Friends who might know

by happy_moron Posted on May 11, 2012

…aka Friends Who are Being Stalked By Bing and Facebook So You Can Ask Them About Things They Posted Pictures Of.

Creepy. Oh, So Creepy.

Now, there’s a method of retrieving data called Random Access.  (It’s the ‘RA’ in RAM). The random access world is similar to siting on a couch and randomly thinking of things to do. If you want to watch television, you turn on the television. If you want a beer, you go get a beer. If you want to go to the bathroom, you go to the bathroom. You don’t plan a big trip – I will go the bathroom and I will get a beer and I will turn on the television afterwards… no, you just do things on your agenda as they occur to you.

Computer scientists are well familiar with Random Access. It’s how your processor gets it’s data from memory! But it’s also a very selfish way of doing things. This is sometimes good for computer design, because we really don’t want computer processors that are selfless and willing to wait for things. We want computer processors that get their data NOW and go do the important things that we are telling them to do.

What would be catastrophic is if we allowed the internet world and the computer way of doing things to encourage us to organize our friendships around a random access model. Friendships require continuity and constant care; they are not well suited to a “what can you do for me right now in my internet search” model of relationship.

When Bing starts listing people as resources for me to mine just like I would mine a web-page, that’s when I start to get offended.

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Feedback

by happy_moron Posted on May 7, 2012

The other day, I walked out on a sermon. I found myself explaining to a kind and concerned usher that I was fine, and I sat (somewhat awkwardly) in the lobby until the sermon ended, before reclaiming my seat.

I’d never, ever walked out on a sermon before. I have been raised, as have countless other virtuous Christians, to remain welded to the pew while the sermon is going on. Retention of the message was always preferred, but ultimately was unenforceable and therefore optional. Listening, on the other hand, was mandatory. You don’t have to like the sermon, you don’t have to remember it, but you’re not allowed to get up and go. Go to the bathroom? Yes. Abandon a message that disagrees with you? Nope. Doodle on your bulletin if you so desire (or, more likely, fold, spindle and mutilate it)… but suffer through. It’s only respectful. Sermons are allowed to be bad – or boring – or too long.

So there I was, sitting in the lobby, crunching the numbers. A hundred odd folk inside the sanctuary, me outside. Was I in schism? Was I acting as a bad member of the body? How do I tell? Was there something funky in my granola this morning that put me in the wrong mood for listening? Jesus probably doesn’t want me to be hurtful to his servant the pastor, and I certainly have pride to burn, most days.

But is it right to remain in your seat if you feel that the message is bringing the gospel into disrepute? Is it damning to the church if everyone sits politely through a terrible sermon? I can think of a couple friends of mine, who, seeing a group of Christians sit through an awful sermon, would just assume that all were agreeing with it. Not that one guy quietly getting up from the far wing of the sanctuary and slipping out would make much of a difference. Maybe I should have kicked my chair over.

Of course, walking out of the sanctuary probably has more to do with me than the sermon. After all, a hundred polite Christian folks stayed seated. Maybe I’m just morbidly curious. What would happen if half the congregation walked out during a message? Could the church process the fallout? Could the pastor preach again? Would it be a better way of handling conflict than doodling on a bulletin?

I’m going to have to find out what the proper, constructive feedback channels in my church are if I want to push back against a sermon. But it’s also worth bearing in mind that perhaps the best sermon for me is one that I strongly disagree with. After all, if I walk out on anything I don’t like, how am I ever going to change? On the other hand, if I don’t walk out, how is the sermon ever going to change?

Have you ever walked out of a church service? If so, why?

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Great Job, HP!

by happy_moron Posted on May 3, 2012

Cleaning up a new HP laptop; it’s remarkably free from Stuff I Don’t Want on My Computer!

I never want to go back to the Bad Old Days when there was AOL and the RubbishMusicPlayerThatWasntWinamp and Toolbars and five hundred desktop links and Un-installers that half the time would try to complete the installation (groan)…

Of course, they all thought that they were the only program on the machine and so start-up was one giant hour of every single unwanted application trying to get your attention. And they couldn’t just use ordinary dialogues and windows, either. No, these were programs designed by marketers because they weren’t meant to be good or useful, they were designed to be obviously and conspicuously there (which, to be fair, they were).

They achieved this by having clunky custom interfaces that manually painted themselves on the desktop and didn’t move around right; they were unresponsive, the kind of thing you click on five times because the graphics designer didn’t have time/money to design a button with a “pressed-in” animation… so there was no visual or audible feedback to warn you that your click had really clicked.

Then there were always the few apps that you couldn’t quite get rid of, no matter how hard you tried. They were wired into Windows or had written themselves into the CD-ROM firmware or into the BIOS or something. I don’t know, I could never figure out how they could still be there after I uninstalled them. They’d always leave that entry in Add/Remove Programs. Probably it was just that I was always too lazy to manually edit my registry.

Hey – how come no OEM install ever comes with a pre-installed shareware registry editor?

But I didn’t post this to complain, I posted this because when a company does something well, it’s polite to say thank you. Thank you, Hewlett Packard, for keeping pre-installed stuff (for lack of a better word) to a minimum.

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How to learn Greek the Hard Way

by happy_moron Posted on April 26, 2012

… or, “Why I will not get ‘A’s in school unless I change my behaviour”
… or “Why nothing in life is simple”
… or simply: “Yak Shaving“.

I don’t want to lie. Being me has considerable advantages. But it has some  challenges, too – like the way I learn Greek:

The Challenge

1) Sit down to learn Biblical Greek.
2)Wow – Mounce’s BBG has a lot of vocab!
3)Cool! Mounce has audio files for every single vocab word!
4)I should listen to Mounce say all the vocab so I can learn to pronounce them right – it will be easier to do this now, so I don’t make a mental association with incorrect pronunciations…
5)But the vocab is spread throughout all the lessons and it’s so slow clicking through all the web pages…
6)This will surely go quicker if I do things The Right Way…

Finding The Right Way

7)The files are all Quicktime…
8)Install Quicktime.
9)I should cache the audio-files locally… and I can maybe even convert them into .mp3 so I can play them in a playlist!
8)Open terminal ==> ‘man wget‘
9)Hmm… But I need to get the file locations from the links! Is this a job for regex?
10)Save the source for thirty web-pages for link extraction.
11)Oh no! The .html files only link to the individual html pages for each word – there are about 300 of them! Time to ramp it up… oh, IT’S ON.

Getting Ready for Battle

12)Is it finally time to learn BASH scripting or should I brush up on my Ruby? Let’s go with Ruby.
13)Which Ruby screen scraping library should I use to handle the html pages? (Google them) Scrubyt isn’t actively developed, should I use Nokogiri or Anemone? I think Nokogiri…
14) Oh wait… Ruby isn’t installed – what’s the current best practice for install on Ubuntu? It seems to be the Ruby Version Manager, but the Ubuntu packages don’t seem to work right. I should probably install RubyGems manually…
15)RVM install botches horribly.
16)Ok, we’ll just use the old ruby1.8 with Nokogiri then…
17)But I don’t have a good editor installed and I haven’t used one in about a year – I wonder which is top of the hill? (Research Netbeans & Eclipse) Hmm… they’re chunky! (Install Geany and Redcar and jruby)
18)Hey, I’m almost ready to start playing around with editors and finding which one I like better… And after this I can figure out how to use Nokogiri! Isn’t Biblical Greek fun?

Battle is Joined

19)Spend three hours writing program that uses nokogiri
20)Finally! Downloading the .mov files…
21)Discover that running wget through Ruby means the downloaded files are incomplete
22)Change the program to generate command line scripts
23)Think about manually running 30 command line scripts. Oh Goody! I get to brush up on bash scripting after all.
24)Google “Parameter Extensions” and remind myself how a bash “for loop” works.
25)End up using ‘find’ to concatenate all the files into a single script.
26)Download the .mov files.

Cleaning up the Battlefield

27) No, really, that’s about it… All that’s needed now is to write my bash scripts to convert all the .mov to .mp3 (after installing the proper codecs, of course) and to generate the .m3u playlist files so I can play all the vocabulary for a given chapter.
28)But I guess once that’s done, I can fire up Audacity and record myself reciting all the words after Mounce – this way I can make my own .mp3s with my own voice, using correct pronunciation *and* Fwith the definitions – so it will make it easier to memorize! Also I can share those :-)
29)But I don’t know about that… that might be a bit of a distraction from the task at hand…

Isn’t learning Biblical Greek Fun?

Addendum

30)As with anything in our modern scientific world, if you didn’t write it down, it didn’t happen… Laboratory rule #1. The last step is, obviously, to write the blog post!

UPDATE: It turns out that downloading via manual wget scripts or even single wget commands clips off the ends of some of the QuickTime files. Weird. The same thing happens if you update your Nokogiri scraping program to generate ‘curl’ download scripts as well. Even if you open them in Firefox and ‘Save As’ you will get clipped versions of the files :-P

But they play all right on the website… Maybe I’ll just use that :-D

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Understanding Genesis

by happy_moron Posted on April 23, 2012

This post is to log a connection that came into my mind – an idea that I didn’t want to just fall by the wayside. The title doesn’t mean that I understand Genesis.

Ray Anderson writes,

“When someone asks where they should begin reading in the Old Testament, I never tell them to begin with Genesis, but rather with Exodus. Exodus is the theological beginning point that serves as the exposition and explanation of all that precedes.” [1]

When I first read this snippet, I took it as a curiosity and moved on without much thought. But, sitting in church one Sunday, I felt a twinge in my brain; a significance to Ray’s words began to form, a message to my own lost self and to a lost culture.

I can best understand Ray’s comments by thinking about the name of God – YHWH. This is God’s own, personal name (meaning I AM WHO I AM) and it is rendered by most English translations as “The LORD”. YHWH appears throughout Genesis (“The LORD said to Abraham.”) to describe which god (the only one!) created heaven and earth, and which god brought Abraham out from his own country to become a new nation… by whom all peoples of the earth would be blessed.

But Abraham never knew God’s name.

Only Moses knew God’s name; it is at the beginning of Exodus that YHWH appears to him in a bush that is ablaze yet does not burn up.  It is Moses whom YHWH commands to take off his shoes – Moses who is standing in the presence of holy God – present on the earth and introducing himself by name.

Exodus begins with a bombshell – the starting point of the Bible. God comes down and introduces himself to humanity. The rest of the story begins here… even Genesis. Most of us have been taught to read books by starting at the beginning, but Genesis is very much a prequel to Exodus.[2] This is clear; someone, in writing down the Genesis stories, has very carefully told them using God’s own name – YHWH. Genesis is written in hindsight, and it is important to pay attention to this.

For example, if we are tempted to place the Jewish creation myth alongside another ancient Mesopotamian creation myths, we must be cautious, because the Genesis story is not just an ancient myth. It is a reinterpreted ancient myth. Someone (having been stunned by the very revelation and introduction of God, by personal name, to the world) has gone back to re-examine tradition. Having been awed by the incredible and miraculous election and rescue of the Jewish people, he has retold an old story – to explain what actually happened.

The Moon and Sun are not gods; YHWH is. They are only created things. Matter is not shaped from a giant serpent of chaos but is spoken into existence by the word of the God who parts the sea and walks on the earth in fire, and who has introduced himself to humanity in a burning bush. Pharaoh, who claimed to be God – who claimed to protect and uphold the land – who claimed to make the rains fall – was exposed as a helpless fraud by the hand of our YHWH. There is a God who controls all Creation and he is YHWH. We know who he is because he has told us, and we know he commands the world because we have seen him do it.[3]

YHWH is in Genesis, which means that so is the burning bush. The plagues – the parting of the Red Sea… the pillar of fire… the glory at Sinai… all are in Genesis. The beginning words of this story are “I will rescue you from Egypt” and not, “Get out of my garden.” But – having now been rescued… we need to understand how we ever got to Egypt in the first place.

One lesson this story teaches us in our own lost culture is that God doesn’t play fair. He’s liable to introduce himself first, and ask him to follow him… before we understand everything. It’s quite probable that, once we have believed him and followed him some distance, we will have to go back and revise what we once thought we knew.

Our own lost culture is fixated on telling our own story “right the first time”. (These days, in the West, we mostly we try to do this through science and observation.) We think we can build an accurate story of our existence (an anthropology) without factoring in the introduction of God. Well, no – we can’t. We will get lost in bad creation myths, because we, as people – as storytellers – have not yet been transformed to the point where we can tell a decent story.

