An Interesting Thread of Discussion
I'll let the speakers speak for themselves.
Wednesday, January 18, 2006
More Detailed Proof of God
To: editor@edge.org
Peter Corless
Web/Internet Consultant, Game Designer, Author, Owner, Green Knight Publishing
Mountain View, CA
650-906-3134 (mobile)
petercorless@mac.com
Q: Did Isaac Asimov predict the future science of applied memetic sciences, calling it psychohistory, in the Foundation Trilogy?
A: Yes. The sciences of applied memetics underlies economic sciences, marketing research, political and social sciences. Game theory is being applied to problem-solving domains to create predictive future scenarios, from war games to peace games. A form of proto-science of psychohistory is being used to predict optimal future human interactions. We already have a large body of sciences to predict human behavior. We are merely lacking some of the grand unifying theories, or we are ignoring the actual theories discovered centuries and millennia ago because they are lost in the rhetoric of philosophy and religion. That does not invalidate their scientific truths, but many who are supposedly-rational minds have a cognitive dissonance to look back in history or into the face of religion and acknowledging the facts within the mythopoetry.
Q: Is there mathematical proof that God actually exists which even Pythagoras, Aristotle, Albert Einstein and 99.99999% of humanity would nod in agreement with?
A: Yes. It is eminently simple to prove God exists. What is amazing is how easy the math is, and how it was so apparent to Greek mathematicians long before the Age of Christ.
Definition of God
C´ = "God"
C´ —(A)—> ∞ —(Ω)—> C´
Proof of God
1. Things exist.
At the most fundamental level, it is arguable whether anything truly exists, get for the sake of the proof, we shall deal with the hypothesis that things exist, because we see so many of them. The true nature of things can await a later analysis. Even if we see that things are an illusion, an illusion is still a thing, and therefore it is. Ergo, "things exist" can be our first axiom for rational discourse.
T = Set of "Things"
X = "Existence"
X of T = True
2. Everything exists because of a cause.
C = "Cause"
3. An implicit cause lays behind the instantiation of any thing, whether in the world of reality or in the realm of possible ideals.
If there was no reason for something to exist, whether beautiful, true, positive, rational, and whole, or even if irrational, negative, ugly, false, and divisive, then it would simply not exist. All things exist for a reason, whether we have observed the existence of a thing or whether it remains unobserved, whether we understand the reasons or fully understand them. When there is no reason continued existence, things cease to exist in the real world, though they continue to exist in the plane of eternal ideals, because they had been, or could be again. See the "Sundial" argument of Cicero, or the "Watch and the Watchmaker" of more recent centuries. Also see Plato for the difference between the world of the real and the world of the ideal.
t = any one element of T
If t,
Then C(t) ("there is a Cause of t"),
Instance of t in eternal ideal world = True
And possible instance of t in real world = True
4. If there was no cause for each and everything to exist, it would not exist.
If C = Ø, then
t = Ø,
and instance of t = False
5. There is a Prime Cause behind all things and all causes.
C´ = "Prime Cause"
6. The Prime Cause leads to everything.
C´ —> ∞
6. The Prime Cause is still the source for all things and all subsequent causes regardless of all simple and complex paths of causality.
One specific cause is the Prime Cause, from which all others causality and all other products of causality emanates. Regardless of simplicity or complexity of inheritance or graph of causes, C´ remains the ultimate source of all causality. If something we observe and believe to be the prime cause is not the ultimate source of all causality, then it is simply replaced by whatever truer cause is the cause of all things, ad infinitum, until we arrive at the true Prime Cause. However, until human understanding comprehends the possibility, it is still mathematically obvious that all things exists for a unified reason at the ultimate end of all other reasons.
C´ —> t1 (The prime cause is the direct cause of t1)
C´ —> C´´ —> C´´´ —> t2 (the prime cause leads to other causes that lead to t2)
7. Human linguistics assigns many names to the Prime Cause.
Regardless of what we call it, whether a mathematical symbol or a poetic or profane construct, we can assign a semiotic representation to the Prime Cause of all things, which, for convenience's sake, we can call "God" in English, or "C´" as a mathematical term.
C´ = "God", "Allah", "Yahweh", "YHWH", "Jehovah", "Jah," "El", "Elohim", "Theos", "Deus", "Dios", "Dio", "Gott", "Dieu", "ShangDi", "The Creative Principal", "The Creator", "The Prime Cause", "The Supreme Being", "I", "I AM", "The Big Guy" ...
8. The Prime Cause is the cause of creation of all things, which leads to the creation of all things through the creative principle.
A = Alpha, or creative principle
C´ —(A)—> instance of ∞
9. The Prime Cause is the cause of the destruction of all things, which leads everything back to the Prime Cause through the destructive principle.
Ω = Omega, or destructive principle
∞ —(Ω)—> C´
10. Therefore God is the Alpha and the Omega of all things.
The Greeks were not Christians nor Jews, but they clearly believed in the mathematical clarity of the existence of God.
C´ —(A)—> ∞ —(Ω)—> C´
There are definitely conundrums. For if there was a watch and watchmaker argument, what created God? What created the Creator? What was the cause of the prime cause?
This is answered by the rational that God is, always was, and always will be. His instantiation is ∞ in both the real and ideal worlds, across all time, space, and scale, microscopic to macroscopic.
Even if we prove "God" was invented, thus did not always exist, this is a "false God," or more rightly, a false interpretation of God.
The only way for causality to exist is if there is some grand unifying theory of power and force beyond what we would see as "real world" causality that we allow to exist which leads to the existence of everything else. There is an ideal creative force from which everything, ideal and real, emanates, and to which, everything returns when it is destroyed.
Perhaps I have not searched far enough across the Internet or in books for another Proof of God with as clear and simple terms. The above is my own work, and it is "Copyleft" as of this day, 18 January 2006, 10:10 AM, Peter Corless. Copyleft = "It is all right to distribute, as long as you attribute."
Further Reading (for myself too)
So God's Really in the Details?
see works of:
Richard Swinburne, University of Oxford
Alvin Plantinga, University of Notre Dame
Nicholas Wolterstorff, Yale University
Sincerely,
-Peter Corless
petercorless@mac.com
650-906-3134 (mobile)
To: editor@edge.org
Peter Corless
Web/Internet Consultant, Game Designer, Author, Owner, Green Knight Publishing
Mountain View, CA
650-906-3134 (mobile)
petercorless@mac.com
Q: Did Isaac Asimov predict the future science of applied memetic sciences, calling it psychohistory, in the Foundation Trilogy?
A: Yes. The sciences of applied memetics underlies economic sciences, marketing research, political and social sciences. Game theory is being applied to problem-solving domains to create predictive future scenarios, from war games to peace games. A form of proto-science of psychohistory is being used to predict optimal future human interactions. We already have a large body of sciences to predict human behavior. We are merely lacking some of the grand unifying theories, or we are ignoring the actual theories discovered centuries and millennia ago because they are lost in the rhetoric of philosophy and religion. That does not invalidate their scientific truths, but many who are supposedly-rational minds have a cognitive dissonance to look back in history or into the face of religion and acknowledging the facts within the mythopoetry.
Q: Is there mathematical proof that God actually exists which even Pythagoras, Aristotle, Albert Einstein and 99.99999% of humanity would nod in agreement with?
A: Yes. It is eminently simple to prove God exists. What is amazing is how easy the math is, and how it was so apparent to Greek mathematicians long before the Age of Christ.
Definition of God
C´ = "God"
C´ —(A)—> ∞ —(Ω)—> C´
Proof of God
1. Things exist.
At the most fundamental level, it is arguable whether anything truly exists, get for the sake of the proof, we shall deal with the hypothesis that things exist, because we see so many of them. The true nature of things can await a later analysis. Even if we see that things are an illusion, an illusion is still a thing, and therefore it is. Ergo, "things exist" can be our first axiom for rational discourse.
T = Set of "Things"
X = "Existence"
X of T = True
2. Everything exists because of a cause.
C = "Cause"
3. An implicit cause lays behind the instantiation of any thing, whether in the world of reality or in the realm of possible ideals.
If there was no reason for something to exist, whether beautiful, true, positive, rational, and whole, or even if irrational, negative, ugly, false, and divisive, then it would simply not exist. All things exist for a reason, whether we have observed the existence of a thing or whether it remains unobserved, whether we understand the reasons or fully understand them. When there is no reason continued existence, things cease to exist in the real world, though they continue to exist in the plane of eternal ideals, because they had been, or could be again. See the "Sundial" argument of Cicero, or the "Watch and the Watchmaker" of more recent centuries. Also see Plato for the difference between the world of the real and the world of the ideal.
t = any one element of T
If t,
Then C(t) ("there is a Cause of t"),
Instance of t in eternal ideal world = True
And possible instance of t in real world = True
4. If there was no cause for each and everything to exist, it would not exist.
If C = Ø, then
t = Ø,
and instance of t = False
5. There is a Prime Cause behind all things and all causes.
C´ = "Prime Cause"
6. The Prime Cause leads to everything.
C´ —> ∞
6. The Prime Cause is still the source for all things and all subsequent causes regardless of all simple and complex paths of causality.
One specific cause is the Prime Cause, from which all others causality and all other products of causality emanates. Regardless of simplicity or complexity of inheritance or graph of causes, C´ remains the ultimate source of all causality. If something we observe and believe to be the prime cause is not the ultimate source of all causality, then it is simply replaced by whatever truer cause is the cause of all things, ad infinitum, until we arrive at the true Prime Cause. However, until human understanding comprehends the possibility, it is still mathematically obvious that all things exists for a unified reason at the ultimate end of all other reasons.
C´ —> t1 (The prime cause is the direct cause of t1)
C´ —> C´´ —> C´´´ —> t2 (the prime cause leads to other causes that lead to t2)
7. Human linguistics assigns many names to the Prime Cause.
Regardless of what we call it, whether a mathematical symbol or a poetic or profane construct, we can assign a semiotic representation to the Prime Cause of all things, which, for convenience's sake, we can call "God" in English, or "C´" as a mathematical term.
C´ = "God", "Allah", "Yahweh", "YHWH", "Jehovah", "Jah," "El", "Elohim", "Theos", "Deus", "Dios", "Dio", "Gott", "Dieu", "ShangDi", "The Creative Principal", "The Creator", "The Prime Cause", "The Supreme Being", "I", "I AM", "The Big Guy" ...
8. The Prime Cause is the cause of creation of all things, which leads to the creation of all things through the creative principle.
A = Alpha, or creative principle
C´ —(A)—> instance of ∞
9. The Prime Cause is the cause of the destruction of all things, which leads everything back to the Prime Cause through the destructive principle.
Ω = Omega, or destructive principle
∞ —(Ω)—> C´
10. Therefore God is the Alpha and the Omega of all things.
The Greeks were not Christians nor Jews, but they clearly believed in the mathematical clarity of the existence of God.
C´ —(A)—> ∞ —(Ω)—> C´
There are definitely conundrums. For if there was a watch and watchmaker argument, what created God? What created the Creator? What was the cause of the prime cause?
This is answered by the rational that God is, always was, and always will be. His instantiation is ∞ in both the real and ideal worlds, across all time, space, and scale, microscopic to macroscopic.
Even if we prove "God" was invented, thus did not always exist, this is a "false God," or more rightly, a false interpretation of God.
The only way for causality to exist is if there is some grand unifying theory of power and force beyond what we would see as "real world" causality that we allow to exist which leads to the existence of everything else. There is an ideal creative force from which everything, ideal and real, emanates, and to which, everything returns when it is destroyed.
Perhaps I have not searched far enough across the Internet or in books for another Proof of God with as clear and simple terms. The above is my own work, and it is "Copyleft" as of this day, 18 January 2006, 10:10 AM, Peter Corless. Copyleft = "It is all right to distribute, as long as you attribute."
Further Reading (for myself too)
So God's Really in the Details?
see works of:
Richard Swinburne, University of Oxford
Alvin Plantinga, University of Notre Dame
Nicholas Wolterstorff, Yale University
Sincerely,
-Peter Corless
petercorless@mac.com
650-906-3134 (mobile)
The Walking is Just Beginning
No sooner had my walking on Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Day end than I was given my next quest by KFOG, 104.5/97.7 FM. There was a public service announcement for The Overnight.
A few weeks ago, I had been on the Sam Harris site, the End of Faith. Not only do I believe that Sam Harris is deluding himself that we are at the End of Faith, I believe he is deluding himself about the value of faith in everyday life.
