroy utterly, leaving not a man, woman, or child alive, not even their livestock would be spared. I don't believe God has spoken to Netanyahu; the Palestinians are not the Amalekites, but drawing that parallel should be terrifying to anyone familiar with the book of Samuel. I know many of the people in the United States government who are supplying these weapons are not ignorant of the significance of Netanyahu's metaphor, but they continue to support him.

I still worry about the climate sometimes; it's still an issue, and it's still getting worse. However, we are creating a mass extinction event right now, on the other side of the world, quite intentionally. Our leaders are quite happy with it, it seems. The people of the world watch the death and destruction on our phones and protest, but the people who could stop it have no intention to do so. Many of them think that God is on their side. It's hard to believe in God these days, like it's hard to hold onto hope. Maybe the climate will fail us before the last Palestinian is dead in some sort of ironic justice for our hubris.

I don't have a good way to end this piece, because there doesn't seem to be a good way to end this situation.

The Watch on the Beach

I was having a rather interesting conversation with several friends on Facebook the other day about how some people see God in the world around them. It's a subject that's probably worth a post in itself, but there was a specific aspect of the conversation that got me thinking about the subject of the evolution/creation debate, which I haven't written on in a long time, but I wanted to revisit. I should say upfront that I've come to a point in my life where, while I still believe in God, I'm pretty firmly on the evolution side of the debate, but there are still interesting aspects to the conversation nonetheless.

The thing that came up in the conversation was an argument that I myself have used in the past, and it's a classic creationist parable. Imagine you're walking on the beach. As you walk along, you see something shiny in the sand at your feet. You reach down and pull it out of the sand to find it's a gold watch. Do you say to yourself, "Amazing! The random action of the tides and the sand has fashioned this timekeeping device!"? Of course you don't; you recognize that you're holding an object that has been designed.

So now, the argument turns to the human body and asks, do you realize that even on the cellular level the human body is a far more intricate and amazing piece of machinery than that watch? Cells processing minerals, nutrients, and strands of RNA, joined togather to make organs that serve larger, specialized purposes, all fitted together within your skin to make a large, incredibly complex machine that has the ability to do everything that a human body does. How can we look at this amazingly complex piece of machinery and say this was the result of random chance?

That's the Intelligent Design argument, but we know it's evolution; we have mountains of evidence, including fossils of so many of the intermediate species that evolved from simple single-celled organisms to something fish-like to something reptile-like to something rodent-like to something ape-like to what we are now. We know, minus a few minor details, how we got from simple life forms to homo sapiens, and a designer is actually not necessary for the process. Yet it bothers me still.

Why do we look at the watch and say it must have a designer? It really is so much simpler and easier to construct than a human body. You could take apart a watch, and if you were particularly clever, you could figure out how to put it back together, or even build one from parts you made yourself. Nobody could do that with a human body. Even the collective knowledge of all the scientists in the world today couldn't figure out how to build something like a human being from scratch.

The watch itself is also the product of evolution in a sense. Watches are probably never designed completely different from any watch that came before, but were built as improvements on prior designs. It occurred to me that if clocks had been invented in the southern hemisphere, they would run counterclockwise (although we wouldn't call it that) because the earliest clocks were based design-wise on sundials, a kind of proto-clock. However, that evolution was certainly guided by intelligence, although obviously not by a single supernatural one.

So, this is the thing: a watch is complicated enough that we say it must have had a designer, but does there come a point of complexity where we say something is beyond the scope of a designer? What is the basis--separate from knowing an object's history--for judging whether it had a designer?

Remembering Biden

So, I just thought I'd make a quick summary of my takeaways from the Biden years, since someone asked me.

