Category Archives: Logic and Reasoning

#153: What Are Ghosts?

January 4, 2017 M.J. Leave a comment

This is mark Joseph “young” blog entry #153, on the subject of What Are Ghosts?

I do believe in ghosts, I do believe in ghosts, I do, I do, I do….

Thus spoke the Cowardly Lion (in The Wizard of Oz, of course)–but that which caused him to believe in ghosts was not a ghost, but a meddling witch. This came back to me as I listened to a syndicated radio host (The Wally Show) saying that he did not believe in ghosts, but if he was in the real estate market and someone told him that a particular house was haunted, he would not buy it. We will get back to that. He also admitted that as Christians we believe in some kind of spirit realm–but that the idea of ghosts was still not something he could accept.

I’m going to say that I believe in ghosts in the sense that I believe there are real phenomena which have not been materialistically explained which at least appear to be manifestations of spirits.

That said, though, just because I believe in “ghosts” does not mean I have any clue as to exactly what they are. That might be overstating it–I have many clues, but nothing sufficient to achieve certainty. Thus in the interest of making it clear just how unclear the matter actually is, here are a few of the possibilities, as I understand them.

It is certainly not impossible that these are spirits of the dead, people whose inner selves have been separated from their bodies who somehow are maintaining an earthly existence. Most Christians don’t like this, because we are told that it is appointed to men to die once, and after this comes judgment, and from this we conclude that immediately upon dying we are consigned to heaven or hell for eternity. (There are some who believe in something called “purgatory”, a place for souls who are in the process of being saved but are not yet pure enough for heaven; it is based on texts that are controversial, not accepted as canon by Protestants because they are not so recognized by Jews. It’s more complicated than that, but that’s the essence of it. Besides, having one more place for the afterlife does not release spirits to be here.) However, we debate exactly how that happens, because our heavenly afterlife is intimately connected with the resurrection of the body. Thus some think that we go to heaven as “unclothed” spirits and there await the resurrection, and some that we experience (or do not experience) “soul sleep”, such that we know nothing until the return of Christ revives us. Other possible solutions to this include that we immediately receive resurrection bodies which, unlike Christ’s, are not dependent upon our natural bodies, or that we leap across time to eternity such that at the moment of our death we are at the moment of the resurrection.

Given that we are in disagreement (I won’t say uncertain, because some of us are quite certain of one position or another as the “obvious” one), it is entirely possible that spirits of at least some of the dead manifest in the mortal realm. We have the account of Saul visiting the witch at Endor and asking to speak with the departed spirit of the prophet Samuel, in which we are given the rather clear understanding that that spirit responded (and rebuked him for calling). Some argue that this is because it was before the resurrection of Christ, but we are never told this, and so we just simply don’t know and cannot say that this answer is impossible.

However, neither is it certain–which is the point here.
Many theologians who believe that there are such spirit manifestations believe that these are manifestations of what we might call opportunistic spirits. They would use the words “demons” and “devils”, but I find that our understandings of those words, as our understanding of “angels”, seems very narrow and simultaneously inconsistent with some of what we know from the Bible. One would think from what is said that the God who has made more kinds of insects than most of us can imagine could only make one kind of spirit being which divided itself into two parties. I suspect that there are more kinds of spirit beings than there are kinds of lifeforms in the world–but that’s a digression. What matters is that it is entirely possible that these spirits have almost nothing to do with the departed, but know enough about them to masquerade as them, possibly just to frighten people, possibly to cause them to doubt their understanding of spiritual matters, possibly to deliver deceptive messages. The problem here is that we have no way to test this. Houdini, for example, agreed with his wife on a secret password that he would use if he were ever contacted by a medium and she was present, to prove that it was him. Although many mediums claimed to have contacted him, none were able to produce the password–but had they done so, would it have proved that this was indeed Houdini, or merely that spirits who masquerade as people might have been privy to many of their intimate secrets in life? My problem with distinguishing departed spirits from opportunistic spirits is similar to my problem with other gods: we are ill-equipped to know what is really happening in the spirit realm, and cannot know the origins or motivations of any particular spirit we might encounter.
Some people looking for an answer that is almost naturalistic speak of psychic residue, that people suffering particularly traumatic events project mental energy into the surrounding objects which can be sensed by others. I have elsewhere written (Faith and Gaming: Mind Powers, at the Christian Gamers Guild) that it seems to me at least reasonably plausible that people could in the future develop mental powers we do not presently have, and indeed it is a small step from that to suggesting that we might have mental powers of which we are unaware. There is nothing necessarily evil or Satanic about that as a concept. It might be that stressed brains leave some kind of wave pattern in surrounding matter which can be perceived by other brains attuned to this, and it might be that those patterns manifest as replays of events causing the stress–which would explain why so many claimed ghost sightings are frightening, particularly if the emotion is included in the projection.
Most Christians oppose the concept of animism–the idea that there are spirits in inanimate objects. I am less persuaded. There is sound scriptural support for the notion that animals, at least, have spirits, and it does not take much to extend that to cover plants, since the distinctions between these two categories of life forms are more scientific than spiritual. (That’s bad news for vegans, really.) I do not think that rocks and planks of dead wood and other non-living objects have spirits–it is, if I understand aright, the spirit that gives life to the body, whether that of a person or an animal or plausibly even a plant. Therefore I think objects that do not have life in any sense do not have spirits–but I can’t say that I know this. After all, God doesn’t tell us much that we do not need to know, and so most of what He tells us is about ourselves. It is not impossible that, contrary to my belief, stones have spirits. If so, it is possible that the torment of one spirit–that of a person–in the vicinity of another spirit–that of the supposed inanimate object–would leave an impression on that other spirit. We might then be encountering the spirits of non-living matter reliving the suffering of living spirits that had been there.
Many of the stories I have heard of supposed hauntings include the fact that someone died in a particular place, and that this was known to the person who experienced the haunting. Nurses often believe that certain rooms in hospitals are sometimes haunted by former patients, and will sometimes tell this to incoming nurses. Ghosts are seen in castles that are famously said to be haunted. It could be that at least some of these are projections of the expectations of the observer–that is, an unexpected glimmer of light, a stray noise, a chill breeze, and the imagination supposes that for just a moment there was something there. Our minds are already designed to provide details for many things we see. If something moves in your peripheral vision and you have every reason to believe it to be a person, your mind tells you it is a person; in fact, if you believe it to be a specific person, your mind will put that person in that position. Sometimes we are startled because the person we saw was not the person we thought we saw. There is no particular reason why the mind could not provide the image of a ghost where we were anticipating the possibility that we might see a ghost, and the moreso if that makes us nervous.

From this it is evident that assuming the phenomena to be real there are still a great many plausible explanations for it. None of these explanations covers every detail of every supposed encounter, but then, none of them is the only possible explanation for any reported encounter. There might be ghosts; there might be something that tricks us, intentionally or accidentally, into believing that we have seen ghosts. As with Unidentified Flying Objects, it might be that different explanations apply in different cases, and some of them are real departed spirits, but others are not.

I am not afraid of ghosts, but I have never had an encounter. I don’t know that I would be uncomfortable living in a supposedly haunted house. However, there is good reason to be reluctant to buy a house that is said to be haunted: such rumors will impact its market value. There are always stories attached to houses, but when the stories have a negative emotional impact–previous home of serial killer, house in which entire family died mysteriously–it makes the property less desirable. “Haunted” is exactly such a story. If a house is thought to be haunted, you can probably buy it for very little money, and sell it for less. It becomes a bad financial decision. So of course I would be hesitant to buy a house I had been told was haunted, not because I necessarily believe that, but because when the time comes to sell my potential buyers are likely to believe it.

So I do believe that there might be something like ghosts out there, but I don’t believe we either do or can know exactly what they are. We are not equipped to deal with objects in the spirit realm, or indeed even to know with certainty whether that is what we are encountering.

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Bible and Theology, Logic and Reasoning

#152: Breaking a Habit

January 2, 2017 M.J. Leave a comment

This is mark Joseph “young” blog entry #152, on the subject of Breaking a Habit.

We all have habits. It is actually a positive feature of our design: we can harness this habit process to give ourselves good habits, like habitually buckling our seatbelts, or brushing our teeth, or saying prayers when we hear sirens. Yet we tend to notice habits when we develop harmful ones–the regular drink at the odd time, the tendency to snack while working, and of course one of the big ones, smoking.

It was smoking that caused me to think about this, because I know several people who smoke and really can’t afford the cigarettes, and because of my father. I can remember him smoking when I was a boy, and I can remember that my mother said he had a hard time quitting. In the last years of his life he shared with me two things, one the way he managed to quit, and the other a technique he had recently seen in a newspaper that would work well with his own. He seemed at the time eager that I should pass these to smokers I knew, but on reflection it occurs to me that these are good ways to quit just about any habit–and my theology tells me that we all have habits we ought to break, and we all have trouble breaking them.

The difficulty, it seems, is that it is just about impossible for any of us to say to ourselves that we will never do something again, and then stick to that. It’s the reason you’ve probably already broken at least one of the New Year’s Resolutions you made yesterday. It may be that angels who live in eternity can make irrevocable choices, but those of us stuck here in this time zone do not have that ability. And therein lies the key to beating the habit: recognize that you can’t decide never again, and deal with right now.

My father explained to me that he never quit smoking. He had in previous years won bets against people who were trying to quit smoking, which were in essence that he could go longer without a cigarette than they would. One day he applied that to the long haul. For over fifty years he never quit smoking, never told himself he was quitting, he just always decided that he didn’t need a cigarette right now, every time he wanted one. You don’t quit smoking, you don’t break a habit, by deciding right now that you will never do it again; you break it by deciding that you won’t do it now, even if maybe you’ll do it later. When later becomes now, you make the same decision, because you can almost always decide that now is not a good time for a cigarette, that you can have one later when the time is better, and never decide that the time is better.

So that’s how it’s done.

The other part is worth mentioning, particularly for people who have failed before. Failure is not necessarily a disaster; it only means that you start again. The suggestion that was made was that you keep score and play against yourself. Keep a notebook, or get some kind of “app” on your phone that lets you record this. Every time you indulge the habit–have a cigarette, or if that’s not your habit, raid the icebox or take a drink–write down the date and time, and do the math: how long has it been since the last time you did this? That’s your score. Keep track of your best score, and try to beat it. If you have gone four days without a cigarette, but your personal best on record is six days, tell yourself you can beat six days, even if it’s only six days and one hour, and put off that smoke until you’ve bested yourself. Then you have a new record, a new best to beat. You’ve also proved that you can go that long, and if you stick to it you’ll be going months without a mistake.

This is nothing new, really. It’s part of why they have that litany at the beginning of every speech at Alcoholics Anonymous: this is who I am, I admit I have a problem, and at the moment my streak is this long. When it has been three years since you’ve had a drink–or a smoke, or an unscheduled snack, or whatever your habit is–you have some sense of accomplishment in the number. No one says it will never be a temptation; it’s only that practicing resisting that temptation makes you better at it; setting goals you know are achievable because you have done nearly as well before, and dealing with the problem in the present instead of in the hypothetical, all make that resistance easier.

So I hope this helps you quit the habit, whatever it is.

Bible and Theology, Books by the Author, Elections, Games, Law and Politics, Logic and Reasoning, Music, Temporal Anomalies/Time Travel, Time Travel Movies

#150: 2016 Retrospective

December 31, 2016 M.J. Leave a comment

This is mark Joseph “young” blog entry #150, on the subject of 2016 Retrospective.

Periodically I try to look back over some period of time and review what I have published, and the end of the year is a good time to do this. Thus before the new year begins I am offering you a reminder of articles you might have seen–or might have missed–over the past twelve months. I am not going to recall them all. For one thing, that would be far too many, and it in some cases will be easier to point to another location where certain categories of articles are indexed (which will appear more obvious as we progress). For another, although we did this a year ago in web log post #34: Happy Old Year, we also did it late in March in #70: Writing Backwards and Forwards, when we had finished posting Verse Three, Chapter One: The First Multiverser Novel. So we will begin with the last third of March, and will reference some articles through indices and other sources.

I have divided articles into the categories which I thought most appropriate to them. Many of these articles are reasonably in two or more categories–articles related to music often relate to writing, or Bible and theology; Bible and politics articles sometimes are nearly interchangeable. I, of course, think it is all worth reading; I hope you think it at least worth considering reading.

I should also explain those odd six-digit numbers for anyone for whom they are not obvious, because they are at least non-standard. They are YYMMDD, that is, year, month, and day of the date of publication of each article, each represented by two digits. Thus the first one which appears, 160325, represents this year 2016, the third month March, and the twenty-fifth day.

Let’s start with writings about writing.

There is quite a bit that should be in this category. After all, that previous retrospective post appeared as we finished posting that first novel, and we have since posted the second, all one hundred sixty-two chapters of which are indexed in their own website section, Old Verses New. If you’ve not read the novels, you have some catching up to do. I also published one more behind-the-writings post on that first novel, #71: Footnotes on Verse Three, Chapter One 160325, to cover notes unearthed in an old file on the hard drive.

Concurrent with the release of those second novel chapters there were again behind-the-writings posts, this time each covering nine consecutive chapters and hitting the web log every two weeks. Although they are all linked from that table-of-contents page, since they are web log posts I am listing them here: #74: Another Novel 160421; #78: Novel Fears 160506; #82: Novel Developments 160519; #86: Novel Conflicts 160602; #89: Novel Confrontations 160623; #91: Novel Mysteries 160707; #94: Novel Meetings 160721; #100: Novel Settling 160804; #104: Novel Learning 160818; #110: Character Redirects 160901;
#113: Character Movements 160916;
#116: Character Missions 160929;
#119: Character Projects 161013;
#122: Character Partings 161027; #128: Character Gatherings 161110; #134: Versers in Space 161124; #142: Characters Unite 161208; and #148: Characters Succeed 161222.

I have also added a Novel Support Section which at this point contains character sheets for several of the characters in the first novel and one in the second; also, if you have enjoyed reading the novels and have not seen #149: Toward the Third Novel 161223, it is a must-read.

Also on the subject of writing, I discussed what was required for someone to be identified as an “author” in, appropriately, #72: Being an Author 160410. I addressed #118: Dry Spells 161012 and how to deal with them, and gave some advice on #132: Writing Horror 161116. There was also one fun Multiverser story which had been at Dice Tales years ago which I revived here, #146: Chris and the Teleporting Spaceships 161220

I struggled with where on this list to put #120: Giving Offense 161014. It deals with political issues of sexuality and involves a bit of theological perspective, but ultimately is about the concept of tolerance and how we handle disagreements.

It should be mentioned that not everything I write is here at M. J. Young Net; I write a bit about writing in my Goodreads book reviews.

Of course, I also wrote a fair amount of Bible and Theology material.

Part of it was apologetic, that is, discussing the reasons for belief and answers to the arguments against it. In this category we have #73: Authenticity of the New Testament Accounts 160413, #76: Intelligent Simulation 160424 (specifically addressing an incongruity between denying the possibility of “Intelligent Design” while accepting that the universe might be the equivalent of a computer program), and #84: Man-made Religion 160527 (addressing the charge that the fact all religions are different proves none are true).

Other pages are more Bible or theology questions, such as #88: Sheep and Goats 160617, #90: Footnotes on Guidance 160625, #121: The Christian and the Law 161022, and #133: Your Sunday Best 161117 (on why people dress up for church).

#114: St. Teresa, Pedophile Priests, and Miracles 160917 is probably a bit of both, as it is a response to a criticism of Christian faith (specifically the Roman Catholic Church, but impacting all of us).

There was also a short miniseries of posts about the first chapter of Romans, the sin and punishment it presents, and how we as believers should respond. It appeared in four parts: #138: The Sin of Romans I 161204, #139: Immorality in Romans I 161205, #140: Societal Implications of Romans I 161206, and #141: The Solution to the Romans I Problem 161207.

Again, not everything I wrote is here. The Faith and Gaming series and related materials including some from The Way, the Truth, and the Dice are being republished at the Christian Gamers Guild; to date, twenty-six such articles have appeared, but more are on the way including one written recently (a rules set for what I think might be a Christian game) which I debated posting here but decided to give to them as fresh content. Meanwhile, the Chaplain’s Bible Study continues, having completed I & II Peter and now entering the last chapter of I John.

Again, some posts which are listed below as political are closely connected to principles of faith; after all, freedom of speech and freedom of religion are inextricably connected. Also, quite a few of the music posts are also Bible or theology posts, since I have been involved in Christian music for decades.

So Music will be the next subject.

Since it is something people ask musicians, I decided to give some thought and put some words to #75: Musical Influences 160423, the artists who have impacted my composing, arranging, and performances.

I also reached into my memories of being in radio, how it applies to being a musician and to being a writer, in #77: Radio Activity 160427.

I wrote a miniseries about ministry and music, what it means to be a minister and how different kinds of ministries integrate music. It began by saying not all Christian musicians are necessarily ministers in #95: Music Ministry Disconnect 160724, and then continued with #97: Ministry Calling 160728, #98: What Is a Minister? 160730, #99: Music Ministry of an Apostle 160803, #101: Prophetic Music Ministry 160808, #102: Music and the Evangelist Ministry 160812, #103: Music Ministry of the Pastor 160814, #106: The Teacher Music Ministry 160821, and
#107: Miscellaneous Music Ministries 160824. As something of an addendum, I posted #109: Simple Songs 160827, a discussion of why so many currently popular songs seem to be musically very basic, and why given their purpose that is an essential feature.

In related areas, I offered #111: A Partial History of the Audio Recording Industry 160903 explaining why recored companies are failing, #129: Eulogy for the Record Album 161111 discussing why this is becoming a lost art form, and #147: Traditional versus Contemporary Music 161221 on the perennial argument in churches about what kinds of songs are appropriate.

The lyrics to my song Free 161017 were added to the site, because it was referenced in one of the articles and I thought the readers should be able to find them if they wished.

There were quite a few articles about Law and Politics, although despite the fact that this was an “election year” (of course, there are elections every year, but this one was special), most of them were not really about that. By March the Presidential race had devolved into such utter nonsense that there was little chance of making sense of it, so I stopped writing about it after talking about Ridiculous Republicans and Dizzying Democrats.

Some were, of course. These included the self-explanatory titles #123: The 2016 Election in New Jersey 161104, #124: The 2016 New Jersey Public Questions 161105, #125: My Presidential Fears 161106, and #127: New Jersey 2016 Election Results 161109, and a few others including #126: Equity and Religion 161107 about an argument in Missouri concerning whether it should be legal to give state money to child care and preschool services affiliated with religious groups, and #131: The Fat Lady Sings 161114, #136: Recounting Nonsense 161128, and #143: A Geographical Look at the Election 161217, considering the aftermath of the election and the cries to change the outcome.

We had a number of pages connected to the new sexual revolution, including #79: Normal Promiscuity 160507, #83: Help! I’m a Lesbian Trapped in a Man’s Body! 160521, and #115: Disregarding Facts About Sexual Preference 160926.

Other topics loosely under discrimination include #87: Spanish Ice Cream 160616 (about whether a well-known shop can refuse to take orders in languages other than English), #130: Economics and Racism 161112 (about how and why unemployment stimulates racist attitudes), and #135: What Racism Is 161127 (explaining why it is possible for blacks to have racist attitudes toward whites). Several with connections to law and economics include #105: Forced Philanthropy 160820 (taxing those with more to give to those with less), #108: The Value of Ostentation 160826 (arguing that the purchase of expensive baubles by the rich is good for the poor), #137: Conservative Penny-pinching 161023 (discussing spending cuts), and #145: The New Internet Tax Law 161219 (about how Colorado has gotten around the problem of charging sales tax on Internet purchases).

A few other topics were hit, including one on freedom of speech and religion called #144: Shutting Off the Jukebox 161218, one on scare tactics used to promote policy entitled #80: Environmental Blackmail 160508, and one in which court decisions in recent immigration cases seem likely to impact the future of legalized marijuana, called #96: Federal Non-enforcement 160727.

Of course Temporal Anomalies is a popular subject among the readers; the budget has been constraining of late, so we have not done the number of analyses we would like, but we did post a full analysis of Time Lapse 160402. We also reported on #85: Time Travel Coming on Television 160528, and tackled two related issues, #81: The Grandfather Paradox Problem 160515 and #117: The Prime Universe 160930.

We have a number of other posts that we’re categorizing as Logic/Miscellany, mostly because they otherwise defy categorization (or, perhaps, become categories with single items within them). #92: Electronic Tyranny 060708 is a response to someone’s suggestion that we need to break away from social media to get our lives back. #93: What Is a Friend? 060720 presents two concepts of the word, and my own preference on that. #112: Isn’t It Obvious? 160904 is really just a couple of real life problems with logical solutions. I also did a product review of an old washing machine that was once new, Notes on a Maytag Centennial Washing Machine 160424.

Although it does not involve much writing, with tongue planted firmly in cheek I offer Gazebos in the Wild, a Pinterest board which posts photographs with taxonomies attempting to capture and identify these dangerous wild creatures in their natural habitats. You would have to have heard the story of Eric and the Gazebo for that to be funny, I think.

Of course, I post on social media, but the interesting ones are on Patreon, and mostly because I include notes on projects still ahead and life issues impeding them. As 2017 arrives, I expect to continue writing and posting–I already have two drafts, one on music and the other on breaking bad habits. I invite your feedback.

Bible and Theology, Logic and Reasoning

#133: Your Sunday Best

November 17, 2016 M.J. Leave a comment

This is mark Joseph “young” blog entry #133, on the subject of Your Sunday Best.

I recently heard a radio announcer talking about dressing up for church. I think he was parodying the idea, because he said he didn’t want to wear a tie but wanted to wear one of those Elizabethan collars in which William Shakespeare is sometimes depicted. It brought back to my mind a question I had often considered over the years, ever since a friend raised it back in college: why do we, or many of us, dress for church?

I had always thought that people dressed for church to show respect to God. I had also thought that a bit silly, because to my very Baptist mind God was not more present in the church than He was in the bathroom, and if it was disrespectful to God to enter His presence in less than our Sunday finest, we should never pray in our pajamas before bed–something I was always taught to do. When the issue arose, I made that point–and was surprised that not everyone thought that was the reason.

Of particular interest, my friend Walter Bjorck had what I would have said was the exact opposite view. He said that he thought people dressed for church because they could. After all, well into the twentieth century most people worked farm or factory or labor jobs, jobs that required them to get dirty and sweaty and so to wear clothes that could take the dirt and the wear. Sunday was for many the only day of the week on which they were not working, and thus the only day on which they did not have to wear those work clothes. People, he maintained, like to get cleaned up and dressed up once in a while, just to make themselves feel better.

I agreed that if that was the reason, there was in essence no harm in it. I was never one who liked to dress up in that way–I always wanted clothes to be comfortable, and never cared how they looked. Thus if this is the reason, it is good reason for anyone who wants to dress in fancy clothes for church, but not good reason to make me do so. Make yourself comfortable, and I will do the same.

In considering the matter since, though, I have recognized that there are other reasons for people to dress for church, and not all of them are good.

Some people consider dressing for church to be a sign of respect for others who are in church. They consider it rude if you don’t wear a tie, as if you don’t care about the people with whom you share the sanctuary. I can almost see that, but frankly I think their perceptions are skewed. I don’t think it rude for you to visit me in your normal clothes. You’re welcome to visit in whatever you wear to work, or whatever you wear around the house if it meets public decency standards, or whatever you’re comfortable wearing. I would not expect anything different if we went to the same restaurant, or the same public meeting, or the same concert. Why should I be impressed that you dressed up for church? Don’t do it on my account; I won’t do it on yours.

And that raises the slightly different reason people dress up, and the reason I dress up on those rare times when I do. Some people dress to impress. I do it when I have to appear in court. To a lesser degree, I do it when I am on stage, paying attention to what I wear. I do it in essence to manipulate your opinion of me.

That, it strikes me, is not a good reason to dress for church. My opinion of you, and your opinion of me, should not be based on what we wear, particularly in church, but anywhere else as well. I promise not to dress to impress you when we’re in church; I will wear my ordinary clothes, although to please my wife I will try to make sure the T-shirt isn’t ripped or stained. I don’t mind if you want to dress for church, but I do mind if you do so to manipulate my opinion, or anyone else’s opinion, of you. If you’re dressing to impress people in church, stop it now. Better that you should come to church in rags and suffer the ire of people who think it rude (such shallow people need to come to grips with recognizing the value of people rather than the price of clothing) than that you should be attempting to manipulate others by your appearance. That’s fine in court, and it’s fine on stage, and its fine if you’re running for public office or campaigning for support for an important issue or leading others in a business or other organization that requires they respect you. It is not fine when you are gathering with people who are supposed to be family, who are supposed to love you as you really are and not as you pretend to be.

If it makes you feel better to dress up for church, that’s fine. Don’t judge those who do not share that. They might specifically be dressing down to avoid the sin of dressing to impress; they might be avoiding tempting you to the sin of showing them favoritism. There’s no requirement in the New Testament that says we have to dress for our gatherings. There is one that says we have to love each other as we are, and not show favoritism to those who dress well or snub those who dress poorly. You’ll find it in James, if you missed it.

Books by the Author, Logic and Reasoning, Temporal Anomalies/Time Travel

#117: The Prime Universe

September 30, 2016 M.J. Leave a comment

This is mark Joseph “young” blog entry #117, on the subject of The Prime Universe.

Proofreading some pages I wrote for Bob Slade (character introduced in Verse Three, Chapter One: The First Multiverser Novel) brought a smile to my face. Bob always tickles me; he is written to be fun. In this particular instance he wonders whether something in the universe he is visiting is like it is in “the real world”, and realizes that he still thinks of the earth in which he was born as somehow more “real” than the half dozen universes in which he has lived for more years than he was there. It occurred to me that that might be “gamer-think”, but it seemed like something Bob would ponder. I let it stay.

A few days later I was very much enjoying a book by Ian Harac (those of you who follow my Goodreads reviews will undoubtedly read about it there in a few days), a sort of multiverse story in which the lead characters are investigating inter-universe smuggling, and one of them referred to their universe of origin as “earth prime”. It struck me then: how does a culture that travels the multiverse define a concept like “earth prime”?

If you believe in the sort of diverging universe theory in which for every choice the universe divides into two universes, one in which that happens and the other in which it does not (I do not), you might think there is a simple answer: the “prime” universe is the root one from which all others diverged. That, though, does not work. Let us suppose that at the dawn of human history a hypothetical Cain is faced with the choice of whether or not to kill his hypothetical brother Abel. By this theory, our universe splits into two, one in which Abel is killed by Cain and the other in which they are both alive. Which is the prime universe, and which the divergent? Obviously, you suggest, the one in which Cain took the action to kill Abel is the diverging one, because Cain did something that changed history. That’s not true, of course: Cain did something that created history, as there was no history of that moment prior to that moment. Further, although we have so viewed it, it is not as if it is a choice between killing Abel and not killing Abel. It is rather a choice between killing Abel and doing something else instead. He could have gone back to work on his garden; he could have left to have a chat with his mother; he could have asked his brother to teach him to raise sheep. If we are in the universe in which Cain killed Abel, to us it appears that those are all divergent universes; yet if we are in one of those, it is the death that is the divergence, or one of the divergences. We might think that the death is the most dramatic or drastic version of history, but that is very much our ego: why should killing one man be a more significant event than giving life to thousands of vegetables and their offspring? It assumes the importance of humans.

I agree that humans are more important than vegetables, but in the scheme of a godless diverging multiverse that can’t be more than a personal preference.

Thus in a sense, if all universes diverged from one original, all have claim to be that original. If you cut an earthworm in half, both halves regenerate giving you two earthworms; both of them are the original. Every amoeba having come into existence by the cellular division of an amoeba in which one becomes two is the first amoeba that ever lived, from its own perspective. Every universe that is viewed as diverging from another can itself be viewed as the original from which the other diverged, and that is the reality from the objective outside view. There is no “prime” universe in that sense.

Of course, there are other theories of the multiverse. Some hold that all the many parallel universes have always existed, either eternally or from the beginning of time. No such universe can claim to be “first” in a temporal sense. Yet often one is still identified as “prime”.

Let us remember that the suggestion is made that there is an infinite number of such universes. I find that absurd, but concede that if the notion of parallel universes of this sort is true there might well be more universes than there are stars in our own. Vast becomes too small a word.

Something distinguishes each universe in this multiverse. Whatever it is, if we are to become able to travel it in a controlled fashion we have to discover it and turn it into something quantifiable. Thus if every universe has a “frequency” at which it “vibrates”, we can give every universe a number equal to that frequency–akin to radio stations, each of which is identified by the number of cycles per second (renamed to honor a scientist named “Hertz”, changing the abbreviation from c.p.s. to hz.). Of course, it is unlikely that universes “vibrate”, but there would have to be some measurable and quantifiable distinguishing factor, something akin to coordinates, for which we could make a scale.

Making a scale is the problem–not that we could not make one, but that any scale we made would be arbitrary by definition. Inches and feet are only “real” because we have agreed definitions. The metric system prides itself on being scientific, every unit defined in relation to every other unit, but ultimately the basic unit, the meter, even though it is defined by other scientifically determinable values, is still arbitrary. The unit of time we call a second is one sixtieth of one sixtieth of one twenty-fourth of the average period of rotation of this planet from sunrise to sunrise over a year–fundamentally arbitrary and not so constant as was once believed. So we might think that the “prime” universe is the one in which the measured value of the vibrations is “one” on our scale, but our scale is arbitrary. As with the number of “gravs” as a measurement of the gravitic force of other planets, we arbitrarily assign “one” to our own planet and measure the others against that.

Perhaps, though, we could make the “prime” universe that one with the lowest “vibration” (or the highest–it is the same result). The problem here is that, assuming “zero” is not a possible reading (all universes by this definition must vibrate, and “zero” constitutes not doing so) and given the incredible number of such universes, we could never be certain that we had found the universe with the lowest frequency and so could not know which universe was “prime”. We might devise a formula which determined a theoretical lowest possible frequency for a universe; the formula would very likely be incorrect, and we might not be able to determine whether a universe with that value actually exists.

So then the prime universe is decided arbitrarily, and the best choice would be that universe which first determined how to travel to the others. We would label our universe “prime” and measure all the others by their relationship to us; our “frequency” would be “one-point-zero-zero” out to however many places seemed necessary for accuracy, others measured by variation from that.

However, the odds are fairly slim (what am I saying? they’re infinitessimal) that our universe would be the first to discover how to travel the multiverse. Further, given the hypothetical vastness of the multiverse it might be a thousand, a million, a billion years–even never–before we encountered a world which had independently learned to do what we do (unless of course by some wild chance they found us before we solved the problem, but then they have the same problem): which universe gets to be “prime” because they discovered this first?

Ultimately, then, we call our universe “prime” if we invented our own way of traveling the multiverse, not because that has any meaning other than that we regard it our original home. If someone brings the technology to us from another universe, in all likelihood we will call their universe “prime”, and ours will be defined on the scale they devised. It seems the word has no meaning other than “that universe we have chosen as the one by which our scale is calibrated”. If there is a multiverse of this sort, there is no “prime” universe by any other meaning.

Law and Politics, Logic and Reasoning

#115: Disregarding Facts About Sexual Preference

September 26, 2016 M.J. Leave a comment

This is mark Joseph “young” blog entry #115, on the subject of Disregarding Facts About Sexual Preference.

I am aware that it is “politically correct” to regard homosexuality as normal, and to assert that homosexuals are born that way and cannot help being as they are. It has already been established that I do not believe that, and if being politically correct means pretending that lies are true I am going to have to be politically incorrect (a phrase I was using before it was commandeered by a comedian for his talk show). Opinions are fairly set on this issue, and the battle is going to rage for most of the next generation. I don’t mind that people disagree with me. There are facts on the other side, just as there are facts on this side. What I dislike is when people ignore the facts that support the position with which they disagree.

I was moved to consider this by a television show. It has become extremely common for television shows to give us likeable homosexual characters, in an effort to make homosexuality seem normal. It’s a mistake, I think, but people in media recognize that they have a lot influence and attempt to use it. I remember that my wife had a favorite television show featuring a favorite actor, and then the lead character’s girlfriend got pregnant and (over his objections) chose to get an abortion. My wife never watched the show again, because she could not look at a woman who would do that to her baby without crying, and so the show lost its entertainment value. It must not have been only her, though, because within a season the girlfriend, a regular from the beginning, was written out of the show, and the series failed by the end of the next season. People were offended. I tried to continue liking Buffy the Vampire Slayer after they decided to make Willow homosexual, but I it just upset me too badly that her life was being so destroyed, and the more so that it was done for a political message. There was a show launched a year or so ago which sounded really interesting and I started watching it rather faithfully, but I couldn’t get past the excessive homosexual sex in it despite the truly fascinating ongoing mystery that was the primary plotline. If you want to lose audience for an entertainment show, make a bold statement that is bound to offend a large number of viewers, and stick to it.

In the particular show which inspired these current thoughts, there is tension between an elderly widow and her homosexual daughter. The resolution of the show came about when the mother came to understand that her daughter’s sexuality was not the mother’s fault, that it did not work that way but she was simply born homosexual. Maybe she was; the jury is still out on that. However, a picture had been painted of her parents as a couple who possibly never loved each other, the mother terrified of the father for their entire marriage. How can this not have impacted the daughter? We are wrong to imagine that our future marriages will be just like those of our parents, but we do it anyway even when we want to make it different, and a girl growing up in such a house would stand a very good chance of being conditioned to fear men and turn elsewhere for affection. I don’t mean to blame the mother–“fault” for harming someone when acting with the best of intentions but limited knowledge does not always mean “culpability” for the outcome–but I think we’re ignoring a lot of facts when we assert that the environmental factors were irrelevant.

Of course, it’s only a television show, and in fiction the writers can always tell us that things are the way the show says they are. That the daughter of this fear-filled loveless marriage becomes a lesbian proves nothing, because it’s only what the writers decided. Still, just as the characters in the story seem to be ignoring the obvious fact that the child grew up to fear men, those who assert that homosexuality is entirely genetic and not at all environmental seem to be ignoring similar facts in reality.

Decades ago I worked with a young man who in his spare time often visited lesbian hangouts and got to know the girls. He said he never met one who had not been badly hurt by a man at some point–a father, brother, husband, boyfriend, rapist, someone who left her fearful of or angry at men. There are easily a thousand plausible explanations for that. He might simply never have met one who didn’t fit the pattern, or he might have assumed that those who didn’t tell him of such a history did not want to discuss it. Yet it is data: many lesbian women appear to have rejected men because of abuse or hurt in their past. It is at least plausible that environment, and not heredity, is the cause of their homosexuality.

I agree that there might be hereditary factors. As with alcoholism, some might be born with a genetic predisposition to this particular temptation, and as with alcoholism experimentation might trigger it more quickly in those who are more susceptible. But when those who want it to be entirely hereditary attempt to deny that there are any environmental factors, that those who are sexually attracted to members of the same sex could not possibly not have been, it is almost certainly because that is the answer they want, not the answer the evidence supports.

Believe what you think the evidence supports; defend your position. Don’t suppose that you can ignore evidence and still make your position credible.

Bible and Theology, Logic and Reasoning

#114: Saint Teresa, Pedophile Priests, and Miracles

September 17, 2016 M.J. Leave a comment

This is mark Joseph “young” blog entry #114, on the subject of Saint Teresa, Pedophile Priests, and Miracles.

You probably have already heard that the woman known to most of us as Mother Teresa is now officially Saint Teresa of Calcutta.

