Once upon a time I asked someone what his “spiritual gift” was. “Prophesy”, he replied, “I speak truth.” That sounded good because I was worried he were going to make a far-flung prediction of the future and I was going to have to go to bat. “What’s yours?” came moments later, and I shrugged. I really don’t know. “Have you ever taken a spiritual gift test?” danced happily out of his mouth. “Oh yes! I have! And by Moses, I really do not know how people lived before the age of quizzes and surveys, because this thing told me everything I needed to know. For instance, if I liked kids I might have the gift of children’s ministry, or if I fit no where, I had the gift of financial giving. Brilliant. Now that is God-breathed.” Just kidding, I didn’t really say that last part, maybe I’m making this up.

I’ve grown up, just a little (not much you can tell), and I’ve discovered that God has blessed me with a wonderful gift that he shows me how to use daily, and that I fail to use properly every hour. I’ve been given the gift of doubt, and a little Pandora’s box that can swallow a soul it is. Most religious people are scared of doubt, their faith hinges on their undying resolve to hold on to ideas that can hardly hold up their own pants. With courage like a centurion, they march right off the battlefield of life and hold ground that nobody cares to attack, and with a stubborn refusal to turn around (because that might constitute backsliding) they remain. My job is to play the friend in freeze tag, to gently tap on their shoulder and tell them they are free, that decisions must be made, and sometimes they must be unmade for the sake of progress. Perhaps I tell them that God’s lectures don’t end, and to stop attending because you know it all is a bit presumptuous. Maybe a quick slap on the behind and they’re off to the races again, or maybe they hate me. Oh well, I hope it’s worth it.

Sometimes my soldier-friends will become berserk, they rush off any which way to battle the trees they imagine to be foe. While their passion is commendable, their actions are not, and my job is simply to question, to ask “why are you battling a tree, of all things?” Occasionally, their passion is so intense, their resolve so firm, that they will continue to fight that tree. It will be cut, it will be torn, its branches will weep for the day it was planted. But the world won’t be changed, and that soldier will be wasted. I hurt for those soldiers.

This weapon is dangerous, as it swings both ways. Both to cure and to kill, even its weilder, doubt is like fire and can be both good and bad. To crawl, and struggle, and wrestle out of the mouth of the darkness that just swallowed you is a long, hard battle I wish on no one, though experience has its perks. Similarly, the regret that comes when you take off the hand of a friend intending to clip a fingernail in favor, that’s hard. But you live and you learn, and hopefully you don’t “ever do that again, I mean it!”

I don’t lead, that’s not my job. There’s a bigger Guy for that. I know some Truth, maybe a bit, but my job is to smell that which is not it. To compassionately point in the right way the one little soldier who will soon save the day. Churches may hate me, but God still loves me, and if you’d like, I’d love to learn from you someday.

Checked out a book from the library today, as I am apt to do, except this book was a rare randomly-saw-it-on-the-shelf-and-grabbed-it moment. Most of the books I get at the library I’ve looked into beforehand. I won’t delve into how wonderful libraries are for this very reason (and much better than Barnes’ and Noble for many other reasons).

Anyways, the book is titled “The Art of Software Modeling” which interests very few people besides myself, but in reading the first maybe seven paragraphs of the book, the author has touched on topics I’ve been railing on for quite some time now.

For instance, in Questions and Answers I spoke about shared-experience and its usefulnes in allowing people to relate to one another. Watch:

A close alignment of one person’s worldviews with another leads to higher likelihoods of understanding. This is one of the reasons that people form tight in-groups based in shared experiences [a la Christianity?], because of the comfort afforded by the reduced need to “understand” one another when communicating. The idea of “clicking” with another person is based on a shared understanding of a number of experiences, leading to a reduced effort to share information and a sense of familiarity.

In Tainting the Data I ranted about the effects of our own worldview on our interpretation and understanding of the events in our lives. In The Art of Software Modeling, Liberman likens the situation to that of a civilized person trying to explain a refrigerator to people in a more savage culture:

Our internal abstract models of the world are also critical to the communication of complex concepts with other people. For example, it would be impossible for a person from a hunter-gather culture who has never had contact with the modern world to understand the principles of refrigeration simply by describing the mechanics; it is completely foreign to their experience. To succeed, first you would need to have a shared communication medium (language, pictures, gestures, etc). Once you can share ideas, you would then need to translate your understanding into ones that can be related to their internal models of the world: examples of food storage, the effect of cold temperatures on food spoilage, and so on. In other words, you would need to align your model explaining a phenomenon to a shared experience with the intended audience.