Look at the Gospels. They weren’t recorded in realtime, as events happened – not even close! Thanks be to God; even a brief read through Mark shows that when events were going on, the disciples were in the dark about what was actually happening. The Gospels were written through the fires of Pentecost. Here we have transformed Apostles who, having lived a life in the Spirit and in the Church, became men who knew – men who had seen with their very eyes the kingdom that Jesus came to announce.

They didn’t know what he had been preaching about, they knew the thing he had preached.

We need to know God first and understand him later. If we wait for God to make sense to us before we believe in him, we will forever be drowning in a world of primordial soup that houses ancient dragons of chaos, trying to piece together some kind of sensical story without any of the critical pieces. We can’t understand our lives without beginning in introduction and transformation.

“Hi God.
I’m Scott.
My life is kind of a mess.
Please don’t hate me…”

[1] Ray Sherman Anderson, The Soul of Ministry?: Forming Leader’s for God’s People (Louisville, Ky.: Westminster John Knox Press, 1997), 4. Back

[2] Prequels are funny things. Often (e.g. The Silmarillion & Lord of the Rings) they should be read last. In some cases (*cough* Phantom Menace *cough*) they should just be ignored. Back

[3] Genesis is really about Israel. It is not a general “How God made people” manual but more of a “Wow – YHWH was there all this time and this is what he was actually doing” account. Back

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Abstraction

by happy_moron Posted on April 7, 2012

Abstraction is a wonderful thing, in the African sense of the word wonderful – something to wonder at. What makes us derive general principles for things and build worlds of forms that don’t exist? How does this serve us?

When we abstract, we create a picture that is distant, removed and in some way unreal, before attempting to map it back to the Real world. Like some bizarre mathematical transform (I’m looking at you, Laplace) we take a spin into an imaginary world and do magical things there, ultimately returning to the Real world with something more than we started with.

There tends to be a lot of pride in our abstraction. It has noble roots in humanity’s divine mandate to name things – one of our primal urges. But it’s worth remembering that our call to name things was a call to name things which were real, lions and tigers and bears. (Oh my!)

Where does God ever call us to concern ourselves with those things that might be or which might exist – that is, which he might create? He doesn’t, because if he decides to create them, he will let us know (should he so choose). But at that point they will be real. (There is a delicate point here – for example, should God warn us to consider what future consequences of a sin might be, he is calling us to consider not a hypothetical thing, but the very real present danger which we are in – the proper concern for our real, present decisions.)

Like we’ve done with all aspects of our divine mandate, we manage to pervert this naming urge. It becomes an urge to define things and determine them, not in the sense of discovering what is but of declaring what can be.

Abstracting lets us tell the future. If we can get general rules for things, we can predict. And if we can predict, we can move beyond the constraints of our current intolerable reality and the God who we find equally small, irritating and intolerable.

We are desperate to see beyond the Real, desperate… because we dream of uncovering a new and better idol beyond the limits of what we are currently stuck with. Maybe if we can nail down the rules about how God works, we can get to a God beyond the one we actually know.

It’s a tricky business, trying to sort out when we have stopped trying to discover the God who Really Is  (the God who has revealed himself) and when we have begun imagining the God we wish to be.

Imagining, of course, leads us to a place where the only God we have to share is not a God we know but a God we posit.

Oddly enough, such a God is often evil, terrifying, distant and of little use to those we try to proselytize.

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Faith and Works

by happy_moron Posted on April 2, 2012

In this post, I’m rehashing the second chapter of “The Cost of Discipleship” by Dietrich Bonhoeffer.[1]

Jesus calls us, “Come and follow me.”

If Jesus asks us to do a good work, is this challenge a question of faith or a question of works? If we then go and do it (and are saved through it) are we then saved through faith or through works?

We are clearly saved through works, because if we had not done the work, we would not be saved. Simple, no?

But we are clearly saved through faith! Had we done the work outside the call of Jesus, it would have given us precisely nothing. It is the call of Jesus that makes the work special, and it is our response to the call of Jesus (faith) that God loves. Abraham believed God and it was credited to him as righteousness, after all.