1. While Trump fumbled on the pandemic response, I do think Biden handled COVID very poorly, particularly in acting like the vaccine meant the end of the pandemic. While the vaccine was helpful (I got one, but never bothered with a booster since I got COVID anyway), the virus had already mutated to the point of being vaccine resistant. This was a known fact by health officials, but the Biden administration gave misleading information. Also under Biden, the CDC lowered the quarantine time from ten days to five days, not based on any science, but based on a request from Delta Airlines' CEO.
2. Leading up to the invasion of Ukraine, Biden was shipping billions of dollars in weapons to Russia's border, and everyone was saying Biden was going to provoke Russia into doing something ugly. Russia invading Ukraine was exactly what Biden wanted: a proxy war to make Russia look bad and exhaust their resources without commitment of American troops. When Ukraine was willing to start peace talks, Biden talked them out of it. Biden wants war in Ukraine, and clearly doesn't care how many Ukrainians and Russians need to die for it. (He apparently also wants one in Taiwan, as we are shipping weapons there, despite the US not even recognizing Taiwan as an independent nation. This would be like China shipping weapons to Hawaii.)
3. Inflation was out of control these last four years. It wasn't a problem with the economy that Biden created, but was rather price gouging by greedy corporations. Yes, Biden didn't cause it, but he also didn't do anything to fight it.
4. The Supreme Court overturned Roe vs. Wade, and while this was due to Trump stacking the Court, Biden didn't do anything whatsoever to respond to the crisis. Democrats could have killed the filibuster and pushed through a law protecting reproductive rights. Biden could have expanded the Court, as was done before in history. NOTHING was done.
5. Biden, who Democrats keep calling "the most pro-union President ever," broke the railroad workers' strike, which was largely about safety. Shortly after this, a train derailed in East Palestine, Ohio, causing one of the worst ecological disasters in history.
6. Israel was attacked by Hamas on October 7th, 2023, and while I do not condone the attack (although as an occupied nation undergoing ethnic cleansing, it was arguably not a war crime), Israel's response has been to murder somewhere in the neighborhood of 200,000 Palestinian civilians. This is absolutely genocide according to the United Nations' definition, and it has been chiefly powered by American weapons. No weapon has gone to Israel that was not approved by Biden.
7. Democrats keep saying the economy is great under Biden, but all I can seem to see is record levels of poverty and homelessness. I don't care how the stock market is while Americans sleep in the street, and the Supreme Court allows making it a crime. We have billions to support killing people in other countries, but can't afford to house our own people.

This is just off the top of my head; there's really so much more. And Kamala Harris said if she was in charge, she would have done nothing different. Is it really a surprise that Americans didn't turn out to vote for her?

Introducing Viktor

I actually saw someone say on Facebook that season three of the Umbrella Academy was ruined by having a transgender character, and that's stewed with me a while. I have some observations to make about this subject, and it doesn't matter if you watch the show or not.

Season three of the Umbrella Academy was definitely its weakest season, but if someone thinks that's because one of the main characters came out of the closet as transgender, they're deluding themself.

The actor who plays Viktor, Elliot Page, himself came out of the closet as a transgender man, I think sometime during season two. This presents a bit of a challenge for the producers of the series. Do you have someone who identifies as a man continue to play a female character? Do you find a new actress to take over the role? I don't think either of those are a very satisfying choice. So, why not make the character transgender? It's a risk, but how did that really play out?

I've seen it done before where an LGBTQ character comes out of the closet on a comedy show (and while Umbrella Academy is a mix of genres, the tone is generally comedic) and the show has to stop the comedy to address the serious issue of coming out. That in itself can be jarring, but Umbrella Academy made what I thought was a very bold choice to not go down that road. Viktor's coming out takes considerably less time than a single episode. He gets a masculine haircut, changes his clothing, and then, as the plot continues to unfold without stopping for his transition, he confronts each member of his family one by one, informing them, "I'm Viktor now."

I think this way of introducing the change in the character simultaneously dials the "woke" factor up to 11, while giving transphobes zero basis to reasonably complain. Why? Because something understated but beautiful happens: everyone...just...accepts him. It's no big deal. They pretty much just say, "Okay," and the plot moves on.

What a beautiful world it would be if every transgender person had a coming out experience that was so unremarkable. Just, "Okay, I believe that you are who you say you are." And that's over.

There is absolutely nothing to complain about this quick and simple transition in the series other than, "Well, I don't want a transgender character in my show." Which really is no reason at all. It's, "My bigotry won't let me enjoy this piece of entertainment. I can accept people who have superhuman powers, but I can't accept this moment that occurs in real life." I truly believe that if Viktor's transition ruined the show for you, that's entirely on you, and not the show.