He even goes so far as to quote 1984 by Orwell and walk into Newspeak and attempts to eliminate ideas by eliminating the words to express them. Woah, Orwell? Yeah, sweet. I know.

Now, this is all fascinating to you (sarcasm), but it’s just remarkable to see the intersection of ideas and the coincidental nature of having them all in two pages of a book I found randomly. The topics of worldviews and communication are so fundamental to our understanding of the world and our ability to live together, yet we look so little into their intricacies. Particularly, with a lot of friends who intend to go overseas to some unknown culture (hopefully after learning the language) to try to convert souls to Christianity, this is a problem. Why? Because of shared experience! An American simply cannot relate or communicate to someone of such remarkably different lifestyles and culture without some sort of assimilation time. Furthermore, misunderstandings as to how other people live can lead to misdirected efforts to reform a society that isn’t bad (except by western standards) but is merely different. Perplexing.

Apparently, the terms cognitive resonance and cognitive dissonance are the technical terms for all my ranting. Looks like I’ll be heading back to the library.

I like to compare the flow of time to a faucet. While we can interact with it, maybe change it’s direction slightly or stick our hands in it, ultimately water will move from the source to that little drain below. Memory, like our eyes, gives us a sense of time. Without memory there would be no way for us to experience time.

I’ve always had a problem with memories, I try to keep as few things as possible that might remind me of times past. I think this is not really because of the nature of my past, but because the very act of remembering seems like a waste of time present, time that could be better spent. Yet what I’m discovering is that by ignoring what has happened, I’m making increasingly less meaningful the experiences I go through. Without memories, you live and you die, and there is nothing in between.

I remember learning in my English class around the time we were reading Beowulf that there were some people who believed in life after death through the remembering of valiant warriors by way of bards telling their stories for generations to come. Something deep within me really lives to be remembered. Not famous, not great, just remembered.

There are some questions that frustrate me to no end because I don’t have the answer and I’m stubborn as anything. There are other questions that irritate me when people try to answer them. The second class of questions are generally “deeper” (what a stupid word), and if they could be filled with simple answers, I think the universe would rip itself apart. Literally. It would start shredding it’s shirt using comets and stuff out of pure, unadulturated frustration. Deep questions require deep answers, or at very least exceptionally simple answers that can be construed, manipulated, and “chewed on” in the mind of the asker such that they feel deep (otherwise you just wasted ten minutes of your life).

I think this is why: our brain is mysterious and not well understood, but it’s fairly clear that it doesn’t work like a computer system with memory and a processor. Modern world views seem to give the impression that growing older and gaining wisdom consists entirely of accruing facts about the world and molding these together into an abstract understanding of reality (the more accurate, the better, the more data, the more accurate). But I don’t see that as true. In order to remember something, our brain actually reprograms itself (FPGA?) such that each experience we have physically shapes us. Deep questions concern the entire structure of the brain with all its abstractions of understanding, and as I’ve tried to explain earlier, we are particularly intolerant to large changes in the architecture of our world view (it’s a hassle, first of all). If our understanding of reality isn’t resilient, no useful information about our surroundings can be ascertained. Similarly, if instead of changing flippantly it were to be completely solid, we couldn’t move to maturity from our infantile state, nor could we grow in any degree after the point of solidification, if such a point exists (and it appears to exist in very old people and fundamentalists who have hit the very edge of all truth).

If you would like an exercise in frustration, grab a stressball and invite a missionary (any religion will do) over to your house and ask him/her deeper questions about the world. I’m not saying all missionaries are foolish, not at all, but generally the ones I’ve encountered seem to spew very simple analogies by which they can answer all your tough questions in just a few words. To me, this is irritating at best, like infomercials without the rounds of discounts, first because rarely do the analogies pertain to my question in any way, and secondly because the people who hand out these answers are completely satisfied with their product. Gah.