For without faith in everyday life, we'd just commit suicide. According to the BBC and quoted on Aneki.com, apparently nine of the top ten countries with the highest suicide rates in the atheistic Communist and former Communist countries; the tenth is Finland. Yet another source said that there are strong rates of suicide among Christian and Muslim populations. It is tragic that those supposedly undertaking to heal others, such as medical professionals and psychiatrists, in particular suffer from depression that leads to suicide. At least according to the Straight Dope.
My own life was affected by suicide in my Junior year at Carnegie Mellon. In my illustration studio, the woman who sat next to me, Molly, committed suicide after the 1985 Beaux Arts Ball. She was a beautiful but tragically sad young woman. Talented. Wry and witty. Yet deeply pained. Her art work was always strongly rendered yet often bitter.
Two of us from her illustration class went to see her February funeral along with other friends of hers from school, and her family. Bruno drove me down. Molly's was a large Irish family. Like mine. I saw the stunned look on their faces. They grieved so strongly. I grieved with them as well.
I recall how beautiful Molly had been the night of the ball. She was dressed as a southern belle. She was better than good-looking. She was gorgeous. I wished I had told her so when I had the chance. For years I considered that if perhaps I had said more good things to her, she might not have taken the pills. I wondered what had driven her to such extremes. From what I hear, she wanted to live in the end, but she had taken too many aspirin. Her blood was too thin, and they did not have enough time to save her.
So for Molly, I will be walking from dusk to dawn. I will take a long day's journey into night. That's the plan for now at least. If her surviving family reads this, I pray you each and all well. As a fellow artist and student, I admired her talent. As a young man, I loved her with what small chaste friendship two cubicle-cohorts might develop over all-too-short a time. Know that your sister is not forgotten, and her memory, her fiery spirit, lives on forever. The precious gift of her presence in my life will always be there.
For the sake of the other Mollys of the world, those young men and women on the verge of hope and precipice of self-denial, I will walk the Overnight.
Out of the Darkness Overnight
Peter Corless, Walker
TheOvernight.Org
American Foundation for Suicide Prevention
July 22-23, 2006
Please Sponsor Generously
I have already paid the $75 fee for entry. Now it's up to you to help me raise $1,000 for suicide prevention. That's not very much to save a life or ten.
No sooner had my walking on Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Day end than I was given my next quest by KFOG, 104.5/97.7 FM. There was a public service announcement for The Overnight.
A few weeks ago, I had been on the Sam Harris site, the End of Faith. Not only do I believe that Sam Harris is deluding himself that we are at the End of Faith, I believe he is deluding himself about the value of faith in everyday life.
For without faith in everyday life, we'd just commit suicide. According to the BBC and quoted on Aneki.com, apparently nine of the top ten countries with the highest suicide rates in the atheistic Communist and former Communist countries; the tenth is Finland. Yet another source said that there are strong rates of suicide among Christian and Muslim populations. It is tragic that those supposedly undertaking to heal others, such as medical professionals and psychiatrists, in particular suffer from depression that leads to suicide. At least according to the Straight Dope.
My own life was affected by suicide in my Junior year at Carnegie Mellon. In my illustration studio, the woman who sat next to me, Molly, committed suicide after the 1985 Beaux Arts Ball. She was a beautiful but tragically sad young woman. Talented. Wry and witty. Yet deeply pained. Her art work was always strongly rendered yet often bitter.
Two of us from her illustration class went to see her February funeral along with other friends of hers from school, and her family. Bruno drove me down. Molly's was a large Irish family. Like mine. I saw the stunned look on their faces. They grieved so strongly. I grieved with them as well.
I recall how beautiful Molly had been the night of the ball. She was dressed as a southern belle. She was better than good-looking. She was gorgeous. I wished I had told her so when I had the chance. For years I considered that if perhaps I had said more good things to her, she might not have taken the pills. I wondered what had driven her to such extremes. From what I hear, she wanted to live in the end, but she had taken too many aspirin. Her blood was too thin, and they did not have enough time to save her.
So for Molly, I will be walking from dusk to dawn. I will take a long day's journey into night. That's the plan for now at least. If her surviving family reads this, I pray you each and all well. As a fellow artist and student, I admired her talent. As a young man, I loved her with what small chaste friendship two cubicle-cohorts might develop over all-too-short a time. Know that your sister is not forgotten, and her memory, her fiery spirit, lives on forever. The precious gift of her presence in my life will always be there.
For the sake of the other Mollys of the world, those young men and women on the verge of hope and precipice of self-denial, I will walk the Overnight.
Out of the Darkness Overnight
Peter Corless, Walker
TheOvernight.Org
American Foundation for Suicide Prevention
July 22-23, 2006
Please Sponsor Generously
I have already paid the $75 fee for entry. Now it's up to you to help me raise $1,000 for suicide prevention. That's not very much to save a life or ten.
Tuesday, January 17, 2006
Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Moved Me
Yesterday I had the tale of brave Ulysses. Yesterday I marched from my apartment in Mountain View to the bus stop, to Caltrain, to the bus again, up to the Bill Graham Civic Auditorium, and then from there all the way to the Tenderloin, and then back down on the train and a bold stride homewards.
My steps home were buoyed by angels. There was so much love and beauty and truth that I met Plato and shook his hands. Both of them. I clasped people, homeless, immigrants, or long-time San Francisco residents. It didn't matter. It was met with big hearty hugs.
I walked more than a mile in the shoes of others yesterday.
Even as I typed this, this very moment, that very moment already past, on KFOG-FM, poor Mick Jagger and the Rolling Stones are singing, have sung, will ever sing:
"I'll never be your beast of burden.
I walked for miles, my feet are hurting.
All I want is for you to make love to me."
Well, Mick, that's just not the deal to get your best results.
Myself, I felt more like a beast of burden than ever in my life. In fact, I accepted the burden again. The burden of human interaction as a social, political, economic, communicating band utterly human animal. The burden of being a real Christian, a real spiritual being.
Like a beast of burden, I need to carry my weight in the world. I need to walk a mile with more people. To meet more people. I need to continue my pilgrimage in life, as a witness to the wonder of it all.
As the Edward Bullwer-Lytton contest proclaimed decades ago, "If you want to eat, you gotta work. And at last I knew Pittsburgh." So today, I'll be focusing more on self-work and the work I need to do for a very good set of folks in Berkeley, California, who are creating cell phone games that are quirky, fun, and utterly charming.
My job is to help them build their Web and Internet community. Of all the Content Management Systems (CMS), we chose Joomla. Why? Well, there was a rather complex decision-making cycle between me as a Web/Internet consultant and the client. We both looked at the options, but in the end analysis, Joomla, as a name, just sounds more fun than other systems, like MaxDev's MD Pro. If we were into medical research, we might want a lot of M.D.s who are pros. For now, we have no idea what a Joomla is, or where the name came from, but it sounds quirky, fun, and more in line with the spirit of the company.
Music surrounded me when I woke up, but only by my conscious choice to turn it on. I was so tired when I went to bed last night I must have snored like a sawmill.
Yes, I left the alarm clock off, since I had fallen asleep some time after 2 am. I woke up, and thought it was before the dawn. No, the red letters on my trusty old alarm clock assured me it was 11:21. So I turned on the radio.
Tears for Fears. Shout.
The 1985 hit from "Songs from the Big Chair." Of course, that was all too "sensitive new age guy" music at the time. But for some reason, 21 years later, the lyrics were just as powerful.
In violent times, you shouldn't have to sell your soul
In black and white, they really really ought to know
Those one track minds that took you for a working boy
Kiss them goodbye, you shouldn't have to jump for joy
You shouldn't have to jump for joy
No, I didn't jump for joy yesterday. I walked for it. And in my pilgrimage, I found plenty of it. And not just in black and white but all the colors of the rainbow. Dr. King would have been happy to see all the people at the Bill Graham Civic Auditorium. However I did jump to my feet with applause at the song, the poetry, and the speeches!
I wore one black sock and one white sock all yesterday to show that we were all black and white. Like Feirefiz from the tale of Parzival, who was "motley like the magpie," the second-self our hero Parzival needed to meet and embrace as his brother before he could get back to the Grail Castle after his years of searching alone in all the wrong places for what was ever all around him.
The Revolution Starts Now. Another great song.
More to come, but for now, I need to get rocking and rolling on other things.
Yesterday I had the tale of brave Ulysses. Yesterday I marched from my apartment in Mountain View to the bus stop, to Caltrain, to the bus again, up to the Bill Graham Civic Auditorium, and then from there all the way to the Tenderloin, and then back down on the train and a bold stride homewards.
My steps home were buoyed by angels. There was so much love and beauty and truth that I met Plato and shook his hands. Both of them. I clasped people, homeless, immigrants, or long-time San Francisco residents. It didn't matter. It was met with big hearty hugs.
I walked more than a mile in the shoes of others yesterday.
Even as I typed this, this very moment, that very moment already past, on KFOG-FM, poor Mick Jagger and the Rolling Stones are singing, have sung, will ever sing:
"I'll never be your beast of burden.
I walked for miles, my feet are hurting.
All I want is for you to make love to me."
Well, Mick, that's just not the deal to get your best results.
Myself, I felt more like a beast of burden than ever in my life. In fact, I accepted the burden again. The burden of human interaction as a social, political, economic, communicating band utterly human animal. The burden of being a real Christian, a real spiritual being.
Like a beast of burden, I need to carry my weight in the world. I need to walk a mile with more people. To meet more people. I need to continue my pilgrimage in life, as a witness to the wonder of it all.
As the Edward Bullwer-Lytton contest proclaimed decades ago, "If you want to eat, you gotta work. And at last I knew Pittsburgh." So today, I'll be focusing more on self-work and the work I need to do for a very good set of folks in Berkeley, California, who are creating cell phone games that are quirky, fun, and utterly charming.
My job is to help them build their Web and Internet community. Of all the Content Management Systems (CMS), we chose Joomla. Why? Well, there was a rather complex decision-making cycle between me as a Web/Internet consultant and the client. We both looked at the options, but in the end analysis, Joomla, as a name, just sounds more fun than other systems, like MaxDev's MD Pro. If we were into medical research, we might want a lot of M.D.s who are pros. For now, we have no idea what a Joomla is, or where the name came from, but it sounds quirky, fun, and more in line with the spirit of the company.
Music surrounded me when I woke up, but only by my conscious choice to turn it on. I was so tired when I went to bed last night I must have snored like a sawmill.
Yes, I left the alarm clock off, since I had fallen asleep some time after 2 am. I woke up, and thought it was before the dawn. No, the red letters on my trusty old alarm clock assured me it was 11:21. So I turned on the radio.
Tears for Fears. Shout.
The 1985 hit from "Songs from the Big Chair." Of course, that was all too "sensitive new age guy" music at the time. But for some reason, 21 years later, the lyrics were just as powerful.
In violent times, you shouldn't have to sell your soul
In black and white, they really really ought to know
Those one track minds that took you for a working boy
Kiss them goodbye, you shouldn't have to jump for joy
You shouldn't have to jump for joy
No, I didn't jump for joy yesterday. I walked for it. And in my pilgrimage, I found plenty of it. And not just in black and white but all the colors of the rainbow. Dr. King would have been happy to see all the people at the Bill Graham Civic Auditorium. However I did jump to my feet with applause at the song, the poetry, and the speeches!
I wore one black sock and one white sock all yesterday to show that we were all black and white. Like Feirefiz from the tale of Parzival, who was "motley like the magpie," the second-self our hero Parzival needed to meet and embrace as his brother before he could get back to the Grail Castle after his years of searching alone in all the wrong places for what was ever all around him.
The Revolution Starts Now. Another great song.
More to come, but for now, I need to get rocking and rolling on other things.
Monday, January 16, 2006
Priorities
What follows is a post to my MBA/Technology Management class on why I might be late getting a paper handed in on Cultural Values and Ethics:
It's past midnight now. Almost one AM.
I will be on the Freedom Train today. In my mind, I already am.
So if I get this paper done late, it's because my personal, organizational, and cultural values say it's far more important to commemorate the 59th Anniversary of the original Freedom Train than to get this paper turned in immediamente. I want to do this ride this year in preparation for the 60th Anniversary next year. It will be part of a creative project that I'm working on in conjunction with a New York City photographer, if all goes according to plan.
"Flowers in the Cracks."
Ideally, it will begin as a photo-essay project, socio-political, visual and poetic, on the renewal of the spirit, tying together such disparate elements as the Holy Grail, the Declaration of Independence, the United Nations, 9/11 and Iraq. In this case, you can fairly say it's the renewal of the Spirit of '76.
I will be carrying printed-out copies of the documents on the original Freedom Train from 1947, along with the Universal Declaration of Human Rights passed in that same year.
I'll see if I can get this paper done according to the curriculum standards by midnight, but I'm still trying to get back up to speed after being gone most of the week for my grandmother's funeral. I also have my professional position to attend to.
I don't need 900-1,050 words to write such a paper. Nor APA format. Nor Microsoft Word.
All of that is illusion. Artificial schematic "requirements" that we can either opt in to, conform with, and use to limit oneself and one's expression. Or not, if we so choose differently. Pardon me a moment, and I mean no disrespect to the class, the instructor, nor the APA, the University of Phoenix or the Microsoft Corporation, but in the spirit of true freedom, I'm going to color outside the lines. Using every color of the spectrum at my disposal.
I'm going to be on that Freedom Train tomorrow!
I'm going to get a good night's sleep too.
If I can get this paper done when I get back, adhering as best as I can to the required format and content, I'll do the best paper I can given the time left in the day.
I'm not trying to get excused from school work, especially on culture and ethics.
Instead, I'm going to be walking the walk. Talking the talk. No theory. Action. Praxis.
I hope to be amongst our culture and expressing my ethics with the rest of the San Francsico Bay Area. Or at least as many of us that care to show up. Out of universal charity and fraternity, I promised a homeless man, Winston, I'd see him tomorrow and shake his hand if I could find him at the Caltrain station. Even if I cannot find him and never see him again, I'm going to be there for him. I promised a lot of people I'd be riding that Freedom Train up to the city. I promised my pastor and my God.
I'm going to be there for them. Even if I get hit by a car on the way to the train station, or if the train crashes, I'm going to be there. Even if I miss the train due to the fate of space and time, I'll try to catch the next. In whatever afterlife I find, I'll ask where the train station is. I'll be on that train. You might call me a bit obsessed, but I'd simply call this commitment to the principles of the day.
Other people are getting shot at, stabbed, and bombed for the sake of freedom. Some people are being executed rather than ever find a shred of human dignity granted to them out of kindness, regard for equality and fraternal love for all humankind. For their sake, for only a few hours, I will get out of my apartment, give up my normally rather ordinary, sedentary, isolated lifestyle, and I will walk with humble steps as a witness in compassionate solidarity to their suffering, their struggle, and their achievements. To celebrate Jana's life, and the life of all those of her nation and all nations that lived through, suffered or died due to madness and hatred, I will ride that train. This was why I had started my own non-profit some years back — Celebrate History. For the demise of that organization, I will also be on the train in glad rememberance of what we had done when we had the chance, and to celebrate the history of the Freedom Train and all it stands for.
And not just for the past. I will ride for the presently extremely impoverished and homeless who haunt the train stations of our nation, and the poor around the world, who are often in such a state not because of their inherent unworthiness, but because of the often mercurial nature of politics, the fear and hatred of xenophobia, economics, ironic chance and pure malice.
It is also the celebration of my sister, who is busy planning and working to get the NYC MTA rebuilt after 9/11, to get back to normalcy and peak efficiency for the people of my home town, New York City, and all the people of all the mass-transit systems in the world. Such a symbol of unity with mass transit is also vitally important to me as the gas prices rise to $3.00 a gallon, and as we lose touch with our neighbors in an isolated car-driven world.
I'll also be riding that train in honor of my grandfather, and my grandmother, and for many others you will read about in an essay I will point out below.
You can call it my own pilgrimage, my hajj, my Selma, and the worship of so many heroes who have lived and died, and who continue to work uncelebrated today, from the deep south to the South Bronx to South San Francisco to South Africa and South America, and everywhere in between from south pole to north pole.
If you are wondering, no. I have not ridden this train before. This will be my first time aboard. By fate or fortune's hand I might not ever do it again. We can never truly know what the future will hold, or what this might lead to in my life or in the lives of others who find out about this event and what it may mean for them.
For various personal and private reasons, today's going to be a special day for me. I don't want to miss it.
If you want to hear more why I'm playing "hookie" from school on a day when every other school I know of is closed, you can read my essay:
I Think I Hear My Freedom Train — Do You?
There's my cultural values. There's my personal ethics. There's the organization of individuals I will be standing with.
Let me ask: What will you stand for and do tomorrow?
Whatever it is, love it with all your heart and might.
Onwards to adventure!
-Peter.
What follows is a post to my MBA/Technology Management class on why I might be late getting a paper handed in on Cultural Values and Ethics:
It's past midnight now. Almost one AM.
I will be on the Freedom Train today. In my mind, I already am.
So if I get this paper done late, it's because my personal, organizational, and cultural values say it's far more important to commemorate the 59th Anniversary of the original Freedom Train than to get this paper turned in immediamente. I want to do this ride this year in preparation for the 60th Anniversary next year. It will be part of a creative project that I'm working on in conjunction with a New York City photographer, if all goes according to plan.
"Flowers in the Cracks."
Ideally, it will begin as a photo-essay project, socio-political, visual and poetic, on the renewal of the spirit, tying together such disparate elements as the Holy Grail, the Declaration of Independence, the United Nations, 9/11 and Iraq. In this case, you can fairly say it's the renewal of the Spirit of '76.
I will be carrying printed-out copies of the documents on the original Freedom Train from 1947, along with the Universal Declaration of Human Rights passed in that same year.
I'll see if I can get this paper done according to the curriculum standards by midnight, but I'm still trying to get back up to speed after being gone most of the week for my grandmother's funeral. I also have my professional position to attend to.
I don't need 900-1,050 words to write such a paper. Nor APA format. Nor Microsoft Word.
All of that is illusion. Artificial schematic "requirements" that we can either opt in to, conform with, and use to limit oneself and one's expression. Or not, if we so choose differently. Pardon me a moment, and I mean no disrespect to the class, the instructor, nor the APA, the University of Phoenix or the Microsoft Corporation, but in the spirit of true freedom, I'm going to color outside the lines. Using every color of the spectrum at my disposal.
I'm going to be on that Freedom Train tomorrow!
I'm going to get a good night's sleep too.
If I can get this paper done when I get back, adhering as best as I can to the required format and content, I'll do the best paper I can given the time left in the day.
I'm not trying to get excused from school work, especially on culture and ethics.
Instead, I'm going to be walking the walk. Talking the talk. No theory. Action. Praxis.
I hope to be amongst our culture and expressing my ethics with the rest of the San Francsico Bay Area. Or at least as many of us that care to show up. Out of universal charity and fraternity, I promised a homeless man, Winston, I'd see him tomorrow and shake his hand if I could find him at the Caltrain station. Even if I cannot find him and never see him again, I'm going to be there for him. I promised a lot of people I'd be riding that Freedom Train up to the city. I promised my pastor and my God.
I'm going to be there for them. Even if I get hit by a car on the way to the train station, or if the train crashes, I'm going to be there. Even if I miss the train due to the fate of space and time, I'll try to catch the next. In whatever afterlife I find, I'll ask where the train station is. I'll be on that train. You might call me a bit obsessed, but I'd simply call this commitment to the principles of the day.
Other people are getting shot at, stabbed, and bombed for the sake of freedom. Some people are being executed rather than ever find a shred of human dignity granted to them out of kindness, regard for equality and fraternal love for all humankind. For their sake, for only a few hours, I will get out of my apartment, give up my normally rather ordinary, sedentary, isolated lifestyle, and I will walk with humble steps as a witness in compassionate solidarity to their suffering, their struggle, and their achievements. To celebrate Jana's life, and the life of all those of her nation and all nations that lived through, suffered or died due to madness and hatred, I will ride that train. This was why I had started my own non-profit some years back — Celebrate History. For the demise of that organization, I will also be on the train in glad rememberance of what we had done when we had the chance, and to celebrate the history of the Freedom Train and all it stands for.
And not just for the past. I will ride for the presently extremely impoverished and homeless who haunt the train stations of our nation, and the poor around the world, who are often in such a state not because of their inherent unworthiness, but because of the often mercurial nature of politics, the fear and hatred of xenophobia, economics, ironic chance and pure malice.
It is also the celebration of my sister, who is busy planning and working to get the NYC MTA rebuilt after 9/11, to get back to normalcy and peak efficiency for the people of my home town, New York City, and all the people of all the mass-transit systems in the world. Such a symbol of unity with mass transit is also vitally important to me as the gas prices rise to $3.00 a gallon, and as we lose touch with our neighbors in an isolated car-driven world.
I'll also be riding that train in honor of my grandfather, and my grandmother, and for many others you will read about in an essay I will point out below.
You can call it my own pilgrimage, my hajj, my Selma, and the worship of so many heroes who have lived and died, and who continue to work uncelebrated today, from the deep south to the South Bronx to South San Francisco to South Africa and South America, and everywhere in between from south pole to north pole.
If you are wondering, no. I have not ridden this train before. This will be my first time aboard. By fate or fortune's hand I might not ever do it again. We can never truly know what the future will hold, or what this might lead to in my life or in the lives of others who find out about this event and what it may mean for them.
For various personal and private reasons, today's going to be a special day for me. I don't want to miss it.
If you want to hear more why I'm playing "hookie" from school on a day when every other school I know of is closed, you can read my essay:
I Think I Hear My Freedom Train — Do You?
There's my cultural values. There's my personal ethics. There's the organization of individuals I will be standing with.
Let me ask: What will you stand for and do tomorrow?
Whatever it is, love it with all your heart and might.
Onwards to adventure!
-Peter.
Wednesday, January 11, 2006
In Memory of Olivia Conlon
To all,
If anyone would like to donate to a cause to celebrate the memory of Olivia Conlon, please volunteer your time in service or donate to a religious, educational or cultural charity, elderly or health care group, or environmental organization. It might be your local place of worship, or a school (parochial or public), or after-school group. My own aunt was the long-time principal at St. Charles Parish, yet every school in the nation could use more assistance, and even moreso, many schools overseas. Perhaps choose a place caring for the elderly like the Irish EnergyAction. It could be for domestic natural beauty, like Environment California. Perhaps treat yourself to some Irish music while helping out St. Luke's Hospital, Dublin with the Cairde CD. As for an educational and cultural project that could use your funds, Wikipedia seeks to serve the world by sharing our collective human knowledge.
Best wishes for you and your family and friends,
-Peter.
To all,
If anyone would like to donate to a cause to celebrate the memory of Olivia Conlon, please volunteer your time in service or donate to a religious, educational or cultural charity, elderly or health care group, or environmental organization. It might be your local place of worship, or a school (parochial or public), or after-school group. My own aunt was the long-time principal at St. Charles Parish, yet every school in the nation could use more assistance, and even moreso, many schools overseas. Perhaps choose a place caring for the elderly like the Irish EnergyAction. It could be for domestic natural beauty, like Environment California. Perhaps treat yourself to some Irish music while helping out St. Luke's Hospital, Dublin with the Cairde CD. As for an educational and cultural project that could use your funds, Wikipedia seeks to serve the world by sharing our collective human knowledge.
Best wishes for you and your family and friends,
-Peter.
Monday, January 09, 2006
The Death of Olivia Conlon
On Epiphany, the day of spiritual awakenings, I was given a literal wake-up call by my brother John.
My last surviving grandparent, Olivia Conlon, had passed away.
July 15th, 1909 - January 8th, 2006
She died at peace. Her heart just beat fainter and fainter.
I'll be away at her wake and funeral services. Her services are being held at Colonial Funeral Homes, Staten Island, NY.
Murphy, being an Irishman, already signed the guest book. It's got a bug. I let the funeral home know. I got a message in before it went awry.
My prayers and best wishes to you and all your friends and family.
On Epiphany, the day of spiritual awakenings, I was given a literal wake-up call by my brother John.
My last surviving grandparent, Olivia Conlon, had passed away.
July 15th, 1909 - January 8th, 2006
She died at peace. Her heart just beat fainter and fainter.
I'll be away at her wake and funeral services. Her services are being held at Colonial Funeral Homes, Staten Island, NY.
Murphy, being an Irishman, already signed the guest book. It's got a bug. I let the funeral home know. I got a message in before it went awry.
Fatal error: Maximum execution time of 30 seconds exceeded in /usr/home/websites/www.colonialfuneralhomesi.com/Global/Guestbook.inc.php739 on lineI'm getting ready now to scoot out of here.
My prayers and best wishes to you and all your friends and family.
I Think I Hear My Freedom Train — Do You?
Indulge me. Indulge yourself. We're about to take an adventure. You're already on it. I'm just going to point at the scenery outside your window as we chug along. The train's pulling out of the station.Take a breath and relax.
Follow that train back to 1828, to when William Lloyd Garrison met Benjamin Lundy, the Quaker (remember them), who inspired him to found the Liberator, which worked on Emancipation. He was a man of peace, but adamant principle.
Now we need to turn this train back around. Chug uphill once again to 1947. Pull the load of history along with us. The grade is steep. The train will move slowly, but gather momentum year by year. And at times the train will backslide with a screech of metal-on-metal, until it gains traction again. And while it races to the top of the pass, beside it another railroad of tyranny tries to out-race it.
Show Me the Independence
We've arrived at last in 1947. But we have not found the last stop. The Freedom Train was not finished in its work. But let us pause here, where the first red, white, and blue Freedom Train was being prepared, and when its rolling stock first left the station on its mission.
Work was still ahead of it. And Harry S. Truman, the man from Independence, Missouri, the "show me" state, wanted to show the nation what we had wrought so far, so we could see what we had ahead of us still yet to go. He wanted to show independence to the American people. He loved the whistle stop. So the Freedom Train was born.
The United Nations was brand new. They had agreed to their origins in San Francisco, on October 24, 1945. I have stood on the spot where it happened. There was no UN Headquarters. Temporarily, the founding fathers of the United Nations met at Lake Success, on Long Island. The unity of the body was challenged from practically the very start.
The UN also had to work with the International Committee of the Red Cross and other humanitarian organizations dealing with the new Democratic Republic of Vietnam.
We the People...
And most urgently, they had to face the sundering of India into the new states of Pakistan, Bangladesh and Jammu and Kashmir.
India's story, and the inspiration of Mahatma Ghandi, are supposedly well-known to many Americans. But many see the spectacled leader of the Indian people with quaint nostalgia without ever reading his words. He was a revolutionary, with the same passion as William Lloyd Garrison.
It's been a long time comin' -
Indulge me. Indulge yourself. We're about to take an adventure. You're already on it. I'm just going to point at the scenery outside your window as we chug along. The train's pulling out of the station.Take a breath and relax.
If you're not familiar with the original Freedom Train, here's the Museum of America's Freedom Trains, the vehicle that went around the county from 1947-1949 hosting the most valuable documents of our country so that each of us could ride along with the legal vehicles of our freedoms and our rights. A subsequent Freedom Train toured the nation during the 1975-1976 Bicentennial.
WHY A FREEDOM TRAIN? The Freedom Train was conceived as an opportunity to reflect on the meaning of American citizenship at a time when the nation was finding a new and central role in world affairs. Americans had experienced a decade of pre-war economic Depression...The result, they hoped, would enable Americans to rediscover for themselves just how hard-won their freedoms were. Clearly, they hoped to enable personal reconciliations with the still-fresh sacrifices and human costs of war, and to impart a sense of meaning and worth to those sacrifices. — FreedomTrain.org
Today, the situation is no different. We are engaged in a war which we question far more deeply its worth — in economic terms and in the toll of human life, misery and death. We search even more deeply for meaning and national purpose in a nation divided, though mercifully not as deeply as during Lincoln's age. We search for our place in the community of the United Nations, and even the value of that august body. We should keep on the rails of our principles, and honor theworth of all human life, American, Iraqi, yours, mine, and our most distant neighbors.
Whistle Stops on the Freedom Train: 1215, 1658, 1776, 1828, 1863, 1947, 1963, 1964, 1976, and 2006 (Not Necessarily in that Order)
Long before and since the founding of the nation of the United States, billions of people around the world have stood up for the rights of all humankind, especially freedom of religion, in a compassionate and truly Christian way, but also in a Muslim way. In a Hindi way. Even in an atheist way. In a way for men, and for women. In a way for all ethnicities and creeds and genders. Follow the train away from the benighted stations ofhatred and intolerance! Follow it to freedom, love, and a commonweal, cosmopolitan future.
Follow the Freedom Train, your Freedom Train, our Freedom Train, and the legacy ever since the 1215 A.D. Magna Carta (the Great Charter), which preserved the rights of men from tyranny. An authentic, ancient, original copy of the document travelled on that train.
Follow the train to its first whistle stops in 1947. Read what the new web site, the Western Queens Gazette, uncovered just last year from the old, folded Long Island Star-Journal, and what it was like when the train rolled into Queens, New York on December 7th, 1948. What it meant to the people of that day and age.
Read too in that article how this was just the latest historical event for human freedom. How, to these people of Queens, the efforts for freedom went back at least to the Flushing Remonstrance, the first "Bill of Rights" put forward on January 1, 1658, to protect the right of worship of the Quakers.
Follow the Freedom Train when it became the nation's first subway as the Underground Railroad, through the 1800s, up through 1863, when Abraham Lincoln, stewarding the nation through the terrible Civil War, declared in his Emancipation Proclamation that all men and women, regardless of their color, were henceforth and irrevocably free. That no human could claim another as property, as chattel, as a possession.
Follow that train back to 1828, to when William Lloyd Garrison met Benjamin Lundy, the Quaker (remember them), who inspired him to found the Liberator, which worked on Emancipation. He was a man of peace, but adamant principle.
"Our country is the world - our countrymen are mankind...
I am in earnest - I will not equivocate - I will not excuse - I will not retreat a single inch - and I will be heard."— William Lloyd Garrison
He was fond of big, bold typefaces. If he could have afforded color inks, he'd have leapt at the chance to put his credo into the largest and most daring color imaginable. His biography is called "All on Fire." He believed in unleashing his fiery spirit in unequivocal words, while maintaining a calm and peaceful outward demeanor of a proper, spectacled New Englander.
And even as that challenge was well-underway, far before it was complete, he went on to ally with women for their Suffrage. Side-by-side, women and minorities sought what others had presumed for centuries for themselves: freedom!
An Uphill Crawl to 1947
Now we need to turn this train back around. Chug uphill once again to 1947. Pull the load of history along with us. The grade is steep. The train will move slowly, but gather momentum year by year. And at times the train will backslide with a screech of metal-on-metal, until it gains traction again. And while it races to the top of the pass, beside it another railroad of tyranny tries to out-race it.
Slowly it struggle uphill through the American Civil War, the terrible Indian Wars on the Great Plains, to the Spanish-American War, through World War I, the Moro Rebellion in the Philippines, through the raids of Pancho Villa, to the first repression of the Kurds in Iraq where they first suffered the ravages of air bombardment and mustard gas (dropped upon them by the British), to the Battle of Warsaw, to the invasion of Ethiopia—the only non-colonized nation in all of Africa fell to Italy's Fascism, to the Spanish Civil War, through the opportunistic invasion of China, the rise of the Nazis, the promulgation of the Holocaust, and the horrific the carnage of World War II.
Show Me the Independence
We've arrived at last in 1947. But we have not found the last stop. The Freedom Train was not finished in its work. But let us pause here, where the first red, white, and blue Freedom Train was being prepared, and when its rolling stock first left the station on its mission.
Work was still ahead of it. And Harry S. Truman, the man from Independence, Missouri, the "show me" state, wanted to show the nation what we had wrought so far, so we could see what we had ahead of us still yet to go. He wanted to show independence to the American people. He loved the whistle stop. So the Freedom Train was born.
For those of you who love your railroading, here's information from North East Rails about the 1947-1949 Freedom Train.
Birth of the United Nations
The United Nations was brand new. They had agreed to their origins in San Francisco, on October 24, 1945. I have stood on the spot where it happened. There was no UN Headquarters. Temporarily, the founding fathers of the United Nations met at Lake Success, on Long Island. The unity of the body was challenged from practically the very start.
The end of World War II left a world in shock, awed at the possibility of freedom not just for Europe or America, but for untold millions around the world. The success of Democracy and Communism over Fascism led to a revolutionary change in the map. And now, the two great ideologies of humankind could not stop fighting. The Cold War was born and the post-colonial era began.
The United Nations was faced with thepartition of Israel. The peace proposal in the Middle East the looks incredibly similar to the facts on the ground today, decades later. The first UN soldier lost his life in the pursuit of peace.
The United Nations was faced with thepartition of Israel. The peace proposal in the Middle East the looks incredibly similar to the facts on the ground today, decades later. The first UN soldier lost his life in the pursuit of peace.
The UN also had to work with the International Committee of the Red Cross and other humanitarian organizations dealing with the new Democratic Republic of Vietnam.
We the People...
And most urgently, they had to face the sundering of India into the new states of Pakistan, Bangladesh and Jammu and Kashmir.
India's story, and the inspiration of Mahatma Ghandi, are supposedly well-known to many Americans. But many see the spectacled leader of the Indian people with quaint nostalgia without ever reading his words. He was a revolutionary, with the same passion as William Lloyd Garrison.
"A small body of determined spirits fired by an unquenchable faith in their mission can alter the course of history."— Mahatma Ghandi (and see his other quotes.)
When the Freedom Train came to take on the assassinated Ghandi to his next incarnation,shot dead by January 30, 1948, he took his seat in solidarity beside Mr. Garrison. He had seen the possibility of peace between Hindu and Muslim believers in God, but someone denied that truth and cast the vote of their denial with a bullet.
Mr. Garrison, Mr. Lincoln, Ms. Susan B. Anthony, Mr.Frederick Douglass, Mrs. Harriet Tubman, Mr. Ghandi and countless others were probably joined by a lesser-known figure to Americans.
Sheikh Mohammed Abdullah (Sher e Kashmir) (briefbiography) had been working for the freedom of his own people since 1931. While Ghandi tried to keep India together, he saw the tyranny that many in both India and nascent Pakistan wished to inflict upon his nation.
"We the people of Jammu and Kashmir, have thrown our lot with Indian people not in the heat of passion or a moment of despair, but by a deliberate choice. The union of our people has been fused by the community of ideals and common sufferings in the cause of freedom".
— Sheikh Mohammed Abdullah, in the History of Kashmir
"We the people of Jammu & Kashmir, Ladakh and the Frontier regions, including Poonch and Chenani Illaqas commonly known as Jammu and Kashmir State in order to perfect our union in the fullest equality and self-determination to raise ourselves and our children forever from the abyss of oppression and poverty, degradation and superstition, from medieval darkness and ignorance, into the sunlit valleys of plenty, ruled by freedom, science and honest toil, in worthy participation of the historic resurgence of the peoples of East, and the working masses of the world, and in determination to make this our country a dazzling gem on the snowy bosom of Asia, to propose and propound the following constitution of our State."
We the people? Great Madison's ghost! Note how that same phrase was as resonant from a Muslim leader of a new nation in 1947 as it was from our own founding fathers century's before? We the people! The Constitution of our own nation had inspired the world to their own freedoms.
What sort of people are these? Ladakh is a traditional Buddhist land. Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists, even Christians, all living and loving together? Such hippies! Crazy talk! Wasn't it? All done with a sober knowledge of the beauty of open land, living near the roof of the world.
Within two years, the year after the Freedom Train ran its last route, Tibet would be invaded, and the Dalai Lama would be propelled on his own way on the Freedom Train, which he rides each day, with his smile and gentle laughter. But not yet. In 1947, Tibet was free. And many others wished to be.
Thank You, Eleanor
Another thing that occurred in 1947 was Eleanor Roosevelt. She happened in a big way. The once intensely shy woman who encouraged and supported her polio-stricken husband to rise and stand again, who stood beside him and behind him through the years of the Depression, who had worked quietly and diligently for the rights of women and all peoples, who had helped in her own small way during the Second World War — the silent partner behind the New Deal — was now a widow. Yet it was then she made her greatest contribution to human law.
She helped craft the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
In 1947, at last there was a vehicle for the Freedom Train that was not just for English barons against their tyrannical king, nor just for white male Americans, or even just for all Americans regardless of gender. It was a revolutionary idea: freedoms for all people in all nations.
The impact of it was the shot heard round the world, from Lake Success, New York, to Jammu and Kashmir.
You can't get more revolutionary than Eleanor Roosevelt!
I Have a Dream
It was still another decade and more before the Reverend Doctor Martin Luther King, Junior stood up in Washington DC, at the symbol of Lincoln's Memorial, and declared "I have a dream!"
It was a hot August day, the 28th of that month, in 1963. I wasn't born yet. I would be born into the world where the dream had been spoken on September 23rd, 1964. The year of the World's Fair in Flushing Meadows. By then, the United Nations Headquarters had been established in Manhattan. I was born in the capital of the world.
I was born on the Freedom Train, in the Bronx. My first stop was in the hospital at Pelham Bay. I was born into the same borough of New York where the Piccirillis brothers carved that statue of Lincoln in 1922 which Dr. King stood before. It was carved around the same era when my own grandparents moved to the Bronx on their own migrations from Ireland, each seeking personal and economic freedom. My grandfather's job? He was a motorman on the IRT.
When I was a young lad, he took me into the cab of an elevated train. He lifted me up in his arms. He put my hand on the throttle of the IRT subway train, and he pushed my hand down. The train lurched forward.
I clearly remember that day. I didn't even know how to read. I recall clearly the vast row-upon-row of the tracks stretching out before us. The narrow rails converging towards a vanishing point on the horizon. How the trees began to approach and then move past the train to the side. The glass windows of the motorman's booth. The feel of the metal under my hand. The mostly grey cloudy sky and the sunlight behind it. He taught me how to drive the train.
It didn't last very long. I was lowered to the ground, and I got to stare up at him as he took the train faster and faster. And then, it slowed. He gently pulled the train into the next station, and with a nod of his head he handed the train back to the other fellow he worked with from whom he had borrowed it for a "treat" for his grandson. Yes, I guess you could say that he broke the law, but he was not going to let that stand in the way of showing his first grandson how to drive the IRT! That was my grandfather, through and through. I didn't just love my grandfather. I worshipped him.
The dreaming was just beginning. "I have a dream!" My Irish-Catholic mother heard that speech. She loved it so much that in 1969, the same month that humankind first stepped foot on the moon, in fulfillment of the words of the dream of the fallen Irish-Catholic President, she gave my brother the first name "John" in honor of that President and the middle name "Martin" in honor of the man of freedom and that speech. And his other middle name was "Robert" in honor of the other brother struck dead while running for President.
She had gotten the dream too, and she passed it down to me, and to my brother by name. I clearly recall when she gave me the Autobiography of Malcolm X. I blinked and wondered why she'd give that to a grade-schooler. It's a good book. A highly different dream, but my mother could see how Malcolm X and Dr. King saw the same problem, and just were tackling it from different points of origin. They were both heading to that same vanishing point before the rails of the Freedom Train.
I missed the 1976 Freedom Train. For me, that was the year was Operation Sail. It was another legacy of John F. Kennedy, founded in 1961. My heart and my mind went to sea as the ships sailed up and down the Hudson River, and swirled around the George Washington Bridge, and the Statue of Liberty, and the World Trade Center, and the docks of Brooklyn. We followed every glimpse of it we could from the windows of a small car packed with seven sweaty kids. We'd get out and crane our necks. The radio music was alive with Paul McCartney's top hit, "Silly Love Songs." Casey Kasem did a special American Top 40 for all the July 4th songs of the century.
The message was obvious. We were going to win freedom around the world with silly love songs.
In my youth, I also remember the train that ran to the Mark Twain-like town of Willoughby, which Rod Serling introduced me to through television re-runs of the Twilight Zone. In recent years since my 2001 layoff, I have had my own stop at Willoughby, I suppose it's fair to say. Now, in 2006, I'm back in school for my MBA and have a sweet consulting position. I'm out of Willoughby of my reclusive reflection, perhaps, but I'm also not at the job that was telling me to "Push! Push! Push!"
I'm in neither place. I'm back where I belong.
I'm back on the train.
Next Stop on the Freedom Train
Just yesterday, I was informed that on Epiphany of this year, my grandmother passed away. She had faded off, her heart slowly and gently beating softer until she slept eternally. She's gone to see my grandfather. I'm sure she's got all the subway tokens heaven can shower upon her, and he'll be driving her to whatever station she wishes. Her husband, my grandfather, will be there to meet her at the turnstile.
I was born the grandson and son of dreamers with adamant beliefs in what was good and right. Now my own brothers and my sister have their own children; two were born just around this Thanksgiving past. My grandmother died a great grandmother — which she always was. A great grandmother.
I can only dream about the world my niece and nephews will find on their own train ride. So when I get aboard this Freedom Train, I'll be bringing the hand of possibility the youngest motorman in New York City history, and the love of all those I have known who have loved freedom I have ever met since then. I'll be bringing my mind, filled with the possibilities for the generations ahead.
Hope to See You On Board
It doesn't matter if you own a car, or need to borrow five bucks to pay for your ticket. I've been unemployed for years (and I recently got a job, yay!), butI'llloan you the money if you need.I'll give you the money I have in my pocket until it's gone. Just to get more on board.You just need to get down to the train station, and we'll get on that Freedom Train together. I'll get myself to the Palo Alto station, as Malcolm X said, "by any means necessary." I'll see you there unless something untoward happens. You'll see me on that trainin spirit, even if something happens to my body, even if it's standing-room-only. I'll be the guy hoping to peek over Mr. Ghandi's shoulder to read what headlines Mr. Garrison published today about Mrs. Roosevelt's latest appeal to us all.
If you miss getting on the physical Freedom Train this year, then plan for next year, the 60th Anniversary of the original Harry S. Truman-era train, and to celebrate the Universal Bill of Human Rights. But if you can, come on out this year. Join the revolution. You'll be able to tell people you've been there and did that for Freedom.
Only One Way We Can Go Out — Singing!
We need people on the train just as much as ever. Blue Meanies are still around every corner. We need Crazy Wisdom to fight them, as Wes "Scoop" Nisker would say. If you can't get on the train because of a Blue Meanie, maybe you can take a Yellow Submarine. As you know, St. Jude the Apostle in Cupertino has a great choir. With them in mind, and "Hey, Jude" running through the back of my brain, I end our train ride today. Hope to see you on January 16th for the next ticket to ride.
Paul McCartney: What's the matter, John Love? Blue Meanies.
John Lennon: Newer and bluer Meanies have been sighted in the vicinity of this theatre. There's only one way we can go out!
George Harrison: How's that?
John Lennon: Singing!
Freedom Train
It's been a long time comin' -
Now it's time to dance
By the golden thread of circumstance
You're destiny come dressed as chance
We've been a long time comin'
To this romance
Now i'm an honest man
But the time has come
And i'm a peaceful man
The peace before the storm
I think i hear my train
I think i hear my freedom train
I think i hear my freedom train
I think i hear my freedom train
I think i hear my freedom train
Now the world is changin' -
Faster than we know
In these troubled lands
Where hate dies slow
I think a train of change
Is comin' down the track
Comin' right this way
It ain't turning back
Now i'm an honest man
With a message of hope
And i'm a peaceful man
On a slippery slope
I think i hear my train
I think i hear my freedom train
I think i hear my freedom train
I think i hear my freedom train
I think i hear my freedom train
Comin' down the track
Comin' down the track
— Lyrics to Freedom Train by Queen
How You Can Ride the Freedom Train in San Jose, CA, 16 January 2006
21st Annual Freedom Train — Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Association of Santa Clara Valley, Inc.
Copyleft 2006 Peter Corless — "It's Okay to Distribute as Long as You Link and Attribute!" — Email on to friends, copy to a newsletter, or post to your site or Blog as you feel so moved.
____________________________________How You Can Ride the Freedom Train in San Jose, CA, 16 January 2006
21st Annual Freedom Train — Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Association of Santa Clara Valley, Inc.
Wednesday, January 04, 2006
Jesus Loves Darwin
I have been giving a great deal of thought to religion and religious tolerance recently, having been monitoring the Forums at SamHarris.org after hearing Sam Harris' interview on NPR.
Edit: SamHarris.org, the web site of the aethist author of "The End of Faith" should not be confused with SamHarris.com, the site of the singer who released a recent Christmas album and says recommends that everyone's bookshelf should include, "The Power of Kabbalah (Yehuda Berg) because it explains everything."
It brought to mind the wars over bumper fish, and Darwin or IXTHYS or Jesus symbol sported on so many bumpers.
For the decade of the 1990s, I sported a Darwin on the bumper of my Toyota Corolla. When I got my Saturn Station wagon, I decided not to put one on because there was more to life than just what had been explained by science alone. In more recent years I installed a Dashboard Jesus, perhaps in unconscious homage to the old Ernie Marrs song "Plastic Jesus." I've not yet gotten my Madonna or Joseph or the Twelve Apostles, and although it's not a furry van nor a Winnebago, it is a station wagon. I've got room to expand, but I likely won't go the hedonist, head-strong, pedestrian-terrorist way of the crooner's subject.
Moreso, it was also a tip of the cap to the Rolling Stones, who always made me smile with the laid-back homey tale of the Girl with Far Away Eyes. "Thank you Jesus. Thank you Lord." In recent years, though times were tough for me in some ways, I still have a lot to be thankful for.
Darwin & Co. as Spiritualists
More and more I've been thinking that there's a synthesis possible between spiritual faith and worldly rationality. I call this philosophy "Jesus Loves Darwin." I'm not the first to express it, and I won't be the last.
If we put forth the axiom Jesus of Nazareth pledged pure, selfless love to all humankind, therefore Jesus loves everyone (even as a philosophical memetic ideal if you do not agree with the historical veracity of the Gospels). Charles Darwin represents evolution, though he of course got the idea of natural selection from other influential thinkers before him, including the Rev. Robert Thomas Malthus. Darwin's family, including the Wedgewood branch, were Universalists. Malthus was Anglican and a Creationist.
However, like the 19th Century Creationists, I am not a "Young-Earth Creationist." I find such anti-logical irrationality intently stupid. Poetically, I agree with the concept of "Day Age Creationism," with the "Days" of Genesis aligning with various eras of the Universe's creation, even if some of those "days" might be millions or billions of years. I am also fond of Theistic Evolution and much if the theories of Deism, though I have a feeling God remains a player in the game He created. He may be mostly hands-off, but too much in the world has the scent and taste of God to be utterly devoid of His presence. In fact, as a game designer, I have a feeling that God is the ultimate game master, asking us what our choices are at every key decision point in life. He eagerly awaits our answers, and is often most merciful to us even given our choices.
I'm also somewhat in agreement with Neo-Creationists that many atheists are actually practicing their own form of religion. After all, don't they sacrifice lab rats at the altar of science? Indeed, they do. Quite by fate I ran into a friend who is into biostatistics at dinner this past eve, and he heartily yet good-naturedly confirmed this to be the case. It is an odd paradox that modern medicine men see themselves as somehow wholly divorced and of a different nature than their aboriginal or medieval predecessors.
Evolving Towards Spirituality
I propose Jesus' desire, hope and love for us is an explicit encouragement to grow and adapt — to evolve — ideologically, spiritually, intellectually, maturely and knowledgeably. He loves us, and wants us to evolve. He loves Darwin, a student of theology, for expressing the way we adapt. He loves Rev. Malthus for warning us of unchecked excesses of humankind, and the tragedies and disasters we set up for ourselves by unplanned, unchecked population growth.
If we are to weather this 21st Century, human destiny needs to continue to craft a synthesis of adaptive spiritual faith and an ever-deepening body of scientific proof. We must remember the history of the debates we have already held on this subject, and learn from our common past.
Sam Harris is only half-right in his assertion for the "End of Faith." While there has been an ongoing and now modern clash between atheists and Bible literalists and Islamic fundamentalists — zealotous anti-rationalist, anti-secularists — what he fails to give credence to is the prevalent number of rational spiritualists for whom fighting over religious differences are not as compelling as the universal lessons and goals of brotherly love, cooperation, peace, concord, fidelity, and commonweal.
By complaining solely about faith, he fails to see how Darwin, himself a clergy student at Christ's College, Cambridge, sought to take up that life to "explore the wonders of God's creation," as so many other naturalists at the time did, such as William Paley.
The Intelligent Design crowd is approaching the problem from the wrong angle, in my view. Rather than try to prop up Young Earth Creationists and say that everything was done according to God's plan, which surrenders the issue of "free will," they should stick to how God set up the experiment, and now we are naturally evolving in the midst of the rules established by the experiment's Creator.
At the same time, strict natural evolutionists are missing the boat to say there is not some forms of creation that seem to have an easier time of it than others — certain designs are advantaged over others. Why? What are the rules behind this "natural favoritism?" Why bilateral symmetry? Why is there so much needless beauty, unless there were moral goods and goals such as happiness and harmony?
We can also look at natural "intelligent design" and see how far up the chain of being it runs. Some natural selections are selected by the species itself or by its members. An animal can chose its mate (or at least try to pair up), and a species can select its optimal mating season. Yet communities, through the pecking order, family support mechanisms, inter-group rivalries, and other communal activities can also perform social selection beyond the individual's will. Isn't this part of an intelligent decision? A bias for design? Do not predators and pests and food sources make their own "choice" to interfere with this individual or its group or entire species by their own counterbalancing selections?
Each time a wolf hunts the slow sheep, he's made an intelligent decision for his own survival, and a decision on the evolution of the sheep. This shows that animals exhibit their own "intelligent design" within their species and towards other species.
