Materialism

Today I lost my beloved 80 GB iPod. Or rather, I discovered it was missing; I only know I lost it sometime this weekend. It's pretty tough, but I'll survive...somehow. Actually, I'm encouraged by how little the loss is affecting me. (Though this is probably partly because I still have my internet-capable iPod Touch) The sudden loss of something I've used almost every day for years got me thinking about the importance of not getting overly attached to possessions, because ultimately we can't keep any of them.

How you approach material things depends on your worldview of course. If you believe there is nothing after this life, then go ahead and enjoy your things; you might as well. But if you believe there is something that comes after death, something eternal, then it's foolish not to seek things that matter in that. Jesus taught that we should not "

Store up for yourselves treasures on earth, where moth and rust destroy and where thieves break in and steal. But store up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where moths and rust do not destroy, and thieves do not break in and steal. For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.

Imagine your most prized possession (which, admittedly, my iPod was not). Suppose it was suddenly gone. (Or do more than imagine and go without it for X days) If this is unthinkable, maybe you need to think about your attachment. No thing lasts forever.

Another Political Rant (sorry)

I think I've been one of the very few people I know to remain silent about the debacle going on in the Wisconsin state capitol thus far, but as a fellow blogospherite, I feel like I should give my two cents.

Shameful. I can't sum up the situation any better. Scott Walker's unyielding insistence on pushing what seems to me to be a highly personal agenda, particularly the part that strips union workers of their collective bargaining rights, strikes me as almost...evil.  But Democrats' undermining of the democratic process, personal attacks on Walker, and equal refusal to negotiate are no more impressive.

The fiasco is an outstanding example of the polarization I've been seeing in the political scene ever since I became old enough to follow it. Democracy was (and continues to be, on small scales) a process that took a nation of widely differing views and distilled them into decisions that, while not always smart or agreeable, worked well enough to get America through some pretty intense history. Today, there's not much going on in government that I would call "decision". Just imagine if a world war were happening today. Or an impending meteor strike.

At some point in the past 60 or so years, political debate turned into argument and outright strife, and opposing viewpoints became opposing sides in an idealogical war. Listening to other views took a back seat to being right, and talking to like-minded people who are also right. There is an incredibly pervasive "us vs. them" mentality in state and federal politics. Political parties no longer seek to merely influence policy according to their platforms, but to gain total control. Being an amateur commentator, I can only speculate on why. I suspect the culture of the internet and its serving as a medium for debate have contributed. (PoliSci/Sociology majors: senior thesis! Credit me!)

If, as I suspect, I'm not making my point clear enough, the situation in Madison speaks much more clearly. Both sides have repeatedly shown a complete unwillingness to negotiate: Republicans by sticking to their guns and continuing to try to push Walker's legislation through, and Democrats by filling (and fleeing) the capitol in protest. I would expect this kind of behavior from children arguing over whose toy is whose, not grown adults and elected officials.

So, readers, I urge you to take a step back. Look at where all this partisanship has gotten us. Stop blindly supporting your chosen side and think for yourself. Realize that maybe, just maybe, you might not be entirely right. Talk to someone  with a different ideology and really listen. An open mind needs to be cultivated and actively maintained, but it is one of the most valuable things in life.

American Football Championship Game!

So, how 'bout that Super Bowl? Two of the best teams in American football coming together to beat the crap out of each other like good all-Americans for a shiny trophy. (Well, until the Packers got their hands on it--literally) The Green Bay Packers versus the Pittsburgh Steelers. Seriously, what kind of a name is "Packers?" and I really think the Steelers should wear metal armor or something. That would be awesome and would make them unstoppable.

For me the big question when preparing for the Super Bowl party was simply: who to root for? It was hard to decide. At first I was thinking of picking the team with the cooler-looking uniforms. The Steelers are yellow and black, but they were wearing their away uniforms so it was more like yellow and white. Not as fun. And since they were playing in Texas for some reason, shouldn't both teams have been wearing their away uniforms? I guess Texas is a bit closer to Wisconsin, right?

So then I decided to look up all the numbers on the players' jerseys--those represent their power level, right?--add them up, and pick the team with the highest total power level. This was quickly defeated when my American football-savvy friends asked if I was counting all the players on the teams, or just the ones in for the season, or just the ones eligible to play in this game... I had no idea how confusing it was. How many players does an American football team need?