This presents a number of problems, most of which have to do with communication and experience. As a human stuck in particular times, circumstances, and a single identity, my ability to experience is limited. For instance, I’ll also never be a mother, a Japanese citizen, or the first person to the moon. I’ve also never been to war. I think I have a hundred thoughts on that very fact, but the result is simple: I cannot form a complete picture of the human experience. No one can, it’s a pipe dream, but we try. Our solution to this problem is language, which is remarkable in and of itself. I really can’t understand how someone learns a language, and while learning the word for “apple” might not be too difficult, how about what the word “thought” means. Nonetheless, each word we use to transmit experiences hinges on our experiences! It’s a self-referential, circular-reference, infinite loop mess at best!

The solution, as I see it comes from short stop and right field (if you’re at first base, I guess). What’s required are shared and created experiences. I’ve always hated art, because I suck at it. That and bad art sucks, but art (whether it be poetry, painting, literature, etc) has the capacity to create experiences and incite emotions. Instead of trying to communicate whatever happened in my life to you, an attempt is made to recreate that same experience within your very own frame of reference. Granted, most “attempts” fail miserably, and some pieces work on some people and frankly don’t on others, oh well. Secondly, we have shared experiences that happen when, with another person, you do something. This provides for a common experience foundation by which to build off of, to converse, and to learn. A conversation with a stranger in a coffee shop allows for minimal exchange of “deep information” (which for some reason reminds me of Google’s “dark fiber”), no matter the depth of the subject matter, but a conversation with the same stranger after a bomb goes off across the street. Yeah. Now we’re talking.

This, right here, is why I’m so pissed off a lot of the time. It’s why I can’t stand evangelism, and apologetics just blah. I know, that’s just blasphemy right there. It’s why theology debates instead of peaking my interest, crush it, and why I’ll argue against anyone taking a stance just to try to throw them off balance long enough to glance at the world around them. It’s also why I gave Bill Simmons my wonderful textbook “Foundations of the Christian Worldview” and why I don’t miss it a bit. If your faith rests entirely on propositions, you have NOTHING. There is a tidal wave of criticism against anti-propositionalism (and/or I’m insane), because the people who have all the propositions are the most vocal because they are in the positions of power, and all their power is derived from this grand wisdom that is hardly such. Knowing Greek and Hebrew does NOT mean you know God. Please. That sounds like the medieval churches and Latin.

The beauty of the Christian message lies in its capacity to affect us, and deeply. A lot of this we call God. The rest, as I see it, is fellowship (or discipleship) and the Bible, which serve as those critical bridges for a complete change of a person, a transformation of the way we see the world. The Bible provides the art, a history of an oppressed people and their attempts to find God as well as their collected wisdom and poetry. From disgusting stories of genocide, rape, and murder to beautiful narratives of love and goodwill (Shalom, if you want). The Bible (a lot of times, for a lot of people) hits the nail on the archetype in such a way that resonates within the soul of man. Problem being, people today seem to want to butcher the entire book, carve it up into little pieces, and mix them with a whole slew of other gruel to force feed to the masses. Humorously, people have been trying to distill snippet answers out of scripture forever (my favorites being Jonathan Edwards and John Calvin!) Why is it that the debate about the will of man vs the will of God rages on even today? Why is it that the harmonization of “those verses” has proved so futile? (The answer to these questions is left as a contextual exercise for the reader) The Bible creates experiences within its readers, and therein lies its strength. Maybe the authors of the Gospels were rather loose with their quotations because their books were never meant to be read like multiplication tables?

Discipleship and fellowship follow, providing for shared experience. Go and make disciples of all nations. I (and the rest of the world) could use one less leaflet in my hand, and one more person to live life with. Somehow, God knows this, but we’ve lost it. “Nobody can be argued into the faith”, but we continue, because we’re insecure. We want what they have, raw “objective” logical backing (and we’re never going to get it), because Christ obviously isn’t behind us . When I learn about God from other people, it is generally when we are both serving other people, and in truths that cannot be put into words, not when I’m being intravenously fed vomit. Maybe I’m just messed up. But it seems to me that people grow when they join together and step onto the plane (geometry, not aviation) of life rather than having both stand on the side and lecture each other about how it feels to be there.

What is it with modern man’s fascination with facts? Sorry for the rant.