Humans, of course, are a primary example of a species that intelligently designs certain species by interfering with natural selection and fostering artificial species adaptions through certain processes and conditions. Horse and dog and flower breeding surely show how human intelligence has altered the genetic history and evolution of these creatures.
The real question is not whether "intelligent design" exists, but whether there is a God, and whether He practices intelligent design like humans do upon other species, and species conduct on each other.
On the question of whether God exists is rather simple. He does. Two proofs shall follow.
Memetic and Economic Existence of God
Socially, politically, linguistically and philosophically, God exists in the memetic superorganism associated with his existence.
Whether His existence is any more real than, say, the Cocoa Puff bird or Gandalf is left to one's memetic filters. The Cocoa Puff bird is surely just a marketing image. Gandalf is the "cane-elf" of the Elder Edda, and thus has a mythopoeic "truth" more authentic to human spirituality. God, however, is hotly debated. Some would see Him as a greater phony than even a cereal box icon.
Economically, God is the better seller. Even for all the recent Tolkien books and movies, God has definitely outsold all the Cocoa Puffs and Gandalf-related products combined, from Gandalf-name-brand software to modems to games and CDs and videos to you-name-it.
Economically, God still commands top dollar. So he's an economic reality too. This gives his memetic superorganism an intellectual property value, which could be measured in billions. I haven't sat down yet to calculate the true human value our race puts upon God. It would be an interesting study in macroeconomics.
Another proof of the existence of God memetically would be the combined sum of the energies expended by people working in the ostensible service to God. Whether as clergy, or as adherents to various faiths who commend their acts or give thanks to God for their blessings. All told we could calculate the rough number of newtons, calories, or other measures of energy, power and force conducted in the name of the service of God.
While we can question whether the people are deluded to hold their faith in God, what cannot be questioned is that they have taken these acts and they express that these acts are attributable to their faith and belief. We can say they are crackpots and cranks, but they have acted this way, rightly or wrongly, under these beliefs. Therefore the memetic superorganism known as "God" can be attributed with some percentage of credit towards these acts.
One could, of course, question whether the individual would have undertaken some of these acts regardless of whether they had any religious convictions or not, or whether they would or could have undertaken similiar secular-accredited actions if freed from religious superstitions. This is a valid argument. We would then have to measure the true difference in their actions and behaviors due to their faith, rather than simply crediting their faith with all their daily actions and conscious and unconscious behavior, from sleep to bowel movements.
It would be ironic for people to credit God with their vices, but it could indeed be done if God is to take credit for everything. Conveniently, Satan was invented to be the cause of all vice-related behavior in humankind, to relieve both humankind and God of any culpability in the ongoing predilection towards human sin and malice.
Is God an Active Actor?
Many who have problems with religion today are more upset at the people who do things claiming to act in His name or on His behalf than they have problems with the Divine Fellow Himself. He usually stays out of politics directly, but those who claim to act on His behalf are all over the map, the print page, Internet site, radio dial, and television set.
Many will point to the acts of the supposedly-faithful and say, "This is why I cannot believe in God." Others will point to natural events, and recognize them as simply natural, with no divine interference. No miracle. Just chance or human choices.
Others see God's hand in everything. Nothing can be done without God. Everything is attributed to Him. If there is free will, it is merely to acknowledge that God is in charge of everything. Otherwise, the script is planned, and you cannot change a thing. Predestination.
Whether the Creator exercises complete control over all objects in the experimental container called the "Universe" is therefore highly subject to debate, even among those who acknowledge that God exists. Some would say that we have only Fate -- everything is pre-determined, and we are merely playing out the moves in the pre-destined operational run. Others say the Supreme Being interferes now and then as a tinkerer making occasional course corrections, which we would view as miracles, providence or divine punishment. Some would toss in a bit of natural luck or fortune which perhaps might even surprisingly aid or thwart or otherwise alter the desired state of the Creator. Yet what we might see as random chance or luck is actually just poorly understood yet quite complex rules and conditions; subtle works of the Creator and certainly not out of His omniescent awareness or power to prevent or alter. Yet these are permitted alterations of reality. Other people would believe He's hands-off, letting us natural beings take care of things on our own — free will would rule supreme.
Others want to argue over who controls what God would see as right and wrong, and proper or improper.
Whether this sort of thinking comes from Bible-thumping apocalyptic End Times Christians, or Islamicists wanting to blow up anything Jewish or American because we are Zionists and the "Great Satan," or whether it comes from Communists trying to forcefully repress and wipe out religious doctrines which might threaten their hold on a state, the issue is the same: religious intolerence.
The Founding Fathers of the United States of America created the freedom of religion with a purpose: so that those who held to a spiritual belief would not be terrorized, harmed or repressed by those who did not hold to that faith, and so those that held to a spiritual belief would not terrorize, harm or repress others using their faith as a sociological weapon.
They had all descended from people of Europe, although a few intermingled with the Native Americans also. They were of many different faiths, a good number of them persecuted in their original lands. They had a vision that if a nation was tolerant to permit each person to worship or not worship as they saw fit, that civil order and reason would rule over tyranny and superstition. This did not mean the Founding Fathers were atheists. Indeed, many of them were quite profoundly faithful, and many of them were Deists.
Like our Founding Fathers, I believe in a Supreme Being, which I call God, yet which I believe is the Prime Cause and infinite power which created all the universe. If such a primal infinite power exists, it has infinite knowledge of what occurs within its creation, but it might not interfere with its creation now that the Great Work is in motion.
First Church of God the Mathematician
I hereby declare, both in whimsy and in utter sincerity, a new faith, called the First Church of God the Mathematician. I did a Google search and I didn't see anything like it, precisely, though I did see a question about whether God is a Mathematician. Of course God is a mathematician! God is also an artist, a great comedian, an undefeatable warrior, a superb quick change artist, the best roleplaying gamemaster, and a real great cook.
However, the reason I choose this particular aspect of faith is to prove to people who may be quite intellectual and scientific that a logical explanation for God exists. It is utterly rational, and it is historically tied back to the Bible, the revelations of Moses, the philosophy of Thales, and thus through his pupil Anaximander (c. 611 - 547 BC) to his protegé Pythagoras, the Roman (and non-Christian) Cicero (c. 106-46 BC) and probably a good many other folks over the years, including a great many beyond the Western world. Moses and a good number of these other fellows spent time in Egypt. Other cradles of civilization have their own cosmology, and many would nod their heads at the same conclusion: God exists.
Let's look at the Proof of the existence of God. In fact, let's look at how to do a mathematical proof first. Let's try for a direct proof. We need axioms, lemmata (proven propositions), theorums or facts, upon which we can agree. From this we can build further arguments.
Facts:
Let it be known,
What if the world is in fact all natural and all designed? What if there was some hidden series of rules behind its natural design that are controlled by an omnipresent, omnipotent, omniscient, eternal force or power?
What if all natural laws obeyed this force or power?
Are we of sufficient knowledge, science or mentality to actually heed what has been said over thousands of years of human existence: that there is a single grand unifying theory behind all creation?
Could the name of this grand unifying theory be God?
If God is not the Prime Cause for a Universe that obeys the rules of causality, then what caused the Universe to be? We can call it "Fred" if it would help calm some atheistic jitters, but we can either argue for one "cause" behind the universe, and call it God, or we can argue for many, and instead, we have a "pantheon" of forces.
Thesis: How Do We Prove the Existence of God?
Occam's razor would argue that only one entity would be necessary to be the Prime Cause of all other entities. We can argue that everything came from a null set of entities, but then we fail to get over how "0" becomes anything greater than "0" unless some non-"0" value gets added to the mix.
God's power, if anything, has to be a non-"0", non-null value. Otherwise, the Big Bang would never have happened. Something drove the singularity into being, and something allowed the singularity to be unleashed on an unsuspecting void.
In mathematical equivalents:
No single causal power or force of the physical Universe could underly all natural laws of science unless it was everywhere (omnipresent) in the Universe, had complete knowledge of the contents of the Universe (omniscient) , had complete temporal access throughout the duration of the Universe to have knowledge of its past, present state and future destiny (eternal), and had ultimate power over all the elements and attributes of the contents of the Universe, and the capacity to apply force and control everything in the Universe (omnipotent).
First, let us disambiguate the term "God" to mean a singular, purportedly omniscient, omnipotent, omnipresent, eternal entity which exists under many different names in various cultures, including, but not limited to: God, Allah, El, Elohim, Yahweh, Jehovah, Jah, YHWH, Deus, Dio, Dios, Supreme Being, Lord, Creator, etc.
Let us assign God as the Prime Cause behind the Universe underlying all its natural laws:
An alternate argument would be C´ = ∞, since an infinite being would be arguably able to transmute into any form it desired. Yet God, God would need to be able to transmute back into God, or retain God form, thus would need to maintain sufficient energy. As the Prime Cause, it not only was infinity, it was all other values too. The Prime Cause created infinity and zero, π and e, all cardinal numbers, all real entities and imaginary concepts, which are different values, and a myriad other real and imaginary, rational and irrational values. It would need to be separate from and superior to ∞ in order for it to also create zero and all other numbers and logical or physical entities. God would be the superset from which all other values derived.
YML or YHWHML (Yahweh Markup Language)
God is not simply the Universe, or energy, or power, or knowledge or reality or existence (being an instantiation within reality), since these are all creations of a Prime Cause. It would be more precise to say God has the attributes of eternality and infinite power (omnipotence), knowledge (omniscience), and existence in reality (omnipresence). In which case, He may be better articulated as an XML statement, with the element of "God" having these attributes:
YML is merely in its infancy. It has no formal DTD or XML Schema. I am not a professional mathematician, logician, nor theologian. I would welcome the comments and assistance of those who understood calculus and higher mathemetics to poke holes in my thoughts or to support them with your own.
It is not the same as Theological Markup Language (ThML), which is for the markup of theological texts. Instead, this is supposed to be a precise language to define God and divine revelations. It might in due time be expanded to be general religious markup language to codify other divinities, pantheons, saints, spiritual movements, as well as angelic and devilish beings. For now, it was an example of how we might wish to create new mathematical languages and representations of God using formal set theory to avoid linguistic barriers towards understanding the truth of cosmology.
A, Ω, ∏ & e — God as Mathematical Formulae
When looked at in this way, God is simply the next set of natural laws in the realm of physics to be solved for beyond the equation E=mc^2. In the arts, God's mathematical nature has been proposed long before and certainly since the 1998 movie π (Pi).
Jewish scholars and Greek philosophers saw God not as a man in a cloud poking at Adam's fingertip, but as the primal cause. Their reverence of this Creator was so great that by the 3rd Century AD, apparently they took the reading of the 3rd Commandment literally and refused to speak the name of YHWH.
It is also curious that YHWH also referred to as Elohim, which is a plural form of "Gods." Which meant that either the Jewish people considered there was more than one cause, or that some primal cause led to other forces or powers which we percieved as emanations of gods.
It is my contention that such a mathematical, "pure," non-anthropomorphized God is the Creator, which is simply another name to be given to the all powerful force behind everything we see, touch, taste, hear, feel, and sense with every intuitive, instinctual, perceptive power in our being.
As was said, the Alpha and the Omega from which all comes and to which everything returns. I see this as a physical reality, not as a poetic metaphor.
Most atheists flinch when it comes to simply seeing reality as all due to some grand unifying theory of the universe.
Fish Wars and Flame Bait
I came back to my concept of "Jesus Loves Darwin" the long way. I hope I have not taxed your interest or curiosity so far.
In actuality, I want to see if we can market two kissing bumper fish. Jesus and Darwin, nose-to-nose, with a heart between them both. I thought it would be a nice "All you need is love" sort of answer to the debate.
I did a search to see what the state of the Fish Wars was. This is what I found.
First, an article tracks someone who actually did a bit of scientific research on why people put Darwin fish on their bumpers. It's not as alarmist as the title sounds. It was a curious read:
Darwin fish symbols on cars are an act of 'ritual agression.'
Next, I gathered a quick sample of various "Fish" other than the IXTHYS and Jesus symbols.
