Oh, don’t miss out on your chance to take part in the global warming debate I started on M*. Vader, I quote you in my future posts when considering economic issues vs. environmental issues.

Listening to the Scientific American podcast, there is an interview with Sean M. Carroll about his new book about time.

One interesting point he makes is similar to one of my past posts: the shock that the big bang started in a low entropy state despite no known mechanism to explain it. And, as with my last quote on this subject, the first thing he looks to is some sort of multiverse whereby the nearly impossible can take place on it’s own.

But here is an interesting quote:

The big bang is [in a multi-verse model] not the beginning. The big bang [might be] explained by something pre-existing to that [in a bigger multi-verse], and that is the only hope I think we have of dynamically coming up with a reason why our observable universe had a low entropy in early times.

In Susan Beth Pfeffer’s otherwise excellent book Life as We Knew It, there is an out of place comic scene that happens right near the end of the book, just as things are getting really bad.

Life as We Knew It tells the horrifying story of a teenaged girl that is watching the world come to an end because an asteroid hits the moon and moved it out of orbit. This in turn leads to massive natural upheaval that culminates in a perpetual winter.

The scene I’m referring to is the one where the radios, that have been dead up to this point, finally start to work again. “The President” (who is never named anywhere in the book) goes on the radio and claims that – despite the death of nearly everyone in the United States — things aren’t so bad and they’ll get better soon.

It’s an overt out of character and out of setting jab at President George W. Bush. (more…)

I voted for Obama and I confess I loved his famous speech on religion in America.

So this Freakonomics podcast episode about how he wasn’t even an active Church goer, but covered that fact up, is a little disappointing. Ah well, you know what you’re getting when you vote for any politician I suppose.

I’m shocked. I had no idea you actually can’t discuss some moral or religious idea in an academic setting. Who’d have guessed? Guess freedom of speech and academic freedom aren’t what they are cracked up to be.

Believe it or not, this post is related to theology. It’s just hidden.

One thing I’ve found is that I seem to be very sensitive to plot holes. I’m going to define “plot holes” as things in a story that don’t make sense within the logic of the story. Harry Potter flying on a broom is not a plot hole. A plot hole would be Harry Potter failing to remember a spell he used two books ago that would have gotten him out of his current jam. (Not that I know of any such incident.)

I kept hearing about how great the new Battlestar Galactica is. And I’ll admit it’s interesting viewing. I’m a little bit into season two now.

But early into season one, quite early actually, I got that sickening feeling in my stomach that the writers were building up mysteries that they didn’t know the answer to either. This is a common problem in these new style complex shows like Lost. The writers make up more and more “interesting things” but fail to connect them together into a rational logical whole. (more…)

I’ve heard so many times what great financial shape China is in, I was starting to actually believe it.

But communist (or not so communist) dictatorships just aren’t capable of good financial management. That’s why this article may well turn out to be the real truth. (more…)

My latest post at M* considers the possible ramifications of God being comprehensible. Here is a preview:

Is that a laudable goal, to try to comprehend God? Is God even comprehensible? Please note, I do not mean to ask if God is comprehensible to current mortal man. No, I am asking if God is comprehensible at all.

What does it mean to comprehend something? Try to define that for yourself for a moment to get a feel for the difficulty in doing so.

I would like to propose a fairly simple definition for your consideration. I propose that “to comprehend” something is merely the ability to describe it in terms of the laws the govern it — to algorithmically compress it, if you will. If we comprehend how the world goes around the sun, this surely must mean we understand the laws of physics that cause it to do so. Therefore comprehensibility is equivalent to explanation and description.

A new post at M* comparing Mosiah 15:1-5 and D&C 93. Here is a preview:

Do Joseph Smith’s own writings count as counter evidence if he explicitly tells us what he means?

If we take Joseph Smiths’ revelations as historical documents and as “his” writings, then I’d have to say D&C 93 completely undermines the Swedenborgian interpretation of Mosiah 15:1-5 in favor of a Representational Modalism / Divine Investiture interpretation instead.

We just had a very fruitful discussion (in my opinion anyhow) about many subjects near and dear to my heart that address certain deep concerns I hold.

I really appreciate everyone that participated and, amazingly, I don’t feel any of the frequent posters in that thread lost control or did anything but add productively to the conversation.

I was just reading Popper in Myth of the Framework that it’s a fallacy that you have to hold the same framework to have a fruitful discussion. But what really impressed me was his thoughts that the “Myth of the Framework” came into existence because people misunderstood the difference between “pleasant” and “fruitful.” True fruitful discussions are never pleasant. They are an attempt to bridge gaps between frameworks that seems unbridgeable at first, and may never be fully bridgeable, but can be substantially bridged for those that try. (more…)

I recently made a post on M* about H.P. Lovecraft and I forgot to put a link on Jr. G to it. Here is a preview:

Joyce Carol Oates suggested that Lovecraft’s “gothic tale[s] would seem to form psychic autobiography” apparently inspired by his own religious views, commonly called Maltheism where one “achieve[s] the mirror-opposite of traditional gnosis and mysticism by momentarily glimpsing the horror of ultimate reality.”

I had a long conversation with J. Max recently about just why I generally like NOMs and even agree with a lot of what they say and do and feel they (potentially anyhow, if not in practice yet) could do the LDS Church a real service.

But there is one thing about that culture that has bothered me a lot, and it creates a huge divide that I don’t believe is bridgeable until addressed by them.

NOMs widely accept that it’s okay to hide (or worse, lie about) what they believe from Believing Members while actively undermining the faith of others through criticism. I have numerous documented cases of this now and it seems to be a very wide spread problem within that community. (more…)

Just another interesting quote, also from the Karