Living with God, without God

In my studies this last semester I ran across a quote from Bonhoeffer that confused me some.  I understood how the quote fit into the bigger movement of history at the time, but not how it would have fit into the life of an actual living worshipful soul.  Here's the quote:

So our coming of age forces us to a true recognition of our situation vis-à-vis God. God is teaching us that we must live as men who can get along very well without him. The God who is with us is the God who forsakes us (Mark 15:34). The God who makes us live in this world without using him as a working hypothesis is the God before whom we are ever standing. Before God and with him we live without God. God allows himself to be edged out of the world and onto the cross. God is weak and powerless in the world, and that is exactly the way, the only way, in which he can be with us and help us. (Letter of July 16, 1944.)  Source Linked

I think I understand a little more of how Bonhoeffer might have understood the idea now.  Tonight I've been watching a movie while doing the dishes that contrasts a variety of people who do really idiotic things because they are certain that God told them to do it.  They are so desperate for answers that show up right away that they project their own understandings onto God.  When it comes to trying to get revelation that is I think always the easy way out.  To quote another author, Philip Gulley, that I've been reading recently:

When God is the extrapolation of our highest principles, we are seldom challenged to expand our consciousness, which is why the divine in any culture seldom rises above that society's collective morality.

In prayer, its easy to take the first impression that seems apparent and to run with it as a totally reliable source.  When life becomes complicated and we instead of just asking we wrestle with God in prayer- we are still prone to confusion and reverently echo chambering our own desires back at ourselves.  Reviewing the history of the religious ideas that people have felt sure of that their successors later abandoned as ungodly makes this all too obvious.  It can be easy to be frustrated, feeling that we need to take everything based on our own wisdom alone because when you expect God to give you all the answers they never seem satisfactory- or at least not in any complete and total sense that is impregnable to simply changing your perspective over time.

But what if what God wanted all along was for use to figure it out on our own?  What if instead of praying to be given answers we should pray for wisdom and guidance and recognize that our decisions are ultimately our own because God isn't interested in trying to push us into little boxes of perfection in a perfect plan but is instead interested in our growth?

So does God answer prayer?  Of course, but we should be hesitant to take the decisions and impulses we feel during times of reverence and put them in God's mouth because if we make those impulses God's we may fail to own up to our own shortcomings that may be reflected in those thoughts.  We should expect divine strength and guidance- but not an answer key to all of life's decisions.  As the Father expected Christ to endure the Cross in part alone, we should humbly expect to endure this life at least in part on our own wisdom.  We should be like Christ who on the same cross from which he cried "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?" could-without divine hand holding- still say "Father forgive them for they know now what they do."

God and Country

I grew up on the idea that the US is somehow extra special in God's plan for the world.  I read material claiming that the US somehow was spotless from imperialism, was a land of perfect freedom, that the USA was in some sense a Christian nation where the truth's of God could be favored over other belief systems, and that the USA had some kind of special role to play in bringing about the events leading to the end of the world.  As I became more mature and my understanding deepened  I understood that the United States history cannot be understood properly while ignoring its imperialistic past, that the USA is more important as a place where some ideals of freedom were formed as opposed to where they were first or best realized, that calls for running the government as a "Christian Nation" often are intended to be acted out in violations of the freedoms of those who were not Christians or whose version of Christianity differed from those in power, and that the end of the world predictions I heard in Sunday had often more to do with patriotism than with scriptures.

But, despite all of that the idea of the US being somehow special in God's plan just seemed like a harmless extension of patriotim that could be winked at.

Now I find the whole package kind of frighteningly unnerving.  In all the history classes I had taken up to date I had never understood the religious nature of the world wars.  I had assumed that Europe had secularized because of the trauma of the religious wars of the reformation.  I hadn't realized that it took a lot longer than this.  I hadn't realized that state religions had flourished in much of Europe until the world wars.  I hadn't realized that so many of the state religions had rallied for God and Country- to the point of preaching death to the enemy and often participating either actively or compliantly with the state brutality encouraged by Nazism.  Being in a religion doesn't make you a good person even if it gives you a narrative to explain how and why you want to be one.  After seeing so much killing done in the name of God and Country it makes sense for Europe to back away from state religions just as it backed away from the hyper nationalism of fascism.

But just how did these religious leaders justify to themselves the violence that they condoned?  It made so much more sense when I watched a video of some of them explaining what happened online.



In this film, it is explained how Hitler combined a sense of love of God and country together in a toxic mass of glorified nonsense.  German Christians who experienced his masterful rhetoric often would have viewed that the Nazi party acting through a militant Germany was God's answer to the Godless Atheists of Communism.  It was all part of God's plan for saving the world from the evils of the last days.  But evil is perfectly capable of acting through a theistic Hitler as through an atheistic Stalin.

So why does that matter regarding the USA?  I watched another video



In this video, Billy Graham argues that a militant United States is God's answer to the evils of godless communism, but only if it purifies itself through purer conversion to Christ.  One might argue that surely Hitler and the Christians who followed him were wrong and Billy Graham was right?  I'd argue that the Lutherans who followed Hitler and the Billy Graham's of the world aren't any more right or wrong than each other.  They were both expression a by then traditional form of patriotism by mixing up God in their own political and military goals.  The Lutherans following Hitler were simply unlucky that the traditional association of God and country turned out so sour for them because Hitler was a man of profoundly evil assumptions about the world.  But you might argue that in the US we aren't that depraved and that we would never allow our sense of destiny to override our sense of morality.  To that I'd say watch this clip



When a popular politician who was close to being vice president blasphemously suggests that the US should use water boarding to "baptize terrorists" and the crowd cheers at the idea- we aren't any inherently better than the Croatian Catholics who shocked even the Nazis by their brutality in massacring people whose religion they disagreed with.  We're simply lucky we haven't had a political leader elected who actually asked us to do such things on such a scale and instead get off easy with just a few incidents of Muslim prisoners raped and at least one tortured to death in US prisons.  We aren't magically moral because of our country or our God- but when we link God and Country too closely in our minds we risk assuming that we are and that all our actions are justified because of it.

The Reformation, and poetry

I've been taking a class on the history of Christianity this semester.  The author of the textbook has done a marvelous job presenting many of the different social movements and the people in history in a very sympathetic light so that I keep reading about a change in history and thinking "Yes Yes that addressed the problems of that era.  I so deeply agree or sympathize with what this person does" and then find myself turning around and saying "That was really sick.  There is so much wrong with what just happened there.  I could never accept that action or that opinion."  The experiments of human society are messy and unpleasant much of the time.  But I can' reject them because I'm human and my own world is subject to the same human imperfections.  This experience of relearning about the reformation led to my writing this poem.

Blood

The past is covered in blood.
Food robbed from the hungry
Water taken from the thirsty.
Quarrels broken into pools of blood.

I must escape this pool of blood
Restore food to the hungry
Give water to the thirsty,
And mend the wounds with the gift of my blood.

Sick of gore, the red sunrise beckons.
Come eat without price
Come drink without money,
Come cleanse your soul from blood.

The red mirage transforms to blood
The people are hungry
The children are thirsty,
And through my veins, flows blood.

The Willard Bay Oil Spill and Interstate Pipeline Safety Regulations

This is an essay I wrote on as part of applying for a scholarship that came through.  500$ free for pretty much just reading the newspaper.  Thing is the essay itself didn't seem like that much of something special to me.  But I guess the people who award scholarships liked it.  I just thought I'd celebrate the scholarship by blogging the essay.