Fish for Sale in the Net
Darwin — Sticker $2.00
Darwin — Plaque (Size: 5" wide) $8.00
Darwin Loves You — Sticker (Size: 3" x 12") $2.99; magnetize for $1.99 more
Jesus Loves Darwin — Sticker (Size: 3" x 11") $3.29
Reality Bites — Plaque (5" long) $8.00
Shark Fish — Plaque (5" long), $8.00
Gefilte Fish (for Judaism) — Plaque (5" long), $8.00
Procreation (Evolution Screwing Ixthys) — Plaque (Size: 4.5" high) $8.00
Flying Spaghetti Monster — Emblem (5" long), $8.00
More Fish (Sinner, Devil, Angel, N' Chips, Bite Me, Jeebus, Fish-on-a-Hook) @ PrankPlace.com
I really didn't want to buy any of these yet, but I needed to do some marketing research. I don't like some of the choices consumers have. They tend to be nasty and nastier; I especially do not like the Procreation one, though I can understand the ironic blasphemy of it. I found the original Darwin to be best and simplest, though I love the Gefilte Fish too. Flying Spaghetti Monster is simply cute and inane. I'm sure someone could do one for the mighty Cthulhu in time.
I was gladdened there is already a Jesus Loves Darwin sticker, but it is purely textual. No "fish wars" per se on a graphical basis. So that's the market opportunity. I will see if I can contact the company to get one designed. Or I might design my own.
The following are curious places to do more research into the Fish Wars. I found Jim Miller's article somewhat heartening, as it speaks about the coming synthesis between Creationism and Evolutionary thinking.
Fishwars — Blog about the Culture Wars
Truce in the Fish Wars — Jim Miller
Let's pray for peace in 2006!
I have been giving a great deal of thought to religion and religious tolerance recently, having been monitoring the Forums at SamHarris.org after hearing Sam Harris' interview on NPR.
Edit: SamHarris.org, the web site of the aethist author of "The End of Faith" should not be confused with SamHarris.com, the site of the singer who released a recent Christmas album and says recommends that everyone's bookshelf should include, "The Power of Kabbalah (Yehuda Berg) because it explains everything."
It brought to mind the wars over bumper fish, and Darwin or IXTHYS or Jesus symbol sported on so many bumpers.
For the decade of the 1990s, I sported a Darwin on the bumper of my Toyota Corolla. When I got my Saturn Station wagon, I decided not to put one on because there was more to life than just what had been explained by science alone. In more recent years I installed a Dashboard Jesus, perhaps in unconscious homage to the old Ernie Marrs song "Plastic Jesus." I've not yet gotten my Madonna or Joseph or the Twelve Apostles, and although it's not a furry van nor a Winnebago, it is a station wagon. I've got room to expand, but I likely won't go the hedonist, head-strong, pedestrian-terrorist way of the crooner's subject.
Moreso, it was also a tip of the cap to the Rolling Stones, who always made me smile with the laid-back homey tale of the Girl with Far Away Eyes. "Thank you Jesus. Thank you Lord." In recent years, though times were tough for me in some ways, I still have a lot to be thankful for.
Darwin & Co. as Spiritualists
More and more I've been thinking that there's a synthesis possible between spiritual faith and worldly rationality. I call this philosophy "Jesus Loves Darwin." I'm not the first to express it, and I won't be the last.
If we put forth the axiom Jesus of Nazareth pledged pure, selfless love to all humankind, therefore Jesus loves everyone (even as a philosophical memetic ideal if you do not agree with the historical veracity of the Gospels). Charles Darwin represents evolution, though he of course got the idea of natural selection from other influential thinkers before him, including the Rev. Robert Thomas Malthus. Darwin's family, including the Wedgewood branch, were Universalists. Malthus was Anglican and a Creationist.
However, like the 19th Century Creationists, I am not a "Young-Earth Creationist." I find such anti-logical irrationality intently stupid. Poetically, I agree with the concept of "Day Age Creationism," with the "Days" of Genesis aligning with various eras of the Universe's creation, even if some of those "days" might be millions or billions of years. I am also fond of Theistic Evolution and much if the theories of Deism, though I have a feeling God remains a player in the game He created. He may be mostly hands-off, but too much in the world has the scent and taste of God to be utterly devoid of His presence. In fact, as a game designer, I have a feeling that God is the ultimate game master, asking us what our choices are at every key decision point in life. He eagerly awaits our answers, and is often most merciful to us even given our choices.
I'm also somewhat in agreement with Neo-Creationists that many atheists are actually practicing their own form of religion. After all, don't they sacrifice lab rats at the altar of science? Indeed, they do. Quite by fate I ran into a friend who is into biostatistics at dinner this past eve, and he heartily yet good-naturedly confirmed this to be the case. It is an odd paradox that modern medicine men see themselves as somehow wholly divorced and of a different nature than their aboriginal or medieval predecessors.
Evolving Towards Spirituality
I propose Jesus' desire, hope and love for us is an explicit encouragement to grow and adapt — to evolve — ideologically, spiritually, intellectually, maturely and knowledgeably. He loves us, and wants us to evolve. He loves Darwin, a student of theology, for expressing the way we adapt. He loves Rev. Malthus for warning us of unchecked excesses of humankind, and the tragedies and disasters we set up for ourselves by unplanned, unchecked population growth.
If we are to weather this 21st Century, human destiny needs to continue to craft a synthesis of adaptive spiritual faith and an ever-deepening body of scientific proof. We must remember the history of the debates we have already held on this subject, and learn from our common past.
Sam Harris is only half-right in his assertion for the "End of Faith." While there has been an ongoing and now modern clash between atheists and Bible literalists and Islamic fundamentalists — zealotous anti-rationalist, anti-secularists — what he fails to give credence to is the prevalent number of rational spiritualists for whom fighting over religious differences are not as compelling as the universal lessons and goals of brotherly love, cooperation, peace, concord, fidelity, and commonweal.
By complaining solely about faith, he fails to see how Darwin, himself a clergy student at Christ's College, Cambridge, sought to take up that life to "explore the wonders of God's creation," as so many other naturalists at the time did, such as William Paley.
The Intelligent Design crowd is approaching the problem from the wrong angle, in my view. Rather than try to prop up Young Earth Creationists and say that everything was done according to God's plan, which surrenders the issue of "free will," they should stick to how God set up the experiment, and now we are naturally evolving in the midst of the rules established by the experiment's Creator.
At the same time, strict natural evolutionists are missing the boat to say there is not some forms of creation that seem to have an easier time of it than others — certain designs are advantaged over others. Why? What are the rules behind this "natural favoritism?" Why bilateral symmetry? Why is there so much needless beauty, unless there were moral goods and goals such as happiness and harmony?
We can also look at natural "intelligent design" and see how far up the chain of being it runs. Some natural selections are selected by the species itself or by its members. An animal can chose its mate (or at least try to pair up), and a species can select its optimal mating season. Yet communities, through the pecking order, family support mechanisms, inter-group rivalries, and other communal activities can also perform social selection beyond the individual's will. Isn't this part of an intelligent decision? A bias for design? Do not predators and pests and food sources make their own "choice" to interfere with this individual or its group or entire species by their own counterbalancing selections?
Each time a wolf hunts the slow sheep, he's made an intelligent decision for his own survival, and a decision on the evolution of the sheep. This shows that animals exhibit their own "intelligent design" within their species and towards other species.
Humans, of course, are a primary example of a species that intelligently designs certain species by interfering with natural selection and fostering artificial species adaptions through certain processes and conditions. Horse and dog and flower breeding surely show how human intelligence has altered the genetic history and evolution of these creatures.
The real question is not whether "intelligent design" exists, but whether there is a God, and whether He practices intelligent design like humans do upon other species, and species conduct on each other.
On the question of whether God exists is rather simple. He does. Two proofs shall follow.
Memetic and Economic Existence of God
Socially, politically, linguistically and philosophically, God exists in the memetic superorganism associated with his existence.
Whether His existence is any more real than, say, the Cocoa Puff bird or Gandalf is left to one's memetic filters. The Cocoa Puff bird is surely just a marketing image. Gandalf is the "cane-elf" of the Elder Edda, and thus has a mythopoeic "truth" more authentic to human spirituality. God, however, is hotly debated. Some would see Him as a greater phony than even a cereal box icon.
Economically, God is the better seller. Even for all the recent Tolkien books and movies, God has definitely outsold all the Cocoa Puffs and Gandalf-related products combined, from Gandalf-name-brand software to modems to games and CDs and videos to you-name-it.
Economically, God still commands top dollar. So he's an economic reality too. This gives his memetic superorganism an intellectual property value, which could be measured in billions. I haven't sat down yet to calculate the true human value our race puts upon God. It would be an interesting study in macroeconomics.
Another proof of the existence of God memetically would be the combined sum of the energies expended by people working in the ostensible service to God. Whether as clergy, or as adherents to various faiths who commend their acts or give thanks to God for their blessings. All told we could calculate the rough number of newtons, calories, or other measures of energy, power and force conducted in the name of the service of God.
While we can question whether the people are deluded to hold their faith in God, what cannot be questioned is that they have taken these acts and they express that these acts are attributable to their faith and belief. We can say they are crackpots and cranks, but they have acted this way, rightly or wrongly, under these beliefs. Therefore the memetic superorganism known as "God" can be attributed with some percentage of credit towards these acts.
One could, of course, question whether the individual would have undertaken some of these acts regardless of whether they had any religious convictions or not, or whether they would or could have undertaken similiar secular-accredited actions if freed from religious superstitions. This is a valid argument. We would then have to measure the true difference in their actions and behaviors due to their faith, rather than simply crediting their faith with all their daily actions and conscious and unconscious behavior, from sleep to bowel movements.
It would be ironic for people to credit God with their vices, but it could indeed be done if God is to take credit for everything. Conveniently, Satan was invented to be the cause of all vice-related behavior in humankind, to relieve both humankind and God of any culpability in the ongoing predilection towards human sin and malice.
Is God an Active Actor?
Many who have problems with religion today are more upset at the people who do things claiming to act in His name or on His behalf than they have problems with the Divine Fellow Himself. He usually stays out of politics directly, but those who claim to act on His behalf are all over the map, the print page, Internet site, radio dial, and television set.
Many will point to the acts of the supposedly-faithful and say, "This is why I cannot believe in God." Others will point to natural events, and recognize them as simply natural, with no divine interference. No miracle. Just chance or human choices.
Others see God's hand in everything. Nothing can be done without God. Everything is attributed to Him. If there is free will, it is merely to acknowledge that God is in charge of everything. Otherwise, the script is planned, and you cannot change a thing. Predestination.
Whether the Creator exercises complete control over all objects in the experimental container called the "Universe" is therefore highly subject to debate, even among those who acknowledge that God exists. Some would say that we have only Fate -- everything is pre-determined, and we are merely playing out the moves in the pre-destined operational run. Others say the Supreme Being interferes now and then as a tinkerer making occasional course corrections, which we would view as miracles, providence or divine punishment. Some would toss in a bit of natural luck or fortune which perhaps might even surprisingly aid or thwart or otherwise alter the desired state of the Creator. Yet what we might see as random chance or luck is actually just poorly understood yet quite complex rules and conditions; subtle works of the Creator and certainly not out of His omniescent awareness or power to prevent or alter. Yet these are permitted alterations of reality. Other people would believe He's hands-off, letting us natural beings take care of things on our own — free will would rule supreme.
Others want to argue over who controls what God would see as right and wrong, and proper or improper.
Whether this sort of thinking comes from Bible-thumping apocalyptic End Times Christians, or Islamicists wanting to blow up anything Jewish or American because we are Zionists and the "Great Satan," or whether it comes from Communists trying to forcefully repress and wipe out religious doctrines which might threaten their hold on a state, the issue is the same: religious intolerence.
The Founding Fathers of the United States of America created the freedom of religion with a purpose: so that those who held to a spiritual belief would not be terrorized, harmed or repressed by those who did not hold to that faith, and so those that held to a spiritual belief would not terrorize, harm or repress others using their faith as a sociological weapon.
They had all descended from people of Europe, although a few intermingled with the Native Americans also. They were of many different faiths, a good number of them persecuted in their original lands. They had a vision that if a nation was tolerant to permit each person to worship or not worship as they saw fit, that civil order and reason would rule over tyranny and superstition. This did not mean the Founding Fathers were atheists. Indeed, many of them were quite profoundly faithful, and many of them were Deists.
Like our Founding Fathers, I believe in a Supreme Being, which I call God, yet which I believe is the Prime Cause and infinite power which created all the universe. If such a primal infinite power exists, it has infinite knowledge of what occurs within its creation, but it might not interfere with its creation now that the Great Work is in motion.
First Church of God the Mathematician
I hereby declare, both in whimsy and in utter sincerity, a new faith, called the First Church of God the Mathematician. I did a Google search and I didn't see anything like it, precisely, though I did see a question about whether God is a Mathematician. Of course God is a mathematician! God is also an artist, a great comedian, an undefeatable warrior, a superb quick change artist, the best roleplaying gamemaster, and a real great cook.