Season four is looking much better.

Elevators again?!

I had a dream a couple nights ago that my family lived in the Eiffel Tower. Apparently the tower was filled with apartments, and ours was on the second floor. It wasn't clear to me, looking back at it, where the tower was supposed to be, because it didn't look like Paris, nor did it look like Southern California. What I especially remember was the elevator.

The elevator was very large, and round, and it had no controls. Instead of choosing the floor you wanted, the elevator just automatically stopped at every single floor on the way up. This was a very strange elevator.

So this is the random bit of information that I wanted to share: I dream a lot about elevators. I don't know why, but somewhere between a quarter and a third of my dreams involve elevators as a significant element. Riding on strange elevators, elevators that malfunction, and sometimes climbing up buildings through empty elevator shafts. A significant portion of my dreams are weird elevator dreams.

I actually have multiple dreams that take place in this hotel that clearly doesn't exist anywhere in real life. It has two elevators, one of which services the first through third floor, and the other servicing the second through seventh floor. The two elevators are at opposite ends of a very long building. Sometimes I dream I'm a guest, sometimes I work at the hotel, and one time I was a paranormal investigator trying to determine if the hotel was haunted. But always, there are these strange and inconvenient elevators that I have to use, because there are no stairs.

I really have no idea why I dream this way. It's not like there's some significant traumatic elevator story from my childhood, or I have any particular waking fascination with elevators. It's just this thing that I really have no explanation for. There are other recurring themes in my dreams, but this is the one that seems the most random.

Another generation

Recently on Facebook, I saw a post about how Babe Ruth, back in the 1920s, used to play baseball games with players from the Negro Leagues. Even though he was one of the greatest baseball players of all time, when he retired, he never got a job as a manager, because people were afraid he'd integrate major league baseball.

My point? Sometimes the excuse that “they were raised in a different generation” only holds so much water. There were always people who weren't bigots even when bigotry was the norm.

I'm not trying to attack your parents or grandparents here; my mother, who isn't bigoted in any way, has nonetheless said things that were offensive because she simply didn't know better. It's just that it's the 21st century, and it's time for people to know better.

A cup of morning

So, my local grocery store stopped carrying my preferred brand of coffee. I spent a lot of time trying to get a coffee I could feel good about; it's an instant coffee that's organic, fair trade, and good tasting. And then this week it was gone. I looked around at other stores nearby, and none of them carry it.

I of course browsed through the other instant coffees, just to check, but there were no fair trade, organic ones. So I thought to myself, is it time for me to give up coffee? I've come to a point in my life where I'm not caffeine dependent; I could skip coffee in the morning and often do when I'm in a hurry.

But you know what? I like coffee. Sometimes I even drink it black, if it's good enough quality. I like having a moment to myself in the morning when I make myself a cup and just sit and savor it. I feel it makes my morning complete, not because I need it, but just because there's something comforting about having a little morning ritual with things you enjoy.

So, in the end, no big drama; I found a place online that sells my coffee and had some shipped to me. I have to wait longer, and it costs a little more, but I get my coffee. I don't know really why I felt the need to share this moment, but it somehow seemed significant to me.

Do you have anything in your life you don't need, but you don't want to do without it anyway? Sometimes these things are important, aren't they?

(Not that) Ironic

irony noun

1a: the use of words to express something other than and especially the opposite of the literal meaning

b: a usually humorous or sardonic literary style or form characterized by irony

c: an ironic expression or utterance

2a(1): incongruity between the actual result of a sequence of events and the normal or expected result

(2): an event or result marked by such incongruity

b: incongruity between a situation developed in a drama and the accompanying words or actions that is understood by the audience but not by the characters in the play (called also dramatic irony

3: a pretense of ignorance and of willingness to learn from another assumed in order to make the other's false conceptions conspicuous by adroit questioning (called also Socratic irony)

That's Merriam-Webster's definition of "irony". I thought it would be a good place to start this post, as I've had the song "Ironic" by Alanis Morissette stuck in my head this morning. Ever since that song came out, it's bugged me, because I don't feel the things described in the lyrics are particularly ironic. I assume she didn't intend to imply definitions one or three, but in my following analysis, I should accept any meaning. Yes, I'm going to attempt to tear down this song, just to finally get it out of my system.