Within the past three years there have been three oil spills in Utah.  The most recent oil spill happened near Willard Bay in March 2013.  This spill received attention in part because of the dramatic story of a beaver dam stopping an oil spill from seriously contaminating a wildlife preserve.  But it also received attention because, unlike some of the earlier oil spills which happened as a result of difficult to prevent accidents such as a downed power falling on top of an oil pipeline, the Willard Bay spill happened as a result of lax safety oversight.  Federal law puts the regulation of interstate pipelines under the jurisdiction of the Pipeline & Hazardous Materials Safety Administration.  This administration has a limited ability to perform safety inspections because it only has 120 inspectors covering 2.6 million miles of pipeline across the entire nation, about 6,000 of them in Utah.  Most states do not suffer greatly from this lack of inspectors because the law allows the administration to delegate much of its responsibilities to state governments.  As a result most states use their own inspectors and funding from a federal matching program to inspect interstate pipelines.  Utah had not done this, leaving all inspection work to the Pipeline & Hazardous Materials Safety Administration instead.  Because of limited resources the pipeline was not properly monitored or repaired and a lengthwise seam on the 60 year old pipe ruptured.  Chevron spent $21.5 million in cleanup efforts before agreeing to a court settlement to pay the Utah government another $5.35 million in various fees and payments.  Governor Herbert has promised that the state will take a more active role in ensuring the safety of these pipelines by working through the Departments of Commerce and Environmental Quality, but did not propose any new legislation.  Representative Brian King in the Utah state legislature proposed looking into legislation to toughen penalties on oil spills.  In response to previous oil spills Salt Lake City Mayor Ralph Becker proposed advocating for more tough compliance measures, but did not advocate for change during the following legislative session and complained that the Department of Environmental Quality told him that enforcement measures weren't possible.  To date, the only clear response that has happened to improve interstate pipeline safety in Utah is that Chevron paid a large settlement and spent a large sum of money before that on cleanup efforts that may encourage them to be more careful with other pipelines they operate.  As time passes and the matter is considered by the government, it will become more likely that the Utah government may take more authority over regulating these interstate pipelines, especially if significant oil spills continue to happen at a rate of about once a year as they have been over the last three years.

References:

http://www.sltrib.com/sltrib/news/57275295-78/bay-chevron-willard-settlement.html.csp

http://www.sltrib.com/sltrib/news/54883167-78/pipeline-safety-pipelines-report.html.csp

http://www.sltrib.com/sltrib/news/56323703-78/pipeline-utah-safety-state.html.csp

http://www.sltrib.com/sltrib/politics/56075172-90/spill-state-pipeline-bay.html.csp

Rome

Growing up I remember being told from time to time that the United States was like Rome and that we could learn from Rome to help the United States learn how to avoid the mistakes of history.  When I first heard these things I thought they were exciting and grand sounding.  I knew Rome was big and powerful and supposedly had rules of government that somehow were supposed to have inspired our own somewhat.  So the take away for me was that I was part of the grand march of history, repeating the stories of the great and powerful in the past.

However, the application of this idea was always kind of vague.  Sometimes there was some suggestion of how the early Romans were free supposedly and we are free and the Roman's lost their freedom and we're about to lose ours or something along those lines.  About the only concrete idea I ever seemed to take away from it was that supposedly Rome fell because God doesn't like it when people have too much unapproved sex and that therefore we needed to prevent our culture from being involved in too much unapproved of sex to prevent our falling like Rome.  Then there was the distant future where after Rome lost their freedoms they persecuted lots of Christians, so supposedly I needed to keep my freedom or else somehow the government was going to go crazy and persecute me.

When I actually studied a little bit of Roman history, the whole concept blew apart for me.  I couldn't find any evidence anywhere that societies rose and fell based on how much approved vs disapproved sex they were having or whom they were having it with.  Rome was never particularly free, a aristocracy ruled pretty freely.  The governance concepts, well, there are some vague parallels but not many of them and most of them fall apart on closer inspection.  Sure, there were representatives elected to some councils, but those councils were made to be powerless and became more powerless as time passed.  As for the Roman Empire being big and the US being big, well, I stopped feeling particularly proud of that parallel.  The Roman empire produced a profound peace in its interior during the pax romana by conquering large amounts of territory.  In the meantime anyone outside the Roman civilization were treated with military brutality to get them in the Roman world.  The United States also has had a period of dramatic cruelty and barbarous behavior towards the people who held the land it wanted.  Not something to be proud of.  In fact, its so embarrassing that we seem to as a culture wish to forget the whole thing.  I remember an email forward that was sent around some years ago where the writer gushed on about how America had never conquered land in order to occupy it or hold it as territory for its own benefit.  Well, that might be true if you ignore Texas, Hawaii, the Philippines, the original boundaries of many Indian tribal lands, etc...  You can surely argue that we have created a vibrant and powerful culture on the ashes of what we destroyed in many cases, and so did Rome.  But I can't look on the past with unmixed pride.

As far as being persecuted, well, I no longer view not having my religious opinions and practices supported by the government as being persecuted.  I no longer assume that government religious favoritism is a zero sum game where some religion is going to win government dominance so it might as well be mine so that more souls can be saved.  And when I don't feel persecuted anymore, the comparison with Rome disappears.

I really stopped feeling like Rome had anything to do with the USA, or at least not in ways that I'd like to think about.

I picked up a book recently discussing the history of the early Christian time period in Roman history.  And reading it, suddenly comparing Rome to the USA popped right back in my head.  In the early Christian era, the author describes that both the pagans and Christians viewed that achieving doctrinal consistency was essential to securing the favor of God or the God's to their empire.  When the Roman empire was wavering back and forth between glory and apparent imminent collapse it would have felt as if the forces of good and evil were battling and that a bit more effort towards piousness might turn the balance towards the temporal salvation of Rome. As the empire wavered, faith in the God's wavered and Christianity was ready to come in with the explanation that if the pagans converted to Christianity that God would favor them with glory and military might again.  When Rome succeeded, the Pagans cheered that the God's had shown favor, discrediting the growing movement of Christians whose very presence tainted the chances of success.  After Constantine, Christians still felt a need to purify land for God's grace by ensuring that heresy was stamped out.  If heretics were allowed to run loose God's favor might withdraw, so it became a social duty to aggressively convert/harrass/kill heretics.

So when I think of all the appeals I have heard claiming that we are a Christian nation or that the government was only meant to protect religious freedom for Christians or that we need laws governed by a particular brand of Christianity in order to be favored by God in otherwise uncertain times, I hear the echos of Rome.  Echos of screaming heretics burning alive, among other things.

I sometimes ponder the statement by Paul that God causes it to rain on the just and unjust.  Paul concluded that God was only indulging the ignorance of the pagans, but that in order to obtain temporal blessings like rain the hearers would need to convert.  But, time has passed and rain still falls on both the Godly and unGodly.  But when you think about it, if God is really our Father, wouldn't we expect that being starved to death by a famine would be His way of dealing with children.  Or, at least, I'd never imagine letting my children starve to death because of an obedience issue.  I might be frustrated and use punishments to help teach principles like "don't run into the street"  But I'd work to preserve life and minimize suffering.  In the end, I think God sends rain on both the righteous and unrighteoud all the time- just like I feed my kids even when they are annoying.

Homeschooling

I was homeschooled from about 6th grade on.  The reasons why are kind of complicated, but lets say there was a big project involving being required to study astrology in math class, being given word puzzles as English homework on a regular basis, and getting an A on an assignment because it involved a % mark.  It's been a long time since I left that world, and I think I can look back on it now with a lot better perspective than I had at the time.  I wanted to give a quick review of what I felt about the experience in terms of the quality of academics, my emotional well being, and my social well being.

Quality of Academics

Homeschooling did help some parts of my academic progress.  For instance, grammar was something that always eluded me until I studied it at home.  Instead of writing assignments being something that were inflexible and arbitrary, I could adapt writing assignments to my own ideas and style and developed in writing much more than I would have otherwise.  I also don't think I would have ever studied poetry if I hadn't been home schooled, and an ability to enjoy poetry has enriched my life even if the poetry I write is only mediocre.

In some ways homeschooling actually hurt my academic progress.  During the time that the whole curriculum plan was built for us by Calvert School it went pretty well, but afterwards when we tried to build our own it went downhill.  My parents didn't feel up to teaching me chemistry or biology or having me self study.  So we signed me up for a BYU independent study biology course.  I don't know if they've improved, but the BYU high school independent study course for biology was pretty horrible at the time.  And I had no lab experience.  Its not that you can't experience biology labs in home school, its just that you have to buy them, and we didn't.  In chemistry we signed me up for a chemistry class from the local community college.  That by itself was actually a very good move.  It got me a little college credit, I learned much better than I would have at home, and it broke down some of the fear of college level courses for me.  But, we never thought to sign me up for the lab section of the chemistry class, which for whatever reason was optional at Montgomery College.  So I missed the labs again.  Yes we could have purchased those too, but my feeling is that unless your parents are already professional chemists, that is probably a bad idea.  At school you actually have a full set of safety equipment.  The things we used for civics studies didn't allow for any serious alternate world view presentation, and didn't encourage critical thought or introspection.  Even though I learned to break past writers block, grammar, and any fear of writing, my parents were unable to provide serious contributions to the maturity of my writing.  Most of what I wrote during that time except for humor pieces is so embarrassing to me today that I can hardly read it.