The first I saw it was in an article critical of the Roman Catholic Church, in the Salt Lake Tribune. My initial glance at the piece noted that it somehow connected the canonization of this world-respected woman to the issue of pedophilia among the priesthood, and I thought it was going to say that an organization which so poorly handled that situation had no business making people saints. I was musing on that, but I hate it when people criticize my articles without having read them, so I went back to read it completely and discovered that his complaint, while I think just as wrong-headed, was much more subtle.

It is of course rather easy to criticize the church for its handling of these pedophile cases, but difficult to see from their perspective. After all, they’re older and larger than most countries, consider their priests something like diplomatic envoys to everywhere in the world, and have a long history of handling their own problems internally. Add to that the necessity of balancing justice with mercy, the concerns for the sinners as much as for the victims, and the awareness that the quickest way for an ordinary parishoner to remove an unwanted priest is to make sexual allegations against him, and you’ve got a very difficult situation. It is thus easy to say that they handled it poorly–but not so simple to be certain that any of us would have handled it better. That, though, was not what the article was addressing.

It is also a mistake to think that the Roman Catholic Church “makes” people Saints. Canonization is rather more a process of identifying those who are. There are few people in the world, perhaps of any faith, who would say that Teresa was not a saint. She certainly fit the standards most Protestants hold: she loved Jesus so much that she abandoned all possibility for a “normal” comfortable western life in order to bring the love of God to some of the most impoverished and spiritually needy people on earth. Many ordinary Catholics were pressing for the Vatican to say officially what they believed unofficially. The problem was that the Roman Catholic canonization process has a requirement that to be recognized officially as a Capital-S Saint an individual must have performed miracles. At least two must be certified by Vatican investigators.

As one of my Protestant friends said, she should be credited with the miracle of getting funding for so unglamorous a work, and probably also for doing so much with what she had. Those, though, are not the types of miracles considered; there has to be an undeniable supernatural element involved. The author of the critical article is unimpressed with the two that they certified, but his argument is rather that miracles do not happen, and the events cited in support of her canonization were not miracles. He then argues, seemingly, that if miracles really did happen, if God really did intervene in the world, then certainly God Himself would have acted to prevent those priests from abusing those children. No loving father could have permitted that kind of treatment of his own children; how can the Church assert that God is a loving Father, if that God did not intervene on behalf of these victims?

We could get into a very involved conversation about why the writer supposes the conduct of these priests to have been “wrong”. Certainly it was wrong by the standards of the Roman Catholic Church. However, the Marquis de Sade wrote some very compelling arguments in moral philosophy in which he asserted that whatever exists is right. On that basis he claimed that because men were stronger than women, whatever a man chose to do to a woman was morally right simply because nature made the man capable of doing it. The same argument would apply to this situation, that because the priests were able by whatever means to rape these children, their ability to do so is sufficient justification for their actions. I certainly disagree because, like the Roman Catholic Church, I believe that God has called us to a different moral philosophy. The question is, on what basis does our anti-God critic disagree? If he asserts, as he does, that there is no God, why does he suppose that it is wrong for adults to engage in sexual acts with children? It seems to be his personal preference; the Marquis de Sade would have disagreed, as would at least some of the men who do this. To say that something is morally wrong presupposes that that statement has meaning. We fall back on “human rights”, but the only reason Jefferson and the founders of America could speak of such rights is that they believed such rights were conferred (endowed) upon every individual by the God who made us. No, they did not all believe in the Christian God (many were Deists), but they did found their moral philosophy on a divine origin.

However, let us agree that the conduct of those priests was heinous. We have a solid foundation for holding that position, even if the writer who raises it does not. The question is, why did God not stop them?

It is said that during the American Civil War someone from Europe visited President Lincoln at the White House. During his visit, he asked whether it were really true that the American press was completely free of government control–something unimaginable in Europe at that time. In answer, Lincoln handed his guest that day’s newspaper, whose lead story was denigrating the way the President was handling the war. It was obvious that such an article could not have been written if the publisher had any thought of the government taking action against his paper for it.

If God is able to work miracles, why does He not miraculously silence critics like the op-ed piece in the Salt Lake Tribune?

Perhaps the writer thinks that even God would not interfere with the freedom of the press in America. Why not? There is nothing particular about the choice to write something which is offensive to God that would make it less objectionable than the choice to do something which is offensive to God. God could perhaps have prevented many atrocities–the development of the atomic bombs that devastated two Japanese cities, the rise of the regime which exterminated nearly six million Jews and even more Poles plus many other peoples, and we could fill the rest of this article with such acts. Yet these are all choices made by men, and just as God chooses not to prevent one writer from criticizing Him in the Salt Lake Tribune, so too He has not prevented billions of other hurtful actions by everyone in the world. He allows us to make our own choices, and to hurt and be hurt by those choices. If he prevented all of them, there would be no freedoms whatsoever.

Two footnotes should be put to this.

The first is that we do not know and indeed cannot know whether God has limited human wickedness and disaster. We can imagine horrors that never happened. The Cold War between the United States and the Soviet Union never “went hot” into a nuclear battle despite the many fictional scenarios describing how it might have happened. We do not know whether God prevented nuclear war, or indeed whether He will do so in the future; we only know that it did not happen. Our perspective of the “bad” that happens in this world lacks perspective because, apart from horror stories, we measure it against itself. Be assured, though, that if the worst thing that ever happened in the world was the occasional hangnail, someone would be asking how God could possibly allow the suffering that is the hangnail. We complain of the worst wickedness in the world, but do not know what might have been or whether God saved us from something worse than that.

The second is that God, Who is the only possible foundation for any supposed moral law to which we could hold anyone accountable, promises that He is ultimately fair and will judge everyone. He has made it His responsibility to see to it that everyone who has caused any harm will be recompensed an equal amount of harm, and anyone who has been harmed will be compensated an appropriate amount in reparations, so that all wrongs ultimately are put right. The writer of the article does not want there to be ultimate justice, but present intervention. However, I expect were we to ask if what He wants is for God to remove from the world the power to choose what we do and have our choices affect each other, he would object to that as well. There will be ultimate justice, and may God have mercy on us all. Meanwhile, we are given freedom to act in ways that are either beneficial (as Saint Teresa) or baneful (as the priests), so that we may then be judged.

How there can be mercy and justice at the same time is something I have addressed elsewhere, and is much more than this article can include. It is perhaps the problem that the Catholic Church has in handling its errant priests. The bishops are not God, and neither are we, and we all do the best we can, which often is not as good as we might hope. We all also fail, hurt others, and need forgiveness and correction. God offers that, and that is the true miracle.

Logic and Reasoning

#112: Isn’t It Obvious

September 4, 2016 M.J. Leave a comment

This is mark Joseph “young” blog entry #112, on the subject of Isn’t It Obvious.

I keep a beverage cup on my desk–usually root beer, usually Barq’s® (I joke that I once had a terrible Coke® habit–two to three liters per day). It has a lid so that when I inevitably upset it any spill will be minimal. I recently acquired a replacement for a worn cup, this one with a threaded lid and an airtight stopper. Twice, maybe thrice, when securing the lid I managed to force beverage out through the threads down the side of the cup and over my hands. I thought, there must be a way to avoid that–and then I immediately recognized what caused the problem and how to prevent it, and implemented the solution.