Quite a few, I learned. As the game began, the Steelers pursued a "war of attrition" strategy, taking out most of the Packers' defensive line. Were they going to run the Packers out of players? Would the Packers be forced to defend their lead with five guys by the last quarter?

So anyway, I apparently got invited to one of two Superbowl parties. The Packers one. That pretty much settled, if not which team I would root for, which team I wanted to win. Don't blame me, Minnesotans, it was the peer pressure!

But jumping back to before the game, that pre-game show was pretty exhaustive. I wasn't sure if they'd cut all the ribbons and sang all the songs they needed to to make the game officially on. Luckily we were enjoying fantastic food and each others' company. Which made it almost tolerable when the teams both ripped off two fantastic Guitar Hero/Rock Band songs for their self-promoting videos! And who was that cowboy they had narrate both of them? What a turncoat.

Apparently Christina Aguilera messed up the national anthem. I didn't notice during it, or when watching it on Youtube afterward, and eventually I had to listen while following along with the actual lyrics. Nice save. I doubt too many people noticed, right?

Anyway, back to the game. I don't really understand the rules of American football too well. Basically the teams run back and forth chasing the ball and trying to get it to their end, while beating the crap out of each other. And the Steelers were doing an especially good job of it. I kept hearing everyone groan and seeing another player getting hauled down the medical corridor. I don't think I'd enjoy American football, considering most of the players are twice my size.

How did that Ben whatever get to be a quarterback, anyway? His name is impossible to spell, and he has the lowest power level of anyone on his team! I guess it must only apply to attacking people and not to throwing, and he just left the clobbering to that guy with the bushier beard and 99 power level.

And the commercials! Excellent. For a while we rated them out of ten. I decided I liked the commercials more than either team and started rooting for them. The game was just the "commercial break", as in the break from the real show: the commercials. It was pretty funny when a completely ordinary Menards commercial aired in the middle of the high-budget ads. You'd think they'd try to do more with it.

I knew I was skipping the halftime show as soon as I heard it was the Black-Eyed Peas performing. Groan. Luckily I'd just picked up my old Sennheiser HD-201s from a friend I'd been lending them to, so I drowned the whole thing out in glorious metal. See my imminent music blog post on the mainstream. I saw a total of maybe 5 seconds of the show (all from checking if it was over) and heard about as much, so don't ask me how bad it was.

So anyway the Packers got off to a pretty early lead. Why did their endzone get painted green!? It was the right shade of green before it was painted! But of course the American Football committee or whoever controls the game--they're all fake, right?--couldn't have them washing out the Steelers, which was about when the beatdowns and injuries started. Things were looking pretty grim for the Packers going into the second half with their defensive players--especially some important Woodson guy--out of the game. The Steelers were starting to catch up. But the Packers managed to hold onto their lead until the last few minutes...

I've always wondered why, if the timer repeatedly fails to stop when the players are just walking around doing nothing, a team doesn't just stall it out. Well, today I learned why: it's lame and boring. That was a disappointing last minute. And so, through ingenuity, running around, and holding the line at all costs, the Packers won and got to touch a not-so-shiny trophy. See you next year!

Anyway, I think we can all agree who the real winners today were: those guys in the yellow pants. Also Brett Favre and all those commercials.

"What's a Bieber?"

Addendum to My Top Free Software

You might recall my previous post on my favorite 10 free programs. Well, I have just discovered something that may top them all in sheer amazingness. It solves a problem I previously thought was impossible: it actually converts video formats, for free. And it works.


It is Miro Video Converter. With it I was actually able to take a video format playable only in Windows Media Player and convert it to a .mp4 that Quicktime will accept. It's pathetic that this is such an amazing accomplishment, but it is literally the first program I have found that can do that. Tell your friends.

On Prayer and Reasons for Unbelief

I've been reading a book I purchased at TCX (Campus Crusade's winter conference): Timothy Keller's The Reason for God. Keller is the pastor of Redeemer Presbyterian Church highly secular New York City, where he comes into contact with thousands of skeptics and has necessarily built up a good deal of apologetics experience. In the first half of the book he addresses some common reasons for unbelief (Christianity's claim to have the truth is arrogant, science disproves God, the existence of Hell...), and in the second he gives some reasons to believe in God. It's a good strategy, and Keller argues simply but effectively. Definitely a good book to give to skeptics.