Emotional Well Being

Public school during 5th and 6th grades was living hell for me.  One of the things I liked the most about leaving the public school system is that breaking out of the environments where so many bad things happened to me allowed me to let go of a lot of the hatred and anger that had been building up in my personality.  Trying to navigate childhood with Asperger Syndrome is hard, and its harder when your undiagnosed and hardly anybody really gets you.  Despite not being diagnosed, the school councilors and psychologists could tell there was something wrong and had me spend some time in the special ed program.  They knew all about how I had trouble socializing, had problems empathizing, and learned things in an unusual pattern.  All the dots were there, but the paradigm to connect them hadn't been accepted in the DSM yet, so I was stuck with vague labels and assignments to write and read things that encouraged looking at stories from more than one perspective.  Didn't do me much good, and other than offering to let me spend more time playing with other special ed kids they didn't do anything that I am aware of to try to help me make friends.  And who really wants the stigma of spending lots of time with the special ed kids?

So I got to heal from a lot of the pain of public school just by leaving it.  But homeschooling does something funny to your emotional well being.  Its puts a lot of your eggs into one basket.  An overwhelming portion of your time is spent in one social group, and if family relationships go sour then you have very few options to escape it.  To imagine how badly that can end, think of how many people like or dislike subjects in school based on whether they liked or disliked the teacher for that class and for no other reason.  So say your mom is your teacher in ALL of your subjects and the relationship goes sour.  You either have the choice to hate academics, or make the mature decision to base your like or dislike of a subject on something other than who is helping you learn it.  Fortunately I didn't like or dislike subjects based on teachers.  And, when my mom would start to threaten to withdraw all support from me to force me to obey her idea of perfect study methods or habits, I just call her threat and learn to self study.  This was how I lived with my mother in general- find ways to reduce any need for physical, academic, or emotional support from her to as little as possible.  It taught me good study habits, even if my life at home was pretty much living hell a lot of the time just like public school had been.  It is normal for teenagers to need to learn some independence from their parents and authority figures.  Public school decentralizes those authority figures and allows you to take breaks from people you have trouble getting along with.  Home schooling centralizes many of your authority figures into one and gives very few opportunities to take breaks from people you don't get along with.  The only times I routinely wasn't with my family was during early morning seminary, mutual night at church, and church itself.  Other than that I spent almost all of my time with my family.

In the end I'm unsure whether the living hell of public school would have been better to continue if it would have meant not having to deal with living hell at home.  Its possible that I would simply have had bad experiences in both places at once if I had stayed in public school.

Social Well Being

Because I didn't have any effective way to deal with the problems inherent in having Asperger Syndrome, my social well being was pretty much broken and would have been broken no matter which path I took in life.  Public school wasn't working.  Homeschooling only allowed me to socialize at church or church events or with people from church on a regular basis.  Luckily, my group of friends at church was really great and our little group did tons of things together.

We did try to break out of not having socializing opportunities in different ways.  There was a group of homeschooling families in the neighborhood that gathered at a public park to play together on a regular basis.  They were good and intelligent people.  Unfortunately the brand of Christianity they belonged to made them somewhat apprehensive of mormons and I think there was almost a standing ban on us playing together in non public settings.  It got awkward quickly, which is too bad because I got along with some of them pretty well.  Since hanging out with the local Christian homeschooling groups didn't work out so well, we tried forming our own mormon homeschooling groups instead.  This had its own problems.  Most of the homeschooled kids were pretty young, and when I was a somewhat older teenage boy most of the other kids involved were pre adolescent girls.  Not so much my thing.  There were occasionally boys my age in these groups, but there was a problem with trying to be friends with them.

The thing is, one of the major reasons teenagers get taken out of public school and home schooled when the parents aren't concerned about the academics of the school district is to rescue them from some kind of bad behavior or a bad situation where the school isn't protecting them.  They don't tend to home school for very long, just long enough for their parents to feel like they have gotten past some life crisis of immoral or illegal behavior or simply a dangerous situation.  So they don't tend to be part of the homeschooling community for very long and they tend not always to be the kinds of people you want to spend time with when they are.  I remember a play event where my mom brought me a boy to play with and pre warned me that this boy was into some bad things and that if he proposed to do anything illegal or immoral that I should feel free to reject his ideas of a fun time.  During one of these visits he told me about how he wanted to grow up to be a hacker or a drug dealer because that was how to make a lot of money.  Even if the kids were well behaved and not spending their time with you making crude gestures and crude jokes and planning their future criminal life, I'm an Aspie, which means that I won't necessarily be able to become friends easily with anybody just because you throw them at me.  I had some play visits where I just sat there and watched the other kids play video games that I had never played before and couldn't easily learn because I had never played anything more complicated than a sega genesis.  If I hadn't been so well integrated into the social life at church, homeschooling would have been an utter failure for me at allowing me to have a social life.

So was I glad that I was home schooled?  Yes and no.  I was traumatized by 5th and 6th grade enough when 6th grade was in the elementary school, that I think I would have been severely damaged by middle school.  Maybe by high school that would have all calmed down.  Before I left the public school system I would have my mom call people to ask to play based on which kids weren't making fun of me, and then those kids would start making fun of me just to get the message across that my friendship wasn't wanted.  So I think socially and emotionally it gave me a valuable break that allowed me to recuperate in preparation for the epic control battles with my mother that ended with me pushing her out of my life in many ways.  I managed to do this in a way that left her proud of me and left a path forwards for the relationship to continue to develop in a positive way.  But I don't know how I would have managed dealing with middle school and early high school and the battles with my mother at the same time.

If I had to do home school over again and I could change something about what I did academically, it would be that instead of just doing the one class at Montgomery College as a 15 something year old I would have dropped almost all the classes I was self studying and tried to get an associates from Montgomery College before I turned 18.  That would have been a much better investment in myself than the self study courses I was doing and would have prepared me for life much better than the distance studies courses I started taking from George Wythe College.  For whatever reason having me take more college classes from the community college just never occurred to us.  Which is really too bad.

Chaos in Stillness, and Stillness in Chaos

Today I stood in the bathroom, looking at my wife and kids.  The three year old, or T as we have been abbreviating him online, is sitting on top of the toilet kiddy seat, completely naked, telling me about how he is sitting on the potty like mommy and daddy.  I’m glad he’s so happy about this.  Most of the day he’s been vomiting and unable to eat, or sleeping.  The 1 year old L is sitting in the sink, playing with the breakable travel alarm clock we keep on the counter and my breakable electric razor before I take it away again.  My wife is about to try to read to me out of the bible as I try to get both the kids into the bath.  Most nights I’m not home for this, and the last several times I’ve come home from work after the kids have had baths there was water splashed half way across the bathroom floor.

But at least during that moment of chaos, I’m holding still.  At least on the outside.

A few weeks ago we invited someone over to dinner.  With two kids our meals can be something more like a zoo feeding time than a ‘proper’ dinner.  But we try to laugh and have fun with it anyways.  Trying to hold intelligent conversation, eat, fend off the two little bandits trying to steal my attention and my cup of water, and figure out all of the social communication signals involved with having someone new in my environment is hard.  Probably about a week later I’m still internally freaking out because I don’t know if how we use cloth napkins might have communicated a confusing contradiction because cloth napkins normally are used at more formal events and in reality our chaotic dinner habits are born of trying to feed two small children in a hurry.  Our guest was very politely following a formality of etiquette that I am aware of but unfamiliar with, leaving me unsure how to interpret what it means when they used it in a complete mismatch to the chaos of the situation.  But if you took a photograph of our meal, any given moment might have looked calm enough.

At work the other day my manager praised me for having won the most fake money on our team for use at the year end company auction.  Apparently I had 11 customers who gave me 100% scores on good customer service after our phone calls (apparently not many other people got so many) and I practically never miss work or even come in late.  On the surface it looks good.  Underneath, I’m going crazy from the stress of strained relationships from having too little time away from work and school, strained relationships with myself from having too little time to invest in myself, financial goals that seem just out of reach of our income unless we fight for each dollar, chronically almost incomplete or almost late school work, and just trying to make myself slow down the pace of my inner life.  Some days my stress is so high that my acid reflux never really calms down between meals and I spend my time at work massaging my stomach to help relieve the tension building up inside of it.  I sometimes stop being able to digest my food fully- I’m not joking that happens to me when I’m on the danger zone of being stressed out.  I feel so mentally exhausted that even asking my customers names seems like too much to ask.  I frequently forget and have to ask at the end of the call, but honestly I just feel too exhausted to care.  As for making multiple sales pitches per call, forget it, I feel great if I can make myself offer them just one sales pitch.  I’ve still never figured out how to make even one sales pitch to a 3rd party monitoring tech support company that calls me because their connection to the customers modem went down- they aren’t the decision makes and probably never even talk to the decision makers other than when their monitoring contract was drawn up.  And how do you even start to think about selling our own IT support to an on site IT specialist?  “Hey just so you know Mr. Local IT, we have this great product that will make your boss lay you off, want to pass the word along to see if your boss wants it?"  But if I forget to make those two sales pitches my quality stats will suffer.  If I don’t make the calls shorter eventually someone is going to freak out on me and threaten to fire me again.  So I still stress about it all, even though I still feel too exhausted to even care some of the time.  I need to reinvest in me, but where do I start when there isn’t very much of me left to go around any more?

I like to say that trying to take care of my own emotional well being is like driving a car with a broken gas tank indicator.  I don’t tend to know I’m low on emotional energy until I run out.  Sometimes I hit bottom, and won’t even be able to tell what’s happening to me until I’ve had to stop and think about it.  By then I can be pretty messed up.  So I try to reboot my self care, start trying to read books for fun between calls instead of doing low quality homework because I can’t concentrate very well at work anyways, try to force away some of the urgent things in life so that I can just relax a while with my wife.  Try to force away some of the stupid things in life that suck the energy away from me but give me little back.  Take a few moments I’m getting dressed for the day to read something uplifting  Try to spend more time romping with my kids.  Life never stops, even if I wish I could take a vacation from it every once in a while.  But for those few moments that I spend relaxing with my wife, reading something uplifting, or tickling my kids, I try to approach stillness that is on both my inside and my outside, even if its just for a few moments.

Shooting coverage and Asperger Syndrome

With the recent shooting there has been a lot of spin put on demonizing the shooter.  Its easy to understand why, nobody likes a mass murderer.  But with the sensationalistic reporting and the focus on the shooter having psychological problems I've been bothered by attempts to gloss over who the guy was and present black and white ideas like "keep guns away from psycho people" and things like that as if that would have actually solved anything.  A lot of conclusions have been jumped to and a lot of bad reporting is happening.  I had a few thoughts.

There have been media reports that the shooter had "a personality disorder" or "undifferentiated mental problems" but the only specific information that seems to have come out yet is that he was diagnosed with Asperger Syndrome.  First, Asperger Syndrome is not a personality disorder.  I'm not going to go into defining it now (as if that were even relevant with the DSM-V coming out) but reporting it so many different ways was kind of dumb to begin with-probably just a consequence of the news trying to get out the information faster than they could verify it.  Apparently they haven't even verified the autism spectrum diagnosis, that's speculation based on publicly observed behavior which has no more verification to its reporting than early reports this his mother was a school teacher, that his brother was the shooter, or that he was dressed in a military style outfit, none of which apparently was true but got reported anyways.

Second, it has been emphasized in some reports that Asperger Syndrome is not correlated with violent crime and that the violent crime in question would be more likely to be done by someone with depression.  I'm happy that some media outlets have taken the time to mention that violence with weapons is not specifically common in Autistics, but the reporting on that end was about as simplistic in a good way as the reports slanted at making him sound "psycho" were simplistically bad.  First, in any large population you will find people with more or less violent tendencies.  Saying that Autism disorders are not correlated with gun violence is like saying that the average joe won't steal your lunch.  A few average joes will steal your lunch, most won't.  Second, saying that the shooting would be more likely done by someone with depression ignores the fact that the rate of depression among people with Asperger Syndrome is pretty high.  I haven't been able to find solid statistics on suicide but from what I've found the anecdotal evidence with Asperger Syndrome also shows a high suicide rate.  I even found one website that said the suicide rate was likely under reported because the adults with Asperger Syndrome are often undiagnosed and therefore not showing up in suicide statistics.

In the reports about his mothers gun collection one nuance is getting left out.  One of Tony Attwood's books recommended watching out for any obsessions with weapons because that could be a warning sign that the child is thinking about taking revenge on the bullies in his/her life.  Since the gun collecting was already a family hobby its possible that this warning sign wouldn't have functioned.  That isn't to say that she shouldn't have had a right to own a gun collection or that having a child with a mental disability should disqualify you from gun ownership, its just a nuance that is overlooked in the reporting.  Granted, at 20 something the shooter wasn't exactly looking for revenge against 1st grade bullies.  My guess is that the kid had a really horrible experience  going through elementary school and wanted to go destroy anybody he could find at the school as a way of expressing his anger at the school he grew up in.  Most people talk about how horrible their middle school years were, I wouldn't know because I was home schooled starting about half way through my last year of elementary school.  However, I can remember one of my favorite things about switching to homeschooling at first was that I had a chance to simply relax and let go of a lot of anger and hatred that had been building up towards my peers.  Since all of the people who had teased or ignored me or simply failed to be able to be my friend were no longer part of my life I could simply let go.  It was a long time before I realized that the bad experiences I had in elementary school were largely caused by my being unable to cope with the social environment rather than it being an environment that was toxic in general.

My experience in elementary school was bad enough that I had stopped hoping to find new friends and I had several incidents in a row where I tried to befriend someone based on the fact that they had not made fun of me in the past and they started making fun of me as a result-apparently to teach me to show my distance so that their social standing wouldn't be hurt by my attention.  I pretty much had come to the conclusion that no matter what new people I met I wouldn't find any more friends beyond the few I already had.  I won't say that homeschooling solved my life problems- homeschooling was hell in some other ways and I'm not sure which set of experiences would have been more emotionally damaging over time- staying in public school or homeschooling.  By the time I left home I struggled with believing that in certain specific ways I was a worthless human being and didn't deserve respect from other people.  And that was somewhat up from my mid teens when I frequently believed I was completely worthless and didn't deserve to live.  The last pieces of that feeling of worthlessness didn't fall away until maybe a year or two before getting married.

A lot of reports are talking as if the shooter was a thoroughly evil psychopath who should have been obvious to identify and therefore treated through better public mental programs or prevented from owning any guns (which ignores the fact that they were his moms guns, not his).  And while murdering tons of little kids is definitely and thoroughly evil, I have trouble seeing the man behind the shootings as pure evil.  I tend to see someone whose life had been hell.  Someone who one day snapped and lashed out at his mother who may have been an angelic caretaker or an infantalizing-you'll-never-achieve-anything-demon-hiding-in-mommy's-social-respectability.  Or maybe a little of both, humans are complicated.  Having murdered her I suspect he kind of said to himself that as long as he was that evil he might as well take out as many people as he could in a place he hated before he killed himself.  Probably if he hadn't snapped on that day he would have eventually found some firmer ground for himself, life would have gotten better in some ways eventually.  Perhaps he could have done about anything, it sounds like the guy was brilliant.  If he had held on for just a little bit longer... but he didn't and he went out in a way that will make it harder to tell stories of people like him without stigma following them.  I just don't see the pure evil that makes good news headlines.  I see someone who maybe was a little bit or even a lot like me-that failed to hold on and reacted violently.  Its true there is nothing about the Asperger syndrome that makes you inherently more violent than anyone else, but if its true he had it we can imagine his life had some pretty hard knocks involved in just getting through the normal world on a regular basis.

Exploring the conflict between Science and Religion

As an introduction to this post, most of what follows I actually wrote as a response to a discussion prompt for a class two semesters ago, as have several other blog posts I've done.  So if this seems kind of out of the blue it is.  I just really like what I wrote up so I figured I'd re use it.