A few days later someone was visiting who fancies himself rather intelligent, and he poured some of our coffee into a very similar cup, tightened the lid, and squirted coffee on his hand and the counter. Helping him clean it up, I gave him the solution to the problem. To my surprise he responded, “I don’t think I ever would have thought of that.” Then I recounted all of this to someone I think intelligent (who also has the same kind of cup and admitted having the same problem), who replied, “I don’t think I would have thought of that, either.”

I thought the solution obvious, but I’ll delay telling you what it is in case you want to think about it for a moment.

When I was in law school, sitting in Professor Lipkin’s Jurisprudence seminar (I have mentioned him before, and have since learned that he has died), he asked a question, and immediately pointed at me and said I was not permitted to answer. The question was one concerning a problem consistent with my experience, so maybe it’s just because the other students, almost a decade younger, did not have the same experience. That experience was an enigma about whether or not to hold a door for a girl (or group of girls). Some girls at that time still believed that gentlemen ought to hold doors for ladies, and were very offended if you were rude enough not to do so; others believed that it was chauvinistic for a man to give special treatment of that sort to a woman, and would be very offended if you did. The question was how to avoid offending anyone. When the class was stumped, I provided the same answer he had found. It just seemed obvious to me.

I have spent a lot of time answering questions about time travel and writing analyses of time travel movies over the years, and sometimes I simply don’t understand why a correspondent or reader does not understand.

When I was about twelve or thirteen I met a kid who wrote songs, and I learned how to write songs from working with him. I eventually became very good, but I have always had this attitude that anyone can learn to write a song if they apply themselves to learning how to do it. That might be true. I think I write some very good songs; I think I’ve written some very bad ones, and that through practice I got better. Writing music and lyrics seems easy.

I realize that this might sound like I am saying, Look how smart I am. I don’t feel smart. I think it was Freeman Dyson who once when asked if he ever wondered why he was so smart answered not exactly, what he wondered was why everyone else was so stupid. I’ve not had that experience. Rather, I recognize that there are some things which come quite easily to me and others which I cannot do well at all. I am awed by people (like my sister) who become fluent in multiple languages, because I struggle with languages despite my grasp of English and of grammar and syntax in the abstract. I have no skill with the visual arts; my drawings are always warped and out of perspective, and when people ask my opinion of their work I always tell them they are asking the wrong person, they should talk to one of my artists. I have also learned over time that for all of us, the things which come easily to us we suppose are easy, and the things with which we struggle we think are difficult. Math is a good example. Someone–a machinist at a factory where I worked as a security guard–once suggested to me that I could with very little practice add a column of two-digit numbers in my head. I’d never tried, never even imagined that I could do that, but it wasn’t really that difficult once I got it in mind to do it that way (instead of adding the right column, carrying, and adding the left column). Simple math seems simple to me; I have no experience with calculus and none worth mentioning with trigonometry. Yet many people struggle with math, while others enjoy it and like to play math games. (I don’t like math games; they feel like busy work to me.)

That is, it is easy to think that the things which come easily to you are simple things anyone could do. It is not necessarily true, and it is not necessarily true that the people who easily do that at which you struggle are smarter than you. They simply have a abilities and practice in those things.

What seems obvious to me might be completely opaque to you, but I would wager that there are things that seem obvious to you that are just as opaque to me. I actually am as smart as all that, but there are many things I can’t do, and probably you can do many of them far better than I.

The reason the beverage is pushed out through the threads as the lid tightens is that the pressure in the cup is increasing and has nowhere else to go; if you leave the plug open while tightening it, the air (and possibly the beverage if it’s really full) will come out through the top of the lid instead of through the threads.

Hold the door for everybody.

Bible and Theology, Logic and Reasoning

#93: What Is a Friend?

July 20, 2016 M.J. 1 Comment

This is mark Joseph “young” blog entry #93, on the subject of What Is a Friend?

A few years back, someone who for the sake of avoiding argument I will identify as a friend of the family posted one of those captioned pictures to his Facebook page which I will admit stung me. I was reminded of it recently when I saw the same sentiment on a T-shirt for sale on the Internet. The gist of it is that your real friends are not the people who get you out of trouble but the people who get in trouble with you, not the people who bail you out of jail when you’ve been arrested but the people who sit in the cell alongside you and laugh about how much fun you had getting arrested together.

It stung because we are the people who have bailed him out, more than once literally and quite a few times metaphorically. I don’t know, though, whether he would number me among his friends. I don’t do wild parties; I don’t enjoy them. Our ideas of “having a good time” don’t intersect at many points. What, though, makes someone a friend?

As I ponder the question, I realize that the Facebook post and the T-shirt place in stark contrast two attitudes about what it is to be a friend or to have a friend. Either could be summarized in the statement, a friend is someone who helps make your life better–and then the discussion becomes a matter of what constitutes a “better” life. That in turn reflects a fundamental attitude regarding what you think life is about.

In the one view, a friend is someone who is always there to support you, always there to help, someone on whom you can lean when you are struggling to stand–and the relationship is reciprocal, that you are always there to support and help him, ready to carry him when he can’t walk on his own. This is the person who bails you out of jail, who gives you a bed and a meal when you find yourself homeless and hungry, who lends you a bit of money when there’s no guarantee you can repay it. This is the friend who tells you when what you are doing is dangerous, foolish, or simply wrong. In a sense, he is like family–that friend that the Bible mentions as being closer than a brother. There is a degree to which you live for him, and he lives for you. You share yourself with this person, and get to know this person. Of course, you can’t have too many of these–or can you?

The alternative view considers friends to be anyone who makes your life more enjoyable, which usually means more fun. The people who invite you to parties are your friends; the people with whom you play games and go on outings and watch sports or movies are all friends in this sense. Of course, you rarely know anything about how they really think or feel–but why would you want to? Life is short, and the point is to enjoy it and to help other people enjoy it. These are your drinking buddies, your coffee klatsch gossip group, your golfing or quilting companions. They matter in so far as they make you happy, and you matter to them to the same degree. If they don’t make you happy, if they are no longer fun, they drop from the list; they are equally ready to drop you. That is of no consequence; you can have scores of such friends, and replace them with new ones, because these people are your friends because they enjoy you and you enjoy them.

I probably have betrayed my preference in describing the two views. Indeed, when Jesus said nobody has greater love than one who lays down his life for his friends, I think He was describing real friendship, the commitment to sacrifice for another–and I think that friendship often involves sacrificing, laying down our lives, usually in little bits, giving up a movie or a dinner out to visit the hospital, spending the spare change on gasoline to drive someone to work or rescue him from the side of the road, losing an hour in the evening to be a shoulder for a few tears.

Yet this assumes that life is about becoming a more loving person, in a sense maturing. Not everyone believes that or wants that. My aforementioned friend is not interested in making himself better; he is interested in having fun. People only matter to him to the degree that he needs them. That’s not to say he never helps his friends or recognizes what they have done for him; it is rather to say that the kind of commitment I view as essential to friendship he views as inimical to it–and ultimately, any authority I might cite in support of my view he would discount because it is not consistent with his view.

I think those friendships shallow. Don’t get me wrong–I would be there for him if he needed me. I just don’t think he counts me one of his real friends, and I’m not sure that I could count on him to be there for me. We just don’t see friendship the same way.

