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Monthly Archives: September 2015

The Final Surrender

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With others, I am repelled by the “violent apocalypse” model of the Second Coming. It’s propagated by addictive personalities that enjoy the adrenaline rush that comes with fear.

But what would you expect from a religion that’s all about men’s problems?

The  three books I have published all attempt to redirect that misguided intention. I think that there’s too much padding, though.

Let’s try this as a means of characterizing Christ’s victory:

“We” (the protective group) has victory. “I” (the creative self) has victory. They stop struggling long enough to surrender to love – which was never fighting with them in the first place.

Marriage, Clerk, Hypocrisy

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The reactionary right has seized upon the cause of the Kentucky county clerk jailed for failing to issue marriage licenses to same-sex couples. When challenged to justify her position from the New Testament, two passages of scripture are offered.

A reference to Old Testament law, of which Jesus said [NIV Matt 5:17-18, emphasis added]:

…I have not come to abolish [the Law and the Prophets], but to fulfill them. For truly I tell you, until heaven and earth disappear, not the smallest letter, not the least stroke of a pen, will by any means disappear from the Law until all is accomplished.

That “all”, of course, being the crucifixion and resurrection, through which the fulfilled Law is superseded by the New Covenant.

But then there is Jesus’s response to the Pharisees [NIV Matt 19:4-5]:

“Haven’t you read,” [Jesus] replied, “that in the beginning the Creator ‘made them male and female,’ and said ‘For this reason a man will leave his father and mother and be united with his wife, and the two will become one flesh’?”

Of course, if you back up just one verse, you’ll see that this is in response to a specific question [NIV Matt 19:3]:

Some Pharisees came to [Jesus] to test him. They asked, “Is it lawful for a man to divorce his wife for any and every reason?”

Which is elaborated further [NIV Matt 19:7]:

“Why then,” [the Pharisees] asked, “did Moses command that a man give his wife a certificate of divorce and send her away?”

In other words, Jesus was confronting the hypocrisy of the Pharisees, who reference the Law of Moses as higher than the direct effect of God’s presence in the lives of a married couple [NIV Matt 19:6]:

“So they are no longer two, but one flesh. Therefore what God has joined together, let no one separate.”

Understand this: such joining occurred without the sanction of any court. It was a natural state of union arranged by God. A marriage license is merely a recognition of that spiritual reality, backed by conventions and sanctions that ensure that the temporal fruit of that union are shared equitably when the union is dissolved.

So, there is no New Testament justification for asserting that “marriage” is only between a man and a woman. Trumpeting the faith of a clerk that refuses to issue same-sex marriage licenses therefore has no foundation, particularly as the woman has been divorced four times. Of course, the Law of Moses appears to justify the practice of divorce, in spite of Jesus’s direct teaching on the matter.

I, for one, will continue to celebrate the sensitivity of clerks that recognize when God has joined same-sex couples, clerks that proceed joyfully and proudly to issue licenses that ratify the spiritual unions that God has formed.

And lest these words be taken as a declaration of war on divorce, let us be aware that God can separate as well as join. The state of spiritual union is something known only to the two parties to a relationship. Let not material concerns prevent the parties from seeking renewed fulfillment with other partners.

Love Doesn’t Do Anything

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It undoes things.

It washes away dirt and fear to reveal the world as it hopes to be.

When I was working as a Post-Doc, my friend Laurent Terray discovered Yoshi’s bar down in Oakland. Yoshi’s was an intimate club that drew jazz headliners such as Dizzy Gillespie.

Laurent dragged me down one night to hear a trio play – guitar, keyboard and percussion. I found myself drawn to the back wall where I could see all three pairs of hands at once. The music entered a timeless realm, the air resonated with beauty.

During intermission, I was chatting with Laurent when the guitarist came up and laid his instrument on the chair in front of me. I didn’t know what to make of it. Finally a young man came up and, looking a little scandalized, took the guitar and walked off with it.

I just didn’t understand, then, how much people crave to be looked upon with kindness. It heightens every experience.

Be good to each other. It allows light into the world.