The real point of incompatibility between science and religion is the type of logic used by each.  Since 1620 when Francis Bacon wrote Novum Organum science was reoriented to be based on inductive logic where (simply put) you take observations, make tentative assumptions based on observation, and then test the assumptions by more observations.  Previous scientists had made observations but the scientific method didn't really start to be worked out till Bacon.
Religion, on the other hand, is based more essentially on deductive logic as developed by Aristotle.  A series of spiritual experiences or beliefs are taken as assumptions and then conclusions are made based on those assumptions.  Occasionally the assumptions might be revised by a new spiritual experience or from some other cultural source of information but generally speaking the foundational assumptions are not supposed to change.  If anything is encountered which seems to contradict the assumptions then the typical doctrinal response is to ignore it as invalid on its face because it contradicts the assumptions, contradict it by interpreting the assumptions in a more complicated way, or to make more and more complicated interpretations of the assumptions to allow the apparent contradiction to disappear.
Science using inductive logic never assumes it has a completely true and exact assumption but by testing and revising the assumptions a lot over time they become useful or probably mostly true.  Religion using a more deductive style of logic assumes it has achieved at least some things that are completely true and exactly correct.  It is more or less assumed that given time that other truths can be discovered by exploring the complexities and consequences of those original assumptions.
At least as far as traditional biblical interpretation is concerned we have many cases where there is apparent contradiction between science and religion.  How individuals handle that can vary a lot.  I don't have any easy answers.  Over my life I've had a lot of people who tried to reassure me of my faith by telling me a folklore version of science that was easier to disbelieve or where the contradictions didn't exist.  Like claiming neanderthals and humans didn't overlap in time and that humans don't appear in the fossil record till the time that the bible says they should.  I think that's a practice that we should try to avoid.  It seems almost unavoidable that such folklore sciences will show up because as long as normal people try to figure out science they are bound to make mistakes or make stuff up to fill the gaps in their memory or understanding.  But as much as we can I think we should avoid putting words in scientists mouths to reassure ourselves.
There's no easy way to tell science and religion to make nice and stop fighting because a typical religious doctrine system has no inherent logical path to rapidly reform itself when new evidence shows up.  Science has no inherent logical mechanism to adapt to new religious ideas nor any way to judge which religion's ideas should be incorporated.  They are based on two completely different logic systems so it wouldn't really make sense for them to immediately cross fertilize each other.  If you aren't supposed to contradict the assumptions it takes a lot of time for the assumptions to disappear before you can ignore them.  It wasn't until 1822 (per wikipedia ) that the Catholic Church stopped the ban of printing "heliocentric books in Rome".  That's a grand delay of nearly 300 years after Copernicus published in 1543.  Granted its not always that slow, I think when I read one of Stephen Hawking's books (sorry I can't say which I read several) that he said the Catholic church almost immediately gave doctrinal support to his work on the Big Bang because they thought it was easy to reconcile the big bang with the idea of God having created the Universe.  Having already dismissed biblical literalism from their astronomy they were open to further change.  On other subjects literalism is still more or less the official interpretation (depending on which religion you adhere to).  Its always possible that science on any given subject will turn out to be partially or extremely wrong.  Science isn't supposed to give us absolute truth so we can never rule that out.  Its always possible that the range of subjects on which religions will judge their traditional beliefs to be unsupportable will expand and that in 100 years our descendents will look back on us and laugh with scorn about how crazy we were and how we just didn't realize that a few more parts of our belief systems were obviously expendable.  I think the best thing to do would be for each side to be tolerant of each other and pick their fights as respectfully and as humbly as possible.  Science is most certainly not representing absolute truth because its not meant to do so.  On the other hand, there is probably no belief system with a long history where we couldn't look at the early history and find beliefs contradicted by their later history.  Just take the Old Testament statements about what to do with people with contradictory beliefs and behavior and compare that to the time immediately following the Reformation (lots of religious wars-kill the heretic and force them to believe) and then again with modern practice of Christians.  Or look at New Testament statements about the spirituality and worth of women (1 Timothy 2:12-15 for example) and compare it with recent statements by LDS church leaders (I won't bother linking any, the statements that women are spiritually superior is so frequently repeated it doesn't bear citing).  No matter whether you think its good or bad, no true contradiction, or happened for valid reasons and that both were right in their times, some doctrines change.

"Family Life" education

A while back there was a bill proposed in Utah  that would have allowed school districts to opt out of teaching any sexual education and prohibit (if I recall) any mention of contraception.  After a great deal of controversy, it became clear via polls and public outcry that the plan did not have public support.  It was passed by the legislature, vetoed by the governor, and in the following election the man who introduced the bill lost his re election bid.

To put context on this, Utah law already bans encouraging contraception use (though not mentioning that it exists) and parents are allowed to opt their children out of sexual education as it exists.  The sexual education as it exists will depend on the school district, I believe my wife stated that the only sexual education done in her school district was a quick meeting where they told you to anticipate the development of secondary sex characteristics.  And that was it.  Not much to opt out of.

The debates on the subject of how much sexual education to put in school often seem to come back to the idea that we are afraid of "giving kids ideas."  The thing is, kids have dumb ideas all the time without any adult having to tell them about anything.  It reminds me of a job I had doing customer service for a cell phone company.  There were countless parents who called in shocked that there was an enormous charge on their bill showing that their child had been using text messaging.  They often tried to claim that their child didn't know how to text message because they hadn't taught them how.    My coworkers and I used to jokingly tell these parents that if their kids are in school, have friends, and have a phone they know how to text.  Nobody has to show them how for them to figure it out.  Similarly, teenagers have all the relevant anatomy, the correct hormones, and coed environments.  Even if nobody tells them "how" to go about getting pregnant reliably, teenagers inherently have all the ingredients necessary to have lots of clueless sexual interaction.  On top of that we live in a rather sexually obsessed and saturated culture.  Not talking about sex only makes it so that the doors of communication between the school or parents and the child on the subject are shut, it doesn't actually keep the child from receiving lots of sexual communication, much of it unhealthy and attached to negative social stereotypes and roles.

Certainly sex ed is awkward.  Even though I never attended it in public school myself (parental opt out), I had to deal with classmates who were trying to find a way to relate to all the new information that was dumped on them and in a poorly disciplined classroom this led to several awkward moments where students sat around discussing whether their bodies were mature enough to achieve ejaculation or drew pictures of penises (with smiley faces) on the blackboard.  The solution to awkwardness isn't to run away though, and in the situations in which I grew up, better discipline in the classroom could have solved most of the problems.

I tend to view sex ed for teenagers like drivers ed.  We expect children to grow up and probably use a car daily in navigating their world.  Learning to drive isn't automatic like learning to breathe, so we have drivers ed requirements where society does something to help make sure everybody knows the basics to help keep them safe.  Similarly we hope that children will grow up, form relationships, and have families (or shall we say it, we hope they will have sex) as part of a normal emotionally healthy life.  Overwhelmingly, the human goal in life isn't celibacy.  There is nothing automatic about learning to have healthy relationships with emotionally and physically satisfying sex in them.  There are plenty of parts the schools certainly can't help with, but plenty they can.  Just like we don't raise children with a goal in life that they should be unable to drive, we should stop talking about sex ed as if the goal for our children was for them to be celibate.  Sure there are limits on that.  We don't put toddlers in drivers ed and we don't include nascar driving or drag racing in the list of skills for teenagers to master for their drivers license.  Similarly, we can choose what information to give to teenagers in sex ed.  There is no reason we need or want teenagers to be able to recite the Kama Sutra or recite all the sex tips that were talked about in last weeks grocery store magazines.  But some basics are a good thing to help them form safe and healthy relationships that we expect some day will be sexually satisfying.  Since in our culture families and friends haven't been reliable sources of information (too scared, too embarrassed, too whatever it is) some teaching in schools can be a good thing. 

Moses and Egypt

The story of Moses and Egypt is one that I'm not so certain about how we interpret it.  The traditional view of a massive slave population that is shepherded out of Egypt is one that I think even LDS orthodox sources (institute manuals or FARMS, can't remember which it was) limit with possible interpretations of how the large numbers of people could be reinterpreted as mistranslations of linguistically similar phrases.  There's one thing I feel fairly certain of.  Our view of the pre-exodus Israelites being wretched slaves is probably a bunch of ethnocentric bias.  Probably closer to the truth is that the Israelites were a local aristocracy that had their privileges taken away so that they had to pay a sort of "human labor" tax that was typical of Egyptian peasants.

Here's how the reasoning works:
Genesis 47:12 suggests that Jacob and his family were being fed by the gift of Joseph's rank and position- ie would probably be exempt from selling themselves and their possessions as described in 47:14-20 because they had Joseph giving them the food for free.  You end up with a unique political situation of 3 land owning classes, being Israelites, the Priests (47:22) and the Pharaoh himself (47:20).  So it seems inappropriate to interpret them as equals with the Egyptians and then were slaves, they are an aristocracy.  This seems supported by Exodus 1:9 which shows the Israelites as being a competing political center of power.  From the historical record we know that a large part of Pharaoh's social organizing power lay in conscripting normal peasants to work on public works projects when the land was not fit for farming.  Exodus 1:11 describes the Israelites getting conscripted or a public works project.  So when we think of the Israelites as slaves we are probably misreading the situation.  If the Israelites are still shepherds at this time the work season may have felt more oppressive to them since sheep and cows don't have seasons of the year where you can ignore them because the Nile is doing the wrong thing at the moment.  However from the perspective of Egyptian government they probably simply had their aristocratic privileges removed and are being made to work on public works projects like normal citizens.  These public works projects would expose them more directly to the Egyptian religion as many of the building projects I'm guessing had sacred contexts to them.  Being required to work on public buildings to the honor of a God-King and his pantheon you don't believe in could eventually pressure the Israelites to socially bond into the Egyptian religion.  This might increase the importance for the Isrealites to leave before they completely blended their culture in.