An old man turned 98
He won the lottery and died the next day

What's supposed to be ironic here? I certainly don't think it's ironic for an elderly person to win the lottery, and it's certainly not ironic for a 98-year-old man to die. So, it must be ironic to die so soon after winning? Maybe, but if you're playing the lottery at 98, you're probably thinking of having something to leave to your family, I would think, and I would assume his children and grandchildren, although saddened by his passing, got to enjoy his winnings. So, not particularly ironic.

It's a black fly in your Chardonnay

Flies get in drinks all the time, and Chardonnay is no exception. Not ironic.

It's a death row pardon two minutes too late

Yes, well the timing is perhaps ironic, but there are unfortunately many prisoners on death row that shouldn't be there (all of them, if you're against capital punishment) that don't get pardons in time.

And isn't it ironic, don't you think?

Not particularly so far.

It's like rain on your wedding day

Well, you certainly don't want rain if your wedding is going to be outdoors, but there's always a risk of that happening. (Funny story: I went to my cousin's wedding in England, which is generally known for poor weather, and it rained on her wedding day, but it didn't rain any of the rest of the two weeks I was there. I'm not sure if that would be considered ironic.)

It's a free ride when you've already paid

I don't know what this is even supposed to mean exactly, like did you buy a non-refundable bus ticket to San Francisco, and then a friend mentioned that they're driving there, and you could come along? Is this ironic? I don't see how.

It's the good advice that you just didn't take

Could be ironic, I suppose, depending on the advice, and what you did contrary to it. Without context, who can tell?

And who would've thought, it figures

Is this her definition of "ironic"? Just something unexpected?

Mr. Play It Safe was afraid to fly
He packed his suitcase and kissed his kids goodbye
He waited his whole damn life to take that flight
And as the plane crashed down, he thought
"Well, isn't this nice?"

Once again, there's a lot going on here, so it's not clear to me what's supposed to be ironic. Certainly people don't expect planes to crash, because mostly, they don't, but plane crashes happen all the time. Furthermore, the fact that fear of flying is so common suggests that there are people who are afraid to fly on a lot of those crashes. It's probably also not uncommon for someone involved in a crash to be a first-time flier. Now, it's possible that Mr. P.I.S. is specifically taking this flight to get over his fear of flying, and the lyrics may subtly suggest that scenario, but why pack a suitcase if you're just flying to prove a point? Maybe I'm reading to much into that particular lyric, and not enough into the rest, which I suppose would be ironic.

The chorus repeats, and bridge:

Well, life has a funny way of sneaking up on you
When you think everything's okay and everything's going right
And life has a funny way of helping you out
When you think everything's gone wrong and everything blows up
In your face

See, I think this is Alanis Morissette's definition of "ironic": when things go wrong. That simple, and wrong.

A traffic jam when you're already late

If you're already late, why does the traffic jam even matter?

A no-smoking sign on your cigarette break

Um, you just need to find a better spot for your smoke.

It's like ten thousand spoons when all you need is a knife

That's a lot of spoons, but not a lot of irony.

It's meeting the man of my dreams
And then meeting his beautiful wife

Yeah, a lot of men are married, sorry.

Chorus again and outro:

And, yeah, life has a funny way of sneaking up on you
Life has a funny, funny way of helping you out
Helping you out

I suppose she's using the phrase "helping you out" ironically here. But that's also the irony of a song called "Ironic" that is largely devoid of irony.

Does it ever not matter?

Two things happened in the last 24 hours that share a common theme in my mind, and it made me think.

This morning, one of my coworkers joked that he was using a blue cutting board to cut beef. There's a color-coded system with the cutting boards, see: red is for beef and pork, blue is for seafood, yellow is for poultry, white is for dairy, and green is for fruits and vegetables. This is the joke, though: this particular coworker as far as I know is the only cook who is still following the system; he was actually cutting salmon. If he's the only one following the system, is the system really even meaningful?