However, the reason I choose this particular aspect of faith is to prove to people who may be quite intellectual and scientific that a logical explanation for God exists. It is utterly rational, and it is historically tied back to the Bible, the revelations of Moses, the philosophy of Thales, and thus through his pupil Anaximander (c. 611 - 547 BC) to his protegé Pythagoras, the Roman (and non-Christian) Cicero (c. 106-46 BC) and probably a good many other folks over the years, including a great many beyond the Western world. Moses and a good number of these other fellows spent time in Egypt. Other cradles of civilization have their own cosmology, and many would nod their heads at the same conclusion: God exists.
Let's look at the Proof of the existence of God. In fact, let's look at how to do a mathematical proof first. Let's try for a direct proof. We need axioms, lemmata (proven propositions), theorums or facts, upon which we can agree. From this we can build further arguments.
Facts:
Let it be known,
- Before the creation of the Universe there was some form of void or, inversely, a formless mass (apeiron), from which matter would spring and into which the Universe would unfold (A or Alpha); it is also the place or state to which things return when they are individually or collectively destroyed or otherwise cease to be (Ω, or Omega).
- Some pre-existing or eternally existing Prime Cause led to the creation of the Universe. (While one could also propound a set of causes or subsequent series of causes which led to the creation of the Universe, this still leaves the question of what was behind the set or series. Generally, if there is a unified theory for cosmology, then all set of causes or series of causes collectively still come from a meta cause which remains the Prime Cause.)
- Some First Principle (arche) of matter sprang into being, which gave rise to all other substances. (However it was not air or water, as the ancient Greeks believed. It was likely some far more sub-atomic structure, which we have yet to classify.)
- The Universe was created (see Big Bang theory).
- The Universe exists now.
- The Universe is proceeding towards some end state which we have not yet been able to specifically calcaulate.
- Perception of the Universe over time increases our collective body of knowledge for understanding of the Prime Cause.
- Information overload, lack of education, and human stupidity remain primary reasons for arguing over the obvious, rejecting data and reinventing the proverbial wheel.
- If the Universe exists and obeys natural laws, some force or power underlies its existence and the natural laws in which it operates.
- By analogical inference, all products have principles and causes by which they are created. The Universe infers a Creator who caused it to be (i.e.,either Cicero's sundial c. 1st Century BC or Paley's Watchmaker analogy, c. 1802).
- God has been said to be the Prime Cause, or Creator that created the universe.
- God has been said to be present in all places in creation; omnipresent.
- God has been said to be all-powerful; infinitely powerful; omnipotent.
- God has been said to be all-knowing; infinitely knowing; omniscient.
- God has been said to be eternal; always existing, even beyond our understanding of life and existence (i.e., the Universe); immortal.
- God has been said to therefore know all past, all present and all future over all time and space.
- God was said to have given humans free will (choice) to determine their own fates.
- Fortune, or random chance (or seemingly random chance), has been the names given for non-deterministic outcomes, or outcomes that occur through more chaotic systems than we can devise rules to understand.
- Chaos theory states that what we see as random, chaotic phenomenon, is actually simply phenomena which is too complex for us to understand given limitations of knowledge, science, and mentality.
- Some people deny the existence of God, but few people deny the existence of the Universe.
- Some argue the Watchmaker analogy puts a fallacious presumption, a conscious desire to find a God behind all things, even if there is no God.
- Some argue the Watchmaker analogy also contains the fallacy the viewer would recognize the watch as artificial against the background of the natural world and thus know it was designed, yet then is self-refuting in that it states all nature is designed, and thus, this would remove any sense of speciality of the watch. The conundrum is that all the world is natural, and if everything is designed, all the world is artificial.
What if the world is in fact all natural and all designed? What if there was some hidden series of rules behind its natural design that are controlled by an omnipresent, omnipotent, omniscient, eternal force or power?
What if all natural laws obeyed this force or power?
Are we of sufficient knowledge, science or mentality to actually heed what has been said over thousands of years of human existence: that there is a single grand unifying theory behind all creation?
Could the name of this grand unifying theory be God?
If God is not the Prime Cause for a Universe that obeys the rules of causality, then what caused the Universe to be? We can call it "Fred" if it would help calm some atheistic jitters, but we can either argue for one "cause" behind the universe, and call it God, or we can argue for many, and instead, we have a "pantheon" of forces.
Thesis: How Do We Prove the Existence of God?
Occam's razor would argue that only one entity would be necessary to be the Prime Cause of all other entities. We can argue that everything came from a null set of entities, but then we fail to get over how "0" becomes anything greater than "0" unless some non-"0" value gets added to the mix.
God's power, if anything, has to be a non-"0", non-null value. Otherwise, the Big Bang would never have happened. Something drove the singularity into being, and something allowed the singularity to be unleashed on an unsuspecting void.
In mathematical equivalents:
- God = ¯ (God is not a "Null" value; God is not an empty set.)
No single causal power or force of the physical Universe could underly all natural laws of science unless it was everywhere (omnipresent) in the Universe, had complete knowledge of the contents of the Universe (omniscient) , had complete temporal access throughout the duration of the Universe to have knowledge of its past, present state and future destiny (eternal), and had ultimate power over all the elements and attributes of the contents of the Universe, and the capacity to apply force and control everything in the Universe (omnipotent).
First, let us disambiguate the term "God" to mean a singular, purportedly omniscient, omnipotent, omnipresent, eternal entity which exists under many different names in various cultures, including, but not limited to: God, Allah, El, Elohim, Yahweh, Jehovah, Jah, YHWH, Deus, Dio, Dios, Supreme Being, Lord, Creator, etc.
Let us assign God as the Prime Cause behind the Universe underlying all its natural laws:
- C is the set of Causes of the Universe.
- C ={C´} (C has one element, C´, the Prime Cause; other causes can be sub-causes of the Prime Cause and all derive their causality from C´)
- C´ = "God" (What we call "God" is the Prime Cause; we assign the name "God" to the Prime Cause)
- C´ —> ∞ (God, the Prime Cause, leads to the creation or instantiation of everything)
- One product of God, C´, is the physical Universe.
- P(C´) = ∞ (The power of God, the Prime Cause, is infinite.)
- K(C´) = ∞ (The knowledge of God, the Prime Cause, is infinite; omniscient)
- R(C´) = ∞ (The reality or existence of God, the Prime Cause, is infinite; omnipresent)
- R(C´)/s+t = ∞ (The reality of God, the Prime Cause, over all space and time, is still infinite)
- C´ > P+K+R+e+s+t (God, the Prime Cause, has an existence extending beyond the physical Universe's dimensional power, knowledge, reality, energy, space and time, even into other dimensions; God is omnipresent)
- C´ > P∞/e+s+t (God, the Prime Cause, is greater than infinite power over the sum of energy, time and space)
- C´ = ∞/t (The instantiation or duration of God, the Prime Cause, is eternal; infinite over time)
- ∆C´/t = 0 (God, the Prime Cause, does not change over time)
- C´ > ∞ (God is greater than infinite)
An alternate argument would be C´ = ∞, since an infinite being would be arguably able to transmute into any form it desired. Yet God, God would need to be able to transmute back into God, or retain God form, thus would need to maintain sufficient energy. As the Prime Cause, it not only was infinity, it was all other values too. The Prime Cause created infinity and zero, π and e, all cardinal numbers, all real entities and imaginary concepts, which are different values, and a myriad other real and imaginary, rational and irrational values. It would need to be separate from and superior to ∞ in order for it to also create zero and all other numbers and logical or physical entities. God would be the superset from which all other values derived.
YML or YHWHML (Yahweh Markup Language)
God is not simply the Universe, or energy, or power, or knowledge or reality or existence (being an instantiation within reality), since these are all creations of a Prime Cause. It would be more precise to say God has the attributes of eternality and infinite power (omnipotence), knowledge (omniscience), and existence in reality (omnipresence). In which case, He may be better articulated as an XML statement, with the element of "God" having these attributes:
His existence bit is set to "1" though of course others will highly contest whether this is a validly-assigned attribute value.
YML is merely in its infancy. It has no formal DTD or XML Schema. I am not a professional mathematician, logician, nor theologian. I would welcome the comments and assistance of those who understood calculus and higher mathemetics to poke holes in my thoughts or to support them with your own.
It is not the same as Theological Markup Language (ThML), which is for the markup of theological texts. Instead, this is supposed to be a precise language to define God and divine revelations. It might in due time be expanded to be general religious markup language to codify other divinities, pantheons, saints, spiritual movements, as well as angelic and devilish beings. For now, it was an example of how we might wish to create new mathematical languages and representations of God using formal set theory to avoid linguistic barriers towards understanding the truth of cosmology.
A, Ω, ∏ & e — God as Mathematical Formulae
When looked at in this way, God is simply the next set of natural laws in the realm of physics to be solved for beyond the equation E=mc^2. In the arts, God's mathematical nature has been proposed long before and certainly since the 1998 movie π (Pi).
11:15, restate my assumptions: 1. Mathematics is the language of nature. 2. Everything around us can be represented and understood through numbers. 3. If you graph these numbers, patterns emerge. Therefore: There are patterns everywhere in nature.In my musing about all the names God might go by, and the Tetragrammaton, I read over the article in the Catholic Encyclopedia on Jehovah (Yahweh). The name originally means "He Who Is," or as Wikipedia states, "He will cause to become." That's about as generic a description of a Creator as you can get.
Jewish scholars and Greek philosophers saw God not as a man in a cloud poking at Adam's fingertip, but as the primal cause. Their reverence of this Creator was so great that by the 3rd Century AD, apparently they took the reading of the 3rd Commandment literally and refused to speak the name of YHWH.It is also curious that YHWH also referred to as Elohim, which is a plural form of "Gods." Which meant that either the Jewish people considered there was more than one cause, or that some primal cause led to other forces or powers which we percieved as emanations of gods.
It is my contention that such a mathematical, "pure," non-anthropomorphized God is the Creator, which is simply another name to be given to the all powerful force behind everything we see, touch, taste, hear, feel, and sense with every intuitive, instinctual, perceptive power in our being.
As was said, the Alpha and the Omega from which all comes and to which everything returns. I see this as a physical reality, not as a poetic metaphor.
Most atheists flinch when it comes to simply seeing reality as all due to some grand unifying theory of the universe.
Fish Wars and Flame Bait
I came back to my concept of "Jesus Loves Darwin" the long way. I hope I have not taxed your interest or curiosity so far.
In actuality, I want to see if we can market two kissing bumper fish. Jesus and Darwin, nose-to-nose, with a heart between them both. I thought it would be a nice "All you need is love" sort of answer to the debate.
I did a search to see what the state of the Fish Wars was. This is what I found.
First, an article tracks someone who actually did a bit of scientific research on why people put Darwin fish on their bumpers. It's not as alarmist as the title sounds. It was a curious read:
Darwin fish symbols on cars are an act of 'ritual agression.'
Next, I gathered a quick sample of various "Fish" other than the IXTHYS and Jesus symbols.
Fish for Sale in the Net
Darwin — Sticker $2.00
Darwin — Plaque (Size: 5" wide) $8.00
Darwin Loves You — Sticker (Size: 3" x 12") $2.99; magnetize for $1.99 more
Jesus Loves Darwin — Sticker (Size: 3" x 11") $3.29
Reality Bites — Plaque (5" long) $8.00
Shark Fish — Plaque (5" long), $8.00
Gefilte Fish (for Judaism) — Plaque (5" long), $8.00
Procreation (Evolution Screwing Ixthys) — Plaque (Size: 4.5" high) $8.00
Flying Spaghetti Monster — Emblem (5" long), $8.00
More Fish (Sinner, Devil, Angel, N' Chips, Bite Me, Jeebus, Fish-on-a-Hook) @ PrankPlace.com
I really didn't want to buy any of these yet, but I needed to do some marketing research. I don't like some of the choices consumers have. They tend to be nasty and nastier; I especially do not like the Procreation one, though I can understand the ironic blasphemy of it. I found the original Darwin to be best and simplest, though I love the Gefilte Fish too. Flying Spaghetti Monster is simply cute and inane. I'm sure someone could do one for the mighty Cthulhu in time.
I was gladdened there is already a Jesus Loves Darwin sticker, but it is purely textual. No "fish wars" per se on a graphical basis. So that's the market opportunity. I will see if I can contact the company to get one designed. Or I might design my own.
The following are curious places to do more research into the Fish Wars. I found Jim Miller's article somewhat heartening, as it speaks about the coming synthesis between Creationism and Evolutionary thinking.
Fishwars — Blog about the Culture Wars
Truce in the Fish Wars — Jim Miller
Let's pray for peace in 2006!
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