Staying Cool with R

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Before returning to the control industry in 2008, I was employed in business systems development. My employer was hot to get in on the off-shore gambling business, but was kind enough to ask me what I was interested in. I offered my concern that people were overwhelmed with the demands imposed by 24/7 communications, to the point that their ability to actually immerse themselves in the experience of the moment was degrading. I thought that a system that guided them through reflection and looked for correlations between mood and experience might be the basis for helping them find people and places that would allow them to express their talents and find joy.

His reaction was to try to stake me at the gambling tables in Reno.

But he did recognize that I was motivated by a deep caring for people. That’s lead me into other directions in the interim. I’ve been trying to moderate the harsh tone in the dialog between scientists and mystics. I’ve accomplished about as much as I can – the resolution I have to offer is laid out in several places. I just need to let the target audience find the message.

So I’ve turned back to that vision. A lot has changed in the interim, most importantly being the unification of the Windows platform. This means that I can try to demonstrate the ideas in a single technology space. There’s only so many minutes in the day, after all.

I began with a review of statistical analysis. I’ve got a pair of books, bought back when I was a member of the Science Book of the Month club, on analysis of messy data. That provided me with the mathematical background to make sense of Robert Kabacoff’s R in Action. However it’s one thing to do analysis on the toy data sets that come with the R libraries. Real data always has its own character, and requires a great deal of curation. It would be nice to have some to play with.

One approach would be to begin digging into Bayesian language net theory and researching psychological assessment engines in preparation for building a prototype that I could use on my own. But I already have a pretty evolved sense of myself – I don’t think that I’d really push the engine. And I would really like to play with the Universal applications framework that Microsoft has developed. On top of that, the availability of an IoT (internet of things) build of Windows 10 for Raspberry Pi means that I can build a sensor network without having to learn another development environment.

So that plan is to deploy temperature and humidity sensors in my apartment. It’s a three-floor layout with a loft on the top floor. The middle floor contains a combination living/dining area and the kitchen. Both the loft and the kitchen have large sliders facing west, which means that they bake in the afternoon. On the bottom floor, the landing opens on one side to the garage and one the other side to my bedroom. The bedroom faces east behind two large canopies, although the willow tree allows a fair amount of light through. There’s a single thermostat on the middle floor. So it’s an interesting environment, with complicated characteristics.

While thermal balance also involves the state of windows, doors and appliances, I think that I can get a pretty good sense of those other elements by monitoring the air that flows around them. Being a hot yoga masochist, I’m also curious regarding the effect of humidity.

So I’ve got a Raspberry Pi on the way, and have installed Microsoft’s Visual Studio Community on my Surface Pro. Combination temperature and humidity sensors cost about ten dollars. While real-time data would be nice, I don’t think that for the purposes of my study I’ll need to link to the Wi-Fi to push the data out to a cloud server. I can use my laptop to upload it when I get home each day. And there’s some work to do in R: the time series analysis includes seasonal variations on annual trends, and I certainly expect my measurements to show that, but there will also be important diurnal variations. Finally, the activation of temperature control appliances (air conditioner and furnace) needs to be correlated with the data. I don’t want to invest in a Nest thermostat, or figure out how to get access to the data, so I’m going to see if I can use Cortana to post notes to my calendar (“Cortana – I just set the air conditioning to 74 degrees”).

Obviously there’s a lot to learn here. But no single piece is overwhelming until I get to the data analysis. Just cobbling together of small pieces. Should be fun! And if I can figure out how to manage my windows and doors and appliances to reduce my energy expenditures – well, that would be an interesting accomplishment.

The Syrian Refugee Crisis: Being Smart with our Compassion

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Stung by the image of a Turkish rescuer carrying the body of a three-year old Syrian boy, drowned when the boat bearing has family to Europe capsized, Chris Hayes last night denounced US immigration policies that will allow only eight thousand Syrians to immigrate next year.

Hayes drew a stark comparison with Germany, where Chancellor Merkel has promised to accept nearly a million refugees next year. Looking at the relative sizes of our two nations, Hayes suggested a target number of at least 100,000 for immigration to the US. Echoing “Black Lives Matter”, Mr. Hayes went on to insist that every presidential contender should be forced to make a declaration of policy on the issue.

I agree that the plight of the refugees is inexcusable, but would respectfully suggest that Mr. Hayes is looking at the problem too narrowly. The US accepts millions of refugees every year from Latin America. Yes, most of those come into our country illegally, but most come to find work, and many of them will be nationalized.