Jesus tells the story of a father who asks two sons to go to the field and work. The first says “Yes,” and doesn’t, while the second says “No,” and does. The second pleases his father – not because of the work, but because his father asked him and he responded. The story doesn’t work without the asking, because Jesus isn’t making a point about hoe technique – he’s making a point about obedience. If the son goes off and does a good work on his own, that’s a nice thing, but it doesn’t have anything to do with obedience to his father – what we like to call, “faith”.

But the story doesn’t work without the work, either. The father asks his son to do something, and if he doesn’t do it, he hasn’t shown faith.  When we look at this dynamic in our lives (Jesus calls us to something ==> We respond ==> consequences ensue), the one thing we CANNOT do is to play a silly little abstract game, where we try and imagine a world where Jesus calls us to follow, but in a sense where we can believe in him and not follow him at the same time.

In this abstract, fantasy world, Jesus calls us in a general sense of salvation, and there’s no real calling to follow into anything. There’s just a general, non-specific call. We are called. We are saved.[2]

I memorized Ephesians 2:8-9 long before I memorized Eph 2:10.

“For it is by grace that you have been saved, through faith, and this is not your own doing. It is the gift of God, not a result of works, so that no one may boast.” — Eph 2:8-9

“For we are his workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand that we should walk in them.” — Eph 2:10

Verses eight and nine present half of a story. If we build a world around just these two verses, it is a fantasy world, where Jesus calls us, but not to anything.

I have never heard a real, living testimony where someone stood up and said, “I heard God call me, but not to anything.” A call to belief? Sure. A call to repentance? Sure. A call to give up pride/fear/anger/hatred? Absolutely! The call of Jesus to follow is not limited to physical actions – it can be a call to an exercise of the will or the heart – but it is always a call to something.

A call to nothing does. not. exist.

Jesus is not interested in abstract salvation; there is no such thing. He is interested in your salvation and my salvation and everybody else’s salvation, but he doesn’t care a whit for salvation in the general, because there is no such thing. There is no such thing as ‘faith’ outside of a specific, concrete call.

Of course, if this is true, there is no separation of faith and works. There is no faith outside God’s request toward us and our response to him. There is just the question – did we respond to him as he asked? We don’t have the option of abstract salvation through abstract faith (call without doing) or works (obedience without call).

The challenge of saying this is that it suddenly becomes really, really, really, important that we pay attention to what God might (truly, concretely, specifically…) be calling us to today.

[1]
Dietrich Bonhoeffer, The Cost of Discipleship (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1995), 57-78
Back

[2] In mainstream Christianity, there seems to be only one instance where we really and faithfully apply the concrete way of looking at faith and works… our initial act of belief, that single  moment when we are called to believe in Jesus! The rest of our life then seems to slip into the abstract, fantasy world where we somehow manage to believe in a Lord who doesn’t actually call us to anything.

In this fantasy, Jesus is concerned with only one moment of our lives and only one work – that of initial belief – and our salvation rests on this moment alone. The only problem with this world is that it’s not the real one; it doesn’t exist outside our fertile, self-centred imaginations.

Back

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Why I think we’re all crazy

by happy_moron Posted on March 12, 2012

I think we’re all crazy. This is why.

Today I was taking the garbage out after a church potluck. This just means carrying it out to the dumpster in the corner of the parking lot.

But it also means taking the key with you, because the dumpster has a lock on it.

So anyway, I’m staring at this padlock on the dumpster and saying, “We’re all crazy”. After all, here I am locking up this precious, valuable garbage. This world really has gone bonkers.

But then I think, maybe it’s not so crazy after all. I’m really locking the dumpster so no one can illegally dump their own trash in there, Whew. Doesn’t that sound sane?

It’s only a little later that the sad truth hits me.

I’m not locking up the precious valuable garbage, I’m locking up the precious valuable empty space around the garbage.

What do you do when you realize something like this? It’s easy; you smile and nod and hang the  Empty Space key back on its hook  (which oddly enough is labelled ‘Garbage Key’) and you ask if someone needs help with stacking chairs. And you pretend that the little bit of sanity you just lost wasn’t really that important, anyway.

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