But I got really into apologetics a few years ago, when I was starting to get really into my faith, or at least think about it a lot. I bought books by authors like Lee Strobel and Norman Geisler. As I learned the answers to seemingly every question skeptics could raise, I thought I had all the answers. Just let me at those nonbelievers! But of course, really being a good apologist takes more than book knowledge: it takes wisdom, compassion, and experience (all traits that Tim Keller seems to be blessed with). Many of the arguments Keller gives in the first part of the book were familiar to me, which reminded me that I still wasn't getting a complete picture of the reasons people keep for unbelief. Maybe at heart they're as simple as the ones Keller brings up, but just like Christian faith they have become the foundation for someone's life and worldview, concealed behind countless justifications and rationalizations.

The point of all this rambling is that I decided to see what actual skeptics are saying to try to improve my apologetics further. I found a website for ex-Christians that I plan on looking more into. The first page I visited was a "logical proof that God does not exist"--the frequent failure of prayer. There are various things I could say about  the argument, but I wanted to comment on the motivation behind it--an expectation that if God exists, he will give us whatever we pray for. (Sounds sort of like what I uncovered on summer project!) It takes Biblical promises that God answers prayer and turns them into the assumption that God is a cosmic vending machine that turns the currency of prayer into whatever we want. If we don't get it, then we didn't pray enough.

Take a closer look at this assumption. If God is powerful enough to control the universe, perform miracles, and know our thoughts, why should He make himself so easily manipulable by our prayers? Might He know more about the situation we're praying about than we do? At the core of this view is the belief that we know better than God and that our plans are more important than His, so of course He should give us whatever we pray for.

But God is bigger than that. His ways are not our ways, and His thoughts are not our thoughts (Isaiah 55:8). Thank goodness! Imagine a world where God answered every prayer! (If you've seen Bruce Almighty, you have an idea) That's not to say our prayers don't have power--we are told that they do. (James 5:16) But their power isn't as simple as put-prayer-in, get-miracles-out--we have to trust God to answer prayer in His way, on His schedule. That's what I think prayer is, above all--deliberately entrusting our troubles and questions to God, as well as just talking to Him. If we go into prayer expecting to get stuff out of it, we miss the point entirely.

I also read a testimony (if the word is applicable here) from a man who was born into what from his description I would definitely call a cult, was shuffled between churches in his childhood, and found his religious curiosity stifled and his questions about God unanswered. He was constantly told he wasn't old enough. Bad experiences with bad Christians raised more questions that went unanswered, and he became an atheist in college.

This is a tragedy. How can someone like this come to believe if his attempts to learn about God are constantly frustrated, and he equates Christianity with fanaticism and closed-mindedness? I wonder if he ever really heard the gospel?

I suspect that a great deal of skeptics are like this--their reasons for unbelief aren't intellectual but emotional, and deeply personal. They are disgusted with what they've seen of Christianity--perhaps rightly so--and just aren't interested. As they grow into whatever faith they instead choose (we all put our faith in something), they might develop intellectual justifications for their beliefs, but these aren't the real reason for it.

This is all just my rampant speculation. I wonder if I just gave a good description of many skeptics. Anyway, the fact that people are falling away from faith because of experiences like this should be a wakeup call to the church. Of course no one is going to find Christianity attractive if they don't see Christ in us. I don't blame them. I suspect that the God that many, many skeptics don't believe in bears little resemblance to the God I do believe in. If only they knew Him!

The Sunk Cost Fallacy

Well, blagonet, much has happened since I lasted posted. The semester from hell is over! Two days after my last post, I turned in my last group project. It was one of the happiest days of my life. After that the rest of the semester was trivial, though my last algorithms assignment gave me quite a headache. (Asymptotic complexity is quite powerful--a few small changes made a test go from 12 minutes to 2 seconds) I had two finals, both of which were jokes--I barely studied and finished in half the allotted time. Since then I've been enjoying my break, getting reconnected with old friends and God at TCX(!), and playing tons and tons of video games. Steam isn't helping with its ridiculous deals. ($5 each for Knights of the Old Republic and Bioshock?)

But anyway, this isn't a blog about what's going on in my life, it's a blog about what's going on in my brain. And somehow I've gotten into some pretty deep thoughts despite all the Super Mario Galaxy 2. It all started when I noticed an ad on QC for a site called Quibids. It showed some big-name electronics items apparently being sold for deeply discounted prices, with timers counting down the last few seconds until they were sold.