Logic and Reasoning

#92: Electronic Tyranny

July 8, 2016 M.J. Leave a comment

This is mark Joseph “young” blog entry #92, on the subject of Electronic Tyranny.

I encountered an article–I did less than read it, but more than scan it–which ironically was apparently written by an expert in social media working with LinkedIn, if I understand aright, explaining why she had shut down her Facebook account. She also had decided to deactivate her smartphone for several hours each evening. She explained that it had been taking over her life, and now she finds she has much more time for more important things, like her writing and in-person personal interactions, relationships.

I apologize for being bored. I use Facebook as my primary mode of communications, but I do understand the problem–and I understand it because I faced it and addressed it long before Facebook was an issue. In fact, there was a name for this problem when it was a much smaller problem. It was called The Tyranny of the Telephone. We have the same problem, only bigger; and the same answers address it, only modified for the new shape.

By the early 1960s, telephones were ubiquitous; it was probably earlier than that, but that’s a time I can remember, and it’s important for another reason. Almost every home–certainly almost every suburban home–had one, and people used them for all kinds of things they previously did in person, like making appointments with doctors and talking to friends and selling life insurance and magazine subscriptions and promoting political candidates. There was a weak attempt at establishing a standard of courtesy, such as when you called someone the first thing you should say is who you are, but this did not really take hold.

What was unexpected about the phone was the way in which it took over our lives. You could be entertaining sixty people spread across three rooms at a family gathering, but if the phone rang whoever was calling would expect, and get, your undivided attention for however long they chose to stay on the line, almost never asking whether it was a bad time. You could be deeply involved in a work project, but if the phone on your desk rang you suddenly were interrupted by whoever was at the other end, for whatever reasons they had for wanting your involvement in what they were doing. It was unlike any social interaction previous to it. If someone knocked on your front door and you were busy, you asked them to wait. If someone called on the phone, you asked everyone else to wait.

Around that time, in the early 1960s, my father, who at that time was an engineer with Western Union, attended a major telecommunications industry conference. The president of AT&T was the keynote speaker. For those who don’t know, prior to the antitrust breakup in the 1980s which allowed the launch of other long distance telephone services and ultimately the creation of independent local telephone companies, American Telephone and Telegraph was the phone company. They provided nearly all local and long distance telephone service throughout the United States, and their Bell Labs was one of the leaders in electronic development and experimentation (I believe they invented transistors and were among the first to work with fiber optic data transmission). In his keynote address, he spoke of many of the technological advances in telephone technology he perceived as coming within the decade, many of which did come in that time while others fell away for lack of interest for a few decades. He predicted call waiting and call forwarding and caller ID, picturephones, and telephones with remote service that you could carry with you into the wilderness. As he finished, he said that he could foresee the day when if you wanted to speak with someone you could pick up a phone, dial one number, and if he didn’t answer you could be pretty sure that he was dead.

What the president of AT&T did not understand then was the possibility that most of us sometimes and some of us most of the time would rather not be readily available to anyone and everyone, that we would want to disconnect from the world for a while, be voluntarily incommunicado.

And the problem with technology like the telephone is that it connects us. Of course, that is exactly what it is supposed to do, but we do not always want to be connected. That, though, is not a problem with the technology; it is a problem with us.

I say I understand the author’s problem, but am bored by it because it is old news. In the late 90s I installed maybe all the popular instant messaging programs–ICQ, AIM, Yahoo!Messenger, MSN Messenger–and made myself available to anyone looking for me. I was, after all, designer of a recently published game, and I needed to be available to answer questions–and I had launched several then independent web sites on time travel, D&D, Bible, law, and more, and needed to be available to people with questions about those. What I found in the main, though, was that if you were visibly “on” such networks, it was like attending a large house party–people would see that you were available and assume that you had nothing better to do than chat with them. I didn’t want to be rude, but I was at work trying to get web pages posted, new worlds written and edited, a novel completed, and more. I would try to get these people to come to the point, to ask their question, to get past the pleasantries–only to realize there was no point, no question, only pleasantries from people who were bored and wanted to talk.

My response then was as drastic as that of the current author: I shut down all those programs. I’m not sure whether I could find the passwords and user names if I wanted them now, and I’m not sure which, if any, still operate, but I removed them from my schedule and found indeed that I had a lot more time, and a lot less contact with some people.

I went through something similar with electronic mail. Every day I would download a large quantity of e-mail messages, attempt to discard anything that I could tell was obviously Spam (something at which I have improved), and then read through the substantial remainder and write responses to most of them. Some would take perhaps not hours but certainly dozens of minutes, explaining complicated issues in temporal anomalies or answering a Bible question that had real personal meaning to a correspondent, and I would send these missives as soon as they were complete. Then when I had finished all the mail that had been downloaded, I would hit the download button again, and get more–usually at least some of it replies to letters I had just sent, often requiring additional substantive responses. This would happen several times every day, and my e-mail engagement would take several hours of my work time.

This time I handled the problem more intelligently. My first step was not to download the second time–that is, if I downloaded mail at two in the afternoon, anything that hadn’t arrived by then would wait for the next day. I did this because I realized that some people were using e-mail as if it were an instant messaging program, and I had eliminated instant messaging programs because they took over so much time in my life. These e-mail conversations were doing the same thing. Cutting them to one message a day saved a lot of time. It saved so much time that I gradually cut it back further, first to every other day, then to a regular schedule of five times in a fortnight. Eventually I realized that anyone who needed to reach me urgently either had my cell phone number (very very few, it was intended for emergency texting) or could reach me through Facebook. Anyone who sent me an e-mail was not in that big a hurry to get an answer, and today I check e-mail about once a month, plus or minus a couple weeks. I’ll get to it eventually. It’s not usually that important, and I don’t need to let it take over my time.

I poke my nose into Facebook several times a day. I was recently gifted with a smartphone, and added the Facebook apps so I can check when I am not at my computer. However, I control my Facebook–I don’t look at my feed or try to follow what my friends are doing, and they know that I am unlikely to notice anything posted that is not in some way directed at me (a private message, a post to my wall, or a post in which I am tagged) or made in one of the few groups which have priority in my preferences. I don’t have to delete Facebook to control it; I have to control myself.

The electronic world has the potential to consume our lives, to take time from other more important activities. That has been true since its beginning, with gramophones and nickelodeons, radio and telephones, television, video games, personal computers, bulletin board systems and online services, cellular phones, Internet and e-mail and smartphones, and whatever comes next will undoubtedly be the same only more. We can be the Luddites trying to cut ourselves off from its progress, but it does not stop that progress and does not improve us nearly as much as learning to control ourselves so we can use such advances as Facebook wisely.

Deleting your Facebook account strikes me as a desperate attempt to get control of your life, along the lines of those in earlier times who removed their television sets and had their phone service disconnected. The problem is that you are letting it control you; the solution is to learn to control it.

mark Joseph "young"

Category Archives: Logic and Reasoning

#153: What Are Ghosts?

#152: Breaking a Habit

#150: 2016 Retrospective

#133: Your Sunday Best

#117: The Prime Universe

#115: Disregarding Facts About Sexual Preference

#114: Saint Teresa, Pedophile Priests, and Miracles

#112: Isn’t It Obvious

#93: What Is a Friend?

#92: Electronic Tyranny

A generalist: learning less and less about more and more, one day to know nothing about everything.