The really funny thing about this is that all the biblical archeologists who are looking for evidence of a massive slave class are probably never going to find anything because the condition of slavery as referred to biblically is probably just the hard labor life of a typical ancient Egyptian peasant- so it would be comparatively indistinguishable from the surrounding Egyptians who were working there.  There could be differences for certain, but not anywhere near as many especially since they would be living in worker camps (not their own permanent dwellings where they might make more dent on artwork or literature) along with typical Egyptians.  Even if the tale of Moses leading the tribes out of Egypt is in general outline correct and not a history/legend mix, the chances of any archeological Hebrew slave class being found in the Pi-Ramsees is pretty much nil.

Humans... old humans

Recently I can't stop bumping into information on scientific discoveries about early humanity.  First it was science websites talking about the earliest proved artifacts of deep sea fishing and bug repellant bedding arrangements.  Next it was my biology class ending with a section on human evolution.  Now, it looks like my general education humanities class begins with a discussion of cro-magnon culture and artifacts.  The introduction to the course spent an entire page warning me that I was going to have to deal with information that contradicted or failed to support the bible.

Believe it or not, I'm actually somewhat pleased that my human evolution studies are being followed almost immediately by a discussion of cro-magnon culture and ancient civilizations.  It will be almost like picking up where I left off on the subject.  The best sum up of what I've learned so far is that "anatomically modern humans" have been around for a long time as far as science can tell, probably 100,000 years or more.  Even early in that time they made stone tools, developed art work, and ritual behavior probably indicative of religion. 

There are two things that bother me the most upon encountering these subjects.  First is that the people who purported to teach me about these subjects before and propose rudimentary systems of synthesizing scientific and religious knowledge apparently either knew very little or they were rejecting scientific reality to replace it with their own.  One professor claimed that neanderthals disappearing and anatomically modern humans appearing lined up with the Book of Genesis time lines.  Apparently he never really bothered fact checking who ever told him that or he made it up.  Neanderthals disappear from the fossil record about 30,000 years ago and overlapped in time a lot with and hybridized a little with modern humans.  Another professor claimed that we should simply view any human fossil from more than 5-6 thousand years ago to simply be non human.  Again, there's no science to back that up, from all appearances he simply made that up because it was the easiest way for him to reconcile the subjects.  Speculation proposed as fact with no evidence isn't something I should have been wasting my time listening to.  This doesn't bother me as much as it might because I've come to suspect anything that I learned from that set of professors as highly suspect.  At George Wythe it is quiet possible to be an academic jack of all trades and a master of none.

The second thing that really bothers me is that there has been little evolution of LDS doctrine to constructively deal with new evidence.  The Articles of Faith explicitly describe that God will yet reveal many important things, the D&C describes a line upon line process of gaining knowledge, the D&C describes all knowledge as being the inheritance of the saints, and doctrinal practice as described across the ancient and modern scripture makes it clear that God is frequently willing to let us rest on the laurels of our own cultural misunderstandings if it isn't particularly urgent that we learn better.  That all being said I think we should anticipate that as new knowledge and discoveries are made that church doctrine will somehow constructively adapt to avoid dogmatizing what were probably misunderstandings to begin with.  I propose no synthesis of doctrines.  I'm just sharply disappointed that none has been forthcoming.

Instead of any attempt to show that the different points of view can or should be reconciled with science we get talks quoted in lesson manuals about how a supposedly more careful reading of Genesis will prove that no organisms were mortal or died before Adam partook of the fruit.  Given an extensive fossil record that shows that people and organisms died before the garden ever took place this claim is so weak that it doesn't deserve to be part of the teaching.  But it is still there.  Believing this doctrine requires us to come up with explanations about how all those buried fossils weren't actually dead but were simply in a suspended animation till Adam partook of the fruit at which point a whole bunch of stuff died rather quickly.  It's always 'possible' this or some other explanation could reconcile our approved Institute manuals with science but it hardly seems likely.  Rather than acknowledging scientific evidence and flexibly suggesting that reinterpretation is possible we seem to be stuck in a position of trying to pick fights with science.

Here is what I believe has happened to us.  The LDS church has made statements from time to time discouraging us from exploring science based on religious belief or religion based on science.  If you link the two together when the science turns out to be wrong or incomplete the religious ideas you attached to it go out the window along with it.  However, in practice this restriction only appears to apply forwards in time.  Nobody ever gets up and says that we should throw out our pre restoration of the church ideas about science and religion- only avoid making new ones.  From Plato and Aristotle down animals and plants were considered to be unchanging over time, if I remember my biology textbook said because it was believed the species represented divine platonic "forms".  The LDS church latches onto this idea when it describes animals and plants being physical manifestations of spiritual creations.  Darwin didn't publish his ideas confronting the "mutability of species" until after Joseph Smith's death.  Without exploring science and religion together in the ways discouraged by the church pre-Darwinian ideas about science and religion are therefore essentially locked into place because it was the default assumption to make.  Granted, trying to come up with something logically consistent that divorces LDS thought from Aristotle on the mutability of species would be very hard.  It gives me headaches to think about.  However, I'd rather have the church actively engaging with the possibility of doctrinal reinterpretation rather than teaching us to assume all new discoveries in archeology and biology are false.

What don't I know?

There are many cute ways parents explain where babies come from.  From mommy's tummy, from a stork, from the hospital, or even from Sears.  Past all the silliness is a basic message that you don't really want to know it wouldn't do you any good yet, give it some time and maybe I'll explain when I stop going into cold sweats at the thought your going to grow up some day.

I think God's word to us is a little like that at times-simplified to the point of incomprehensibility because reality is, to us, incomprehensible or at least undesirable that we should understand.  The most frustrating scripture in all the Holy Word to me is D&C 19:6-12.  On the one hand it is a beautiful scripture that cracks the light open on the LDS doctrine of a benevolent afterlife in which the torments of hell aren't a corporeal torture but an extreme disappointment in which you only have yourself to blame.  On the other hand, it is a clear indication that God sometimes allows himself to use plays on words that we can't expect to understand because it wouldn't be good for us to understand it yet.  This play on words, hinging on whether "endless punishment" and "punishment without end" mean different things, demonstrates that the whole continuing revelation doctrine isn't about just adding more information to what was good information.  It shows that sometimes in continuing revelation, we have a "stork moment" where God tells us to completely throw out what we thought we understood and replace it with something better.  And not just minor details, occasionally God completely revolutionizes a doctrine or a practice.  The New covenant following the Old, priesthood eligibility (think of all those supposedly almost as good as scripture talks given in General Conference before and after), and freedom of religion (change in practice from Old Testament to D&C) are all subjects where things sometimes change more than you would expect if you assumed all the information given was completely right and complete the first time.  That isn't to say that there is a contradiction in what was said at different times that couldn't be explained or synthasized in some way, but that the fundamental shifts can be of surprising magnitude that show everything we had assumed before to be false or "only for then, not for now"

I don't mind the get better information part.  Its the fact that when something doctrinally confuses me I don't know when to stop giving myself a headache and say to myself "I'll ask in the afterlife, this might be more "stork" information.

Just for example, I've been following several announcements recently of findings of human type behavior and artifacts occurring in an earth history timeline that simply doesn't make sense by the biblical account.  I'd looked around enough to find the explanation that the translation of "creating the earth in 7 days) may have alternate interpretations available to help avoid any problems, however when you start finding jewelry, fishhooks, and bedding mats showing a basic  mechanical prowess that we normally only associate with humans. happening tens of thousands in the past.   Does this disprove anything?  Not particularly unless you try to stick to a rigid interpretation of the entire 7000 years of earth's temporal existence statement from the D7C.  I could give myself a headache trying to put it all together, but I could also blow it off as potential stork material where I don't have to figure out anything because anything I figured out might be "continuing revelation" deleted by changes in the future.  The main thing for me is to maintain trust that it does have an explanation, even if I'm not entitled to one or capable of understanding now.

Biking

Today in class we were supposed to write down the factors that were barriers or benefits we felt directed whether we walked, bicycled, carpooled, used public transportation, or drove.  When I stopped to think about it, my feelings about bicycling kind of made me laugh.