Don't worry, I wasn't tempted to click on any of the auctions--I know a scam when I see one. But I was strangely curious about how it was a scam, so I did some Google-powered research. Apparently Quibids and other such "penny auction" sites allow users to bid in one-cent increments in fast-paced auctions for valuable items, which can result in their being sold for well below retail prices. The auctions have seconds to go, but each bid increases the time remaining. (Reminds me of a speed run challenge in SMG2) That all sounds well and good, except that you don't just make one-cent bids--you have to buy them, often for much more than a cent. And the money you spent on the bids is gone regardless of whether you win the item. I read stories about the nightmare this creates--people intending to try out penny auction sites eventually went away empty-handed after pouring money into an unwinnable auction.

This led to a Wikipedia crawl where I looked up some of the psychological and economic concepts at work, namely the sunk cost fallacy. (Also known as "throwing good money after bad") It refers to peoples' tendency to incorporate past spendings in their decision-making, even though this information is irrelevant. This manifests in many ways: the government feeling "locked in" to a project after pouring millions of dollars into it, even if it wouldn't be worth the remaining cost, Britain and France keeping the Concorde flying after it became economically inviable, or people continuing to fork over money for bids for an item that they probably won't (but might!) win. The only way to win these penny auctions is not to play.

But just Googling "penny auction" got me none of this information immediately. The results fell into three categories: penny auction sites, tips for how to win at penny auctions, and sites that claim to "expose" penny auctions but are actually disguised ads for a site (some disguised as blogs just like this!). It makes me worry about how many people actually believe this hysteria and are pouring their money down the drain hoping to win a $22.54 iPad. The internet seems to amplify just about every negative trait of human nature, and greed is no exception.

So that was an extremely random mental journey and I'm not sure why I wrote any of this. (But that's pretty standard for this blog) Until next time, remember that storing up treasures that won't last isn't very wise, but wasting resources with nothing at all to show for it is just stupid.

Separation from God

One of the pillars of Campus Crusade-style evangelism is the fact that our sin--disobedience--separates us from God. How does this happen? My natural response--and I imagine what many other Christians believe--is that God rejects us, casts us from His presence, if we're tainted by sinful guilt. But I disagree. I think that the reverse is the case--sin's separating us from God is not initiated by God, but by us. The truth is that, sinful to the core as we are, there is no way we can bear to the presence of a perfect and holy God. This is hard to explain to those who haven't really felt convicted of their sin--not just regretting the consequences of something, but actually being hit hard by the guilt of it.

If you haven't felt this kind of guilt about God, maybe you've seen it in other relationships. When you've really wronged a friend and you know it, you're almost afraid to see them because of the guilt it brings up. Now imagine (just hypothetically) your friend is 100% perfect--humble, always asks how you're doing first, never makes these kinds of mistakes and all that. It makes whatever you did seem even worse by comparison. Now imagine your friend also happens to be the omnipotent God of the universe and you start to see how the guilt of sin can lead us to separate ourselves from God.

The Bible has evidence for this. In the Fall, God does send Adam and Eve away from His presence for disobeying Him, but look at what happens before that. When they hear God coming, they hide! (Genesis 3:8) Before he banishes them, they try to get away from Him. Again, look at the response of pretty much anyone who has ever had an encounter with God in the Bible. Isaiah "is ruined" by the sight of the Lord on His throne (Isaiah 6:5). John falls at Christ's feet "as though dead". (Revelation 1:17) When God descends on Mount Sinai, the Israelites are terrified and beg Moses to speak to Him for them (Exodus 20:18-19). Moses is apparently cool enough with God to see His back, but after this encounter the Israelites were afraid to look at him, so much so that he had to put on a veil around them (Exodus 34). When Simon Peter sees Jesus (who, by all appearances, was an ordinary guy) perform a miracle, he begs Him to leave. (Luke 5:1-11)

God certainly doesn't seem to be the one trying to get away from us in all these stories. The common theme seems to be that when people see how impossibly great and glorious God is, their thoughts immediately turn to how low and inglorious they are by the standard He sets by His very being. The essence of the Gospel is that even if we try to run and hide from God, He is actively pursuing us, looking to be in relationship with us as  He intended. And because of Jesus' death paying the penalty, the guilt of our sin doesn't have to keep us away from Him. He offers a fresh start, if we'll only reach up and accept it.