Latin American refugees are driven to the US by political tyranny and criminality rampant in their native countries. The conditions in Syria are more extreme and intense, but the basic problem is the same: the failure of governments to create security and stability for their people. So if Germany is held up as a paragon of compassion on the international stage, we should ask “How many Latin American refugees does Germany accept each year?” Almost none, it would appear from the foreign population statistics (see figure 3).

Now the high-minded will complain that US regional policy – including support for fascist regimes during the Cold War and the ongoing War on Drugs – makes us culpable at least in part for the instability in Latin America. But no less so is Europe responsible for instability in their back yard. The Tutsi genocide in Rwanda at the hands of the Hutus was not an outgrowth of ancient ethnic hatred. The Hutu-Tutsi divide was created by the French, who handed out identity cards to create an exploitable ethnic divide based upon wealth. Elsewhere in Africa, the colonial occupiers created national boundaries to exacerbate existing ethnic tensions, thereby ensuring that the natives were unlikely to rally against their European overlords. Those ethnic tensions continue do bedevil Africa to this day, and the residue of these policies is also evident in the Middle East.

Finally, we should focus on the wealthy nations of the Middle East themselves. The region is awash in oil money. Where are Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and Dubai in the relief effort?

I am aware of at least one program that responds to the humanitarian crisis emanating from Syria. The Shia community in the south of Iraq is allocating religious charity to the support of Iraqi Sunnis displaced by ISIS/Daesh.

Given this context, I believe that Mr. Hayes has no moral case that compels us to take the extreme measure of relocating hundreds of thousands of refugees to America. And considering the logistics, it would appear that the most effective way to support the relief effort is to provide financial support to regional efforts. I would hold this as the litmus test for American involvement, but it is from the region that the request should come. When Europe comes forward with a plan for managing the crisis, that is the moment for us to pony up to support the effort. If we are to be outraged, it should be that our allies allowed the problem to fester until it became a disaster.

Mercy for Abortion

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Pope Francis proclaimed today that during the Jubilee year starting on December 8th, priests will be allowed to absolve contrite women of the sin of having procured an abortion.

Francis hails from a region with both a high rate of abortion and relatively religious populations. As my mother continued an active role in church after starting birth control in the ’60s, I wonder how many women who have had an abortion continue quietly to participate in Catholic life. The proclamation of mercy may simply be a concession to practical realities.

I have offered meditations on the problem of abortion. In the wording of his proclamation, I feel that Frances has a heart that is open to the realities described in my first post. Abortion is not a choice that any woman would seek, and it indeed leaves scars. Those scars deserve healing. It is here that I find Pope Francis’s message to be yet a little tone-deaf, in that it trumpets “mercy” rather than healing.

When incarnation has already occurred, among the most significant scars of an abortion arise from the struggle of the infant spirit to disentangle itself from its mother’s womb. I know of two ways of solving this problem: one is for the chastened mother to seek a stable relationship in which a baby will thrive, and to bear the worthy father of a child. Church should be an incubator for such relationships, and keeping women out of Church is contrary to that purpose. The second mechanism is for a mature spiritual practitioner to aid the infant spirit in its liberation. This is an intercession by Divine Love that priests are supposed to mediate.

I also am frustrated that the conditions of mercy are limited to “a contrite heart.” I have voiced the opinion that religion should be seen as the mechanism by which we bring people out of primitive spirituality into a rational engagement with the divine powers. Cain was not punished for the murder of Abel, but sent away to reflect and learn. I believe the same is true for any sin, including abortion. The repentant woman should be asked not only “Are you sorry?” but “What did you learn, and how have you changed your life as a result?”

There are women trapped in circumstances in which the answer will be “Nothing.” I offer my own proclamation here: whether or not the Catholic Church is willing to forgive you, Christ will be with you when you are ready to receive healing. That may be in the final moments of your life, when the hold that the pimp or abuser or pusher has on you slips away. Be unafraid, and open your heart to healing. It is from the heart that unclean things come, but it is also from there that the light of Christ enters into the world. When you receive it, those that have forced themselves into you will be infected with compassion, and you will enter into the ranks of the angels.

Yes, Francis, I think that you understand me: it is the place of the Church to help the burdened carry their cross, rather than to beat them down with it.