Last night, my wife and I were watching the movie Yesterday. If you don't know it, it's a movie in which a struggling musician gets hit by a bus, and when he wakes up, he discovers he's somehow in a world where the Beatles never existed, but he can remember all their music. So he starts performing Beatles music, and it catapults him to stardom. This is the subtle thing about it: while he is enjoying fame and fortune, you can see that he's tortured because he knows he's not really a brilliant musician, but rather a plagiarist. But is it wrong to plagiarize music that never existed and nobody will ever know that it's not yours? (We only finished about ⅔ of the movie, and there are hints that some sort of reckoning may be coming, but whether or not, I think the question stands.

So the thing I'm pondering is whether a moral or immoral act retains its moral value when the context for its morality is removed. As the title of this post suggests, is there ever a time when morality doesn't matter? And I'm not talking about situational ethics, which I've written about before; those are a matter of one moral issue being overridden by a more pressing moral issue. Is it possible there are times when something that should be a moral choice ceases to be because it's simply divorced of sufficient context to make it matter any more? I feel like using the right cutting board is something one should do regardless of the fact the last person to use said cutting board chopped up raw chicken on it. I feel like plagiarism is always wrong, even if the source of your plagiarism has no chance of being discovered (a potentially real issue in the age of AI). But am I wrong? What do you think?

The Problem

So after writing my last post here dealing with the problem of evil and God, and writing They shall be burnt with fire on my other blog, I had an extensive email exchange with Steve Wells about how God seems to him to be quite evil as portrayed in the Bible, and yet predictably I, as a Christian, manage to see God differently. Then this morning, something was said that hit me profoundly. In the midst of a rather large email, I said to Wells,

I respect your opinion on the Bible; it's not unreasonable. I respect the views of Muslims, Jews, Hindus, Buddhists, etc. Is it really so impossible in your mind that there exist rational and moral people who believe in these holy scriptures? People manage to see things differently from each other, and that's okay.

I pressed him for an answer to this question, and this morning he came back with the following email I quote in its entirety:

I'm not sure there's much more to say, Brucker.

Donald Trump could shoot someone in the middle of 5th Avenue, and his followers would still believe in him.

The Bible could say that you should stone to death your entire family if they believe differently than you, and you would still believe in it. (Which, of course, it does in Dt 13:6-10, and you do.)

As for your last comments and questions, no I don't believe that "Hebrew slavery was intended to be a system of helping out the poor." Or that Moses wrote Deuteronomy forty years after writing Exodus. (There's no evidence that Moses ever existed, but if he did, he didn't write either book. They were written by different authors at different times and the text was changed and edited over several centuries.)

You ask if I think it's possible for rational and moral people to believe in the Bible. My answer to that is a qualified yes. Many people who are rational and moral in their daily lives and beliefs believe in the Bible. But their reason and morals are suspended when they look at the Bible. Since they believe the Bible is both true and good, they can't question its truth or morals - because they believe the Bible is both true and good.

They are like people who believe in Trump. They've already decided that he is good and truthful. They can be good and rational about everything else, except for when it comes to him. It is the same for Bible believers.

The tl;dr version of this email is, "Belief in God is like belief in Trump; they're both horrible, but if you've already decided they're great, maybe nothing will convince you otherwise."

This shook me. I have a hard time understanding why there are so many Christians who continue to support President Trump when he's obviously (to nearly everyone who isn't a Trump supporter) a horrible person.* However, what if many atheists feel the same exact way about people who love the God of the Bible, and what if they're right?

There's actually some real soundness to this argument. The God of the Bible never denounces slavery. The God of the Bible demands capital punishment for the victims of rape. The God of the Bible instructed the Israelites to commit genocide several times (a timely issue for 2024!). There's more, so much more that can be said, and it's not just the Old Testament, either; the God of the Bible killed Ananias and Sapphira for lying! It's actually not hard for a person to make the case that the God of the Bible is a terrible being!

It's something that on some level every person who believes in the goodness of God needs to reconcile, even if they don't believe in the Bible. How can you believe that God is good when (fill in the blank)? And there are so many things that can fill in the blank! As I've blogged so many times, this is an issue philosophers wrestle with, but we also have to deal with on a basic level in tangible reality.