To put this in perspective, Bonnie Jean and I owned a car when we got married but didn't really feel we could afford it so we sold the car as soon as we could.  I ran all the errands for almost the entire time bicycling a week of purchases on my back every week.  The weight could become so intense I'd get headaches from supporting it on my shoulders and Bonnie Jean insisted I purchase a set of saddle bags which I was very grateful to own once I had them.  I would bike when it was sunny, when it was rainy, or even if it was snowing.  About the only time I didn't bike is if the roads were one solid layer of ice.  We would rent or borrow a car occasionally for out of town trips and special occasions, but only rarely.  Even with the saddle bags my grocery trips would become so extreme I'd often get comments on the way out of the store as I might have two saddle bags weighed down with heavy liquids like milk, cereals and other light objects filling a large backpack, fruit/bread and other delicate dangling from loops tied to the back pack on the back and shoulders, a frozen pizza wedged behind my back and the backpack, and maybe one or two bags hanging over the handle bars for good measure.  We were avoiding about a 150$ a month for the car payment, 150$ a month insurance payment, and 30$ a month in gas by living this way.  All in all that's 3960$ a year.  It contributed greatly to our ability to begin saving and investing money when we were making very little.  It was the only form of exercise I had but I made good use of it commuting to work, school, and running errands.  At my height of strength during the summer I was such a speedy cyclist I once left the front door of my apartment at the same time as one of my coworkers and beat them to work even though our route included a 50 mph highway.  Granted, I did some crazy stuff to do that like cutting through empty parking lots to avoid stop signs and honing my traffic pattern to avoid having to stop at as many stop lights.  While I walked into work I called out to my coworker, only then exiting her car, that she should go get a bicycle if she was in a hurry to go to work since I beat her there.  I only tried that once, I had such a bad asthma attack from the exertion that I couldn't talk properly.  I think my boss thought I was crazy.

Was I crazy?  In many people's eye's yes I was being completely crazy.  I was living married life with no car in a town with bad winter snowstorms and minimal public transportation.  We only bought a car when we were supposed to get temporary custody of my nephew because I couldn't imagine any way I could bike home a giant box of diapers along with what I was already trucking around town.

Now my biking isn't any where near as extreme as it used to be.  When it snows I drive.  Bonnie Jean does the errands in the car or by bus and I mostly bike the work and school.  The car is ours free and clear, our emergency savings goal of having all our insurance deductibles and three months of living expenses saved up is 50% funded, we have an investment portfolio far beyond what most people my age or at my income level could manage, and considering everything the student debt I have is growing a lot slower than it might because I'm using the tuition reimbursement program at work to pay myself back the large majority of those loans.  A part of this foundation was built by my asthmatic lungs puffed me along 50 miles per week by bicycle trying to avoid higher living expenses anywhere we could by visiting sometimes 2-3 stores per week searching out the best deals on food prices.  So how do I feel about bicycling?  I feel really macho.  Which is hilarious because that's not normally the way I view myself.  Just the sheer amount of physical effort directly contributing to our financial well being has always made me feel more like a man.  I suppose that's one reason to keep cycling.

Take me with you

Tailesen these days either becomes very upset when I'm trying to leave.  He's very adept at spotting when I'm getting ready to go and the other day when I was trying on new gloves to see how they fit with my coat he became very upset thinking I was trying to leave and insisted I hold him and read him a story to reassure him I wasn't going anywhere.  The other day when I was trying to gather things up to go he brought his shoes to me and sat down for me to get him ready to go to.  I think he'd really like to just come with me.

I think I've figured out a large part of why he wants to spend so much time outside, is fascinated by bicylces, and tries to get me to carry him to work.  Its the same phenomenon as when I can sometimes get more work done if I mostly close the office door than if I close it.  If its closed he knows he's been denied access and therefore tries his best to demand entrance.  If its open but mostly shut, he's more likely to think I'm just being boring.  Going to work or school with me is something he never gets to do.  Repeatedly denying access just reinforces that it is something special.  Also, he sees me bike away at one time of day and then hours later sees me come back still riding the bike.  I bet he thinks I spend the whole time at class zipping around on the bicycle.  If daddy loves the outdoors and bicycles that much, it stands to reason he should like them too.  Maybe one day we'll set up a bicycle trailer and I'll have enough time to take him zipping around town.  So far, its not happening.

Happy 4th

Bonnie Jean and I celebrated the 4th by setting off our own fireworks.  I'm guessing we set off about 25 all told.  Not the up in the air kind that were just legalized here, but the cheaper smaller ones that stay on the ground.  Or, at least they are supposed to stay on the ground.  There were a couple that were supposed to spin more or less in the same place on the ground that decided to shoot off side ways and one which levitated onto my neighbors balcony (or at least that's where we think it was headed, never found it again afterwards).  It was fun.  Setting off their own fireworks was a family tradition for her growing up and I had never done it before.

This fourth hasn't felt as sunshiny for me as some in the past.  I've been studying American History post civil war and its harder to talk about being the land of the free when you understand just how recent our understanding of the idea of freedom actually is.  I read a document written by a black man looking back on world war one when he complained about facing the enemy guns abroad and the lynching mobs at home and how tempting it was to simply sit the war out and try not to commit to a nation that hadn't committed towards their safety and freedom.  Or the history of the migrant workers who faced violence, restricted civil rights, and absurdly dangerous working conditions.  Its one thing to speak nostalgicly about all the ethnic minority immigrant groups making up our melting pot nation and another entirely to read about how only about half of the melting pot people stay since they by and large came as migrant workers looking to save up some money to take home to europe.  They weren't very melty and its only later looking back you can talk about how wonderful their integration and naturalization went when at the time depending on the group, place, and time there were mobs that would form to drive ethnic minorities out of town to keep the land and the work available for the 'pure' white race.  Laws were passed so that these ethnic minorities sometimes couldn't vote, couldn't own land, couldn't testify in court, weren't allowed to intermarry etc...

Now, based on my studies the Holocaust completely changed our views of human rights and what was right and wrong concerning racial evaluations.  But once you know all the nitty gritty about how we got here, the surprising thing isn't that its a land of the free.  Its traditionally been a land free for specific groups at specific times.  There are other places you could say well if you only look at the empoered group then sure its a land of the free.  Closer to the truth I think is that the US is one of the first places were certain kinds of thoughts entered human consciousness about human rights and that those ideas have been expanding over time.  And that's a very different from saying it a land of the free.

USU vs GWC... which is harder?

This post rambles on quite a bit but I don't feel its important enough for me to write it correctly.  My apologies if this doesn't make the most sense.

At GWC they always bragged to us about how their freshmen program of study was harder than medical school and that students at their school studied harder than students anywhere else.  And GWC did make you study hard.  I think they wanted us to prepare for life crisis by making our studies one prolonged life crisis.  Very few students even tried to hold down jobs during the semester and those who did often took a lot longer to graduate.  Since you needed several internships to graduate you couldn't devote your summers to earning money without delaying graduation on those internships... say unless you just found ways to excuse your summer job as a learning experience.  But all internships were supposed to be unique and it starts getting harder to find 3 things that make enough money for a whole school year that still count as unique convincing learning experiences.


In any case, my feeling is that being a dad, a husband, a full time employee, and a half time student at USU is actually a lot harder than being a single full time student at GWC.  From the way GWC brags you'd think there was no way that would be possible.  GWC tries to take over your life, but when they overload you with work which is what they know they are doing, there aren't any consequences to simply failing to do the work that is overloaded on you.  I had a professor who by surprise threw a 600 page reading assignment for us to read over a holiday break.  I tried to read some of it but honestly it wasn't a book you could read that quickly unless you weren't paying attention.  I don't think any of the students succeeded.  I gave up and enjoyed my holiday.  There was no consequence except that if I had managed to fit the book in somewhere (remember this was a surprise assignment not on the sylabus which was overflowing with other stuff anyways) I could have gotten more credit hours out of the class.  Or there was the economics semester.  The professor told us up front that he had no intention that we'd actually learn economics but only that we would learn enough about it that some day we would decide we really wanted to learn it.  The readings were difficult and didn't build on eachother in a way that allowed you to grasp them better as you moved on.  Again, I don't think any of the students actually were any where near up to speed on the readings.  We'd get together for study groups and see if anyone knew anything about the readings for the next day and none of us had any idea.  The only students who passed the class with an honors on their oral exam were students who completely ignored the assignments and built their own plan of study.  There was one philosopher whose economic influence the text informed me had disappeared as soon as he died.  I didn't have time to read him so on my final exam I wrote down for his entry that since the assigned reading was about an author who was irrelevant to current economic theory I refused to read him.  I didn't get any points off for doing that and I still passed the class.  This kind of stuff happened all the time.  We would study like crazy, not have time for everything assigned, and not fail the classes when we didn't complete the work assigned.  The main point was for us to study hard, not to complete assignments.