I haven't mentioned it either in my blogs or in emails to Wells, but I suffer from chronic pain. It comes and goes in varying degrees from day to day, but on several occasions it has been so intense that I have contemplated suicide, not out of depression, but as a painkiller! No painkiller can touch it, though, because it's something neurological. I don't understand why God would allow me to have this condition. It's not the result of any sin that I've committed. Do I quote 2Corinthians 12:6-9 again as I did in the comments of my last post? Is that really a good answer? Maybe, but it can sound like a cop-out. Isn't Paul just making excuses for God's bad behavior?

I received Wells's email this morning, as I said, but it was actually specifically as I sat in my church's auditorium waiting for the Sunday service to begin. Here I was, about to do the church thing, and Wells hits me right in the faith! And what did church bring to me? Well, there was an announcement that the church was starting a support group for people with chronic pain. And then the sermon, which delivered the message that (1) sometimes life is confusing, but (2) God is always in control. Maybe it's odd, given all that I was contemplating about God, but I found this message to be very comforting.

I talked with my wife about the email and the sermon, and found that she was one of the people in the camp that I'm sure I've talked about before, the ones who say, "It's God's house, so it's God's rules." This viewpoint implies that God by definition of being the creator of the universe is not beholden to our measurement of morality. It may be true, but I don't personally find it satisfying. If God subjects humans to his rules of morality, it seems that they should at least be consistent. (How do you reconcile "Thou shalt not kill" with genocide? Yes, I know I tried to address this issue when I covered the book of Joshua, but how many atheists found that argument convincing or reasonable?)

If you can convince yourself that genocide is ever justified, maybe you can convince yourself of anything? But what if the argument is logically sound nonetheless? Maybe logic and morality aren't as compatible as I like to think? These are big questions without easy answers. The Bible teaches that God is perfect, but it also teaches that God prefers to work out his perfect will through the actions of imperfect people. Modern-day Israelis are largely convinced that their genocide of the Palestinians is completely justified. I believe they are wrong. Yet the genocide continues, at the hand of God's "chosen people". My government under President Biden is complicit in the genocide, and my omnipotent God is not stepping in to stop it. Why do I protest the one and continue to accept the other?

I'm not presenting an argument here as I often do; I'm presenting moral conflict. I do still believe that God is good, but I admit it isn't always easy to explain why. Am I a model of good faith, or am I a model of moral failure? I think sometimes that this conundrum is very like the conundrum of believing that God exists at all: there is some compelling evidence on either side, but no real proof that one can cling to. At least, I haven't seen it. Is the Bible a fit moral guide when it tells me I can sell my daughters into slavery, but I'm appalled by the idea? Steve Wells would tell me that alone is proof enough, I'm sure; but I'm still not convinced. It's not my belief that every part of the Bible is meant to be all things for all people for all time. So what do I believe the Bible is? It's a collection of books that tells a story about imperfect people and their imperfect relationships with God. It's a story that is mostly real history, but it functions like one of Jesus's parables; it doesn't hand us morality and wisdom on a neat little plate, but makes us think about it. It's simple for some people, while being far from simple for others, and I'm definitely in the latter camp in the end.

I don't pretend to have the Answer-with-a-capital-A, but see myself as occasionally having an answer-with-a-little-a, and from there, I work out my own salvation with fear and trembling (Philippians 2:12).



*I always have to note here whenever I denounce Trump that I'm no fan of President Biden, either. I feel they are both racist rapists who are pushing our country toward fascism; Biden's just fascism with a smiling face on it.

The Problem of Evil and God

So... I came across a real conundrum in my other blog; see Behold, this evil is of the LORD (Isaiah 31) and the comments thereon.

I have touched many times on the Problem of Evil in this blog, but it deserves a revisit due to the issues brought up in that post and the KJV. While more modern translations of the Bible take advantage of the nuance of the Hebrew word mostly translated "evil" in the KJV to translate it into words like "calamity" or "misfortune" or some other less charged word, the Hebrew word "raʿ" is the word used in Genesis chapters two and three in the phrase "tree of the knowledge of good and evil,"which seems unequivocally about evil, and there are many verses in the Bible that have God being the creator of "raʿ". Now nuanced translation of this word is not necessarily wrong, but it's still quite suggestive. To me it suggests that for the Jew and the Christian, there is a need to solve this conundrum:

A) God is good.
B) God is all-powerful.
C) God is all-knowing.
D) Evil and suffering exist, and...
E) Some evil and suffering is created by God.

It's much more challenging to formulate a convincing theodicy with statement (E) in the mix, don't you agree? Yet based on the Biblical evidence, (E) is difficult to deny.

My approach to a theodicy has always been first of all to place a caveat on statement (B) and say that God must be limited by the boundaries of logic. If God is not bound by logic, then nonsense becomes possible and throws all logic out the window. God can make himself not exist. God can give humans free will and make us always choose right. And especially apropos to this discussion, God can remove evil while letting evil still exist, therefore (D) is false regardless of your personal experience of evil and suffering. I hope people can see this is nonsense.

If we suggest that it is not logically possible to create a world full of beings with free will without allowing evil, that's a beginning, but it doesn't quite address (E). Particularly, of course, it would seem that (E) clashes with (A) almost in itself. I think there are two issues that need to be addressed with respect to this clash. The first issue is why a good God would add evil to a world that already has evil. I think this is easier to address than it may seem. I believe chiefly when God visits evil upon people, it's for the purpose of discipline. We as a society recognize a need to discipline children, although there are vast differences of opinion on how best to do so. Even if you are a parent who doesn't believe in corporal punishment, discipline of any sort tends to involve creating some sort of discomfort in children to make them reflect on why their actions were wrong. In other words, we feel that when children act in an evil manner, they need to suffer for it; it sounds more cruel when phrased this way, but I believe that is essentially the nature of discipline. On a wider level, society accepts that when people break the law, it is required to make them suffer. Maybe that is in some form of restitution, maybe incarceration, and sometimes even death. (While I am personally aganst the death penalty for numerous reasons, it can't be denied that there is a large segment of society that feels it is justified.) So, extrapolating from the moral standards we hold in society to the moral standards held by God, I would say that God is sometimes enacting evil for the sake of justice and discipline, which I suggest are greater goods.

The second issue is the more difficult one: why does God allow or even enact evil upon good people? As I said in the post on my other blog, the Book of Job shows us that sometimes God inflicts evil on good people. Perhaps Job is a special case, but it's quite evident from real-life experience that everyone experiences evil and suffering, and it's quite possible that some is inflicted by God. Let's question Job first; is there a purpose for Job's suffering? When I was in high school, we read Job in our humanities class; everyone in my class except for me was convinced Job must have done something to deserve him suffering, but if that was true, wouldn't God say so? No, Job was definitely suffering through no fault of his own, so why? I've heard it posited that Job is actually a key piece of scripture, because in a way it asks and anwers the question, "Is humanity really worth God's love and grace?" Do people just follow God for rewards, or is there a recognition of God's inherent goodness and sovereignty? Job is a test case, being one of the most upright and moral men God had at that time. If Job can be put through loss of all he has and further suffering on top of that and still praise God, then it shows there is something deeper in the relationship between God and mankind. And Job passes the test, even with God showing up at the end of the book to pretty much taunt him!

Now God, being omniscient, already knew this would happen before it happened. God knows how every individual will stand in the face of adversity. So why go through with it? Because everyone who witnessed it, including Job, Job's wife, Job's friends, and the "sons of God" (i.e. angels, including Satan), now can see Job's character for themselves. Adversity reveals character, which is useful for spiritual growth, and spiritual growth is very important. Towards the end of John's gospel, Jesus talks a lot about the adversity his disciples will see once he's gone to Heaven; Paul talks about his personal sufferings in his letters, and says it's for the glory of God. The Bible teaches that being a follower of God is a good thing, but not that it's pleasant; quite the opposite. God often promises to send comfort in times of trouble, but also, you should expect that trouble.

So what is my conclusion? Sometimes evil and suffering are tools to make people become better people. Sometimes we need to be pushed out of complacency and grow, and evil and suffering do that. Whether we're doing something wrong that needs correcting or doing something right that we need to be pressured in to persevering, sometimes we suffer for the greater good. Of course, I know not everyone will find this convincing, and there is always suffering and evil that seem too much to be appropriate, but it's always a possibility that it has purpose. As always, please feel free to comment.