At USU, on the other hand, assignments are given with the intention of being completed.  If you don't have time to complete them it isn't a virtue of an academic system of teaching you to study like a maniac, its your fault for registering for too many classes.  If you don't finish an assignment or give it a half baked effort because you ran out of time, you fail the assignment.  So even though I was only a half time student with a full time job I found myself routinely working absurdly long hours and running my health into the ground trying to get my assignments perfect.  At GWC I would have said, wow I'm sleepy I'm going to bed too bad they didn't give time on the syllabus to complete that absurd assignment and gotten away with it almost every single time.  In my final year we were supposed to be studying a narrow subject to the point of being a world class expert (I think within the top 40 experts in the field was what we were told we would become) and reading through almost all of the "Founder's Constitution" set at the same time.  The sheer amount of study required for what was supposed to be the capstone paper of the entire undergraduate experience was so large that almost all the students in my class were freely admitting they weren't doing the readings for the constitutional law section of the class and we flummoxed the professor my showing up day after day to his lecture having no idea what he was talking about and not being ready to discuss anything he said beyond our prior knowledge.  That capstone paper of mine I took so much effort on that I blew my circuit on it and told the professor that to be able to complete the rest of the studies in the class I couldn't finish it and handed it in as a rough draft that wasn't even coherently structured yet.  I got full credit based on my obvious extensive research on the subject even though by any normal standards I had flunked the paper.  And who would believe I am one of the top 40 experts in the world on UN reform when I can't even write a decent term paper describing it?  The only prominent exceptions to this system of abandoning or only half doing assignments that were beyond possible  were the mid term exams.  A typical mid term exam at GWC wasn't actually supporting the content of our reading or lectures.  We typically were supposed to memorize a large list of information only marginally relevant to our course material and then the teacher would pick a fact out of that list at random and if we knew what it was we had passed if we didn't know we hadn't passed.  It got you to study fairly hard, but I passed those midterms by doing a one day or sometimes several hour crash course memorization spree.  I can absorb a lot of information very quickly when under pressure.  Then as soon as the midterm was done I would promptly forget most of what we studied for that midterm.  Typical content was things like the 50 "principles" of economics that the professor came up with as his study notes for a prominent book, names and locations of every nation-state in the world, meanings of common investment terms, meanings of various mathematical phrases like "trigonometry," etc.  It was somehow suggested that memorizing these lists of information would give us some mastery over them.  About only thing it did was make it so if someone spouted vocabulary at us we wouldn't be embarrassed.

What it comes down to is that after comparing the two experiences, GWC was either joking about them being harder than medical school or reporting experiences of students who came to GWC after going to other colleges and were expecting that all those assignments were real, rather than motivational exercises to make us work hard at work loads the professors well knew we weren't going to complete.  Comparing USU and GWC in terms of the normal definition of a school as a place where learning environment are provided and then the learning of the students is certified to have or not to have taken place, GWC is an institution where assignments can be missed, skipped, turned in poorly done, and where mastery of the content advertized may never be achieved.  What GWC really shines as is a institution of motivational speakers who invite you to complete the impossible and don't criticize you when you don't achieve it, just encourage you to make learning a lifelong process so that you'll eventually master all the things you rushed past at the speed of sound.  As a result students at GWC still learn a lot because they spend a lot of time studying.  The school simply can't certify that the learning took place and in some cases organizationally didn't make any attempt to ensure we were actually learning or would be capable of learning the material presented.  I came out of the school knowing much much more than I did before, but there are entire areas that the school supposedly covered for me in a "world class" way producing results that were somehow the best that I know very little about.  The extent to which this was motivation speaking and not real learning is exampled by an assignment to write a business plan that would make I think it as 1-2 million dollars over a 7 year time period.  We were told that if we really felt strongly about our business plans the professor would actually show them to an actual investment banker to see what a real world business man would think about them.  He bragged about how he didn't know of any other institution in the world that provided that kind of real world feedback to business planning.  How good were the business plans presented?  There was one student who brought in a hunting calender his mom had mocked up that integrated information on the laws and regulations for different types of hunting year round.  He told us that this calender if it was taken to market would be purchased at a certain price by something like 90% of the hunting population and therefore would automatically make him a millionaire.  One of the other students pointed out that this was a high rate of market pentetration and the student presenting the plan said he felt that all hunters would want the calender and couldn't think of any reason he wouldn't get 90% of all hunters to buy it from him and suggested the doubting student just didn't know the market of hunters well enough to understand how that would work.  As far as I knew that student passed the class.

My own attempt wasn't necessarily that much better.  I hadn't even attempted to model what the costs of advertising and management would be or how to enforce quality control off of an extremely decentralized network.  Ignoring those issues, I was unable to build a model that would grow that much unless it assumed some sort of explosive growth pattern which I was unable to model in my excel spreadsheet.  Or in other words I had no idea how to make it work.

So about this claim that no other business schools actually got real feedback on assignments?  My roommate who attended SUU for a business degree showed a business plan to a local investment banker as a required part of his class.  Wheras my idea never even got to an investment banker because that was a special privilege for people who were particularly interested, not for everyone.  I knew my idea wasn't yet worth beans so I didn't bother trying to get a banker looking at it.  So either the professor was full of a lot of hot air or was completely ignorant of how business degrees at the mainstream university a couple blocks away actually worked.  Or the simpler answer is that he wasn't a professor, he was a motivational speaker.

So How have I been?

School ran me ragged this last  semester so I never had much chance to post.

The semester itself went great however.  I know I got A's in two of my 3 classes and I am waiting for the stat's professor to post my grades for my final.  But given I got an A on every homework assignment and both midterms, I'm not excessively worried.

The English class was kind of annoying in that many students weren't taking it seriously and the course was almost designed to take that into account as a starting assumption.  I'm really not that scared of writing, so a class also designed with the assumption that I'm terrified of the process wasn't quite what I needed.  But testing out of it would have required figuring out a lot of stuff very quickly when I was very busy, so I just ran with it and figured I'd pick up on everything I hadn't learned elsewhere in my learning experiences.  Main papers I wrote were a paper on why my favorite songs were my favorites, a short presentation on land planning/use conflict regarding immigration, a review of cloth diapers (which I may end up posting here if I bother taking the time to get the pictures to show right), and a research paper on how a particular strategy used for immigration integration could apply towards the social integration of those with disabilities.

The Wildlands  class was a lot of fun.  The class was mostly designed to get me emotionally and intellectually engaged with the major, find out if I liked my department, and get to know the resources available in the department.  Only a 1 credit class.  I enjoyed it quite a lot.

The statistics class was very boring at the start and quite a challenge at the end.  For the first week or two I don't think we learned much of anything that I didn't know already or hadn't already seen before when I home schooled.  By the end we were covering subjects that I had only vaguely even heard of before.  I had to work hard at all my classes, but this is the main one where I felt I was learning something new all the time instead of just some of the time.

We switched to having me working full time and Bonnie Jean not working at all.  Since this stopped us from passing Taelien back and forth like a hot potato when my wife needed to work and I needed to study, this actually increased both the time Bonnie Jean and I could spend together and the time I could study.  But it was still a very hard semester.  I only had two good study days a week where I could depend on sitting down for a long period of time and studying without interruption.  It took both of those days typically to finish the statistics homework.  English homework was fit in around other classes and a lot of it only after I got home from work and Bonnie Jean went to bed.  So that means between midnight and 1 AM.  The wildlands class mostly needed me to do things and attend activities instead of sit down and write papers and read things so I was able to mostly push that one in wherever it would fit.

The problem with having to complete homework between 12-1 AM on a regular basis is even when there isn't any home work that needs doing that very moment you are still in the habit of staying up that late even if just to relax and have a few moments to yourself.  By the end of the semester I was so sleep deprived I had fallen sick with a cold threatening to turn into a sinus infection.  I had to make an effort to get more sleep in so I would be awake for my stats final.

We've tried getting me back on my bike to reduce gas prices.  Repairing my bike would cost 230$, however, due to rusty cabling, worn out tires, a stretched chain, and a worn out gear cog.  So I bought a new one.  Finally I own a road bike instead of a mountain bike that I only bought because it was the cheapest bike available for sale at the only bike store within walking distance.  I still bought one of the cheaper ones I could find so it isn't a perfect bike.  But unless I'm trying to bike up old main hill to get to class it seems to work perfectly.  I was planning on walking up that hill anyways its so large, so I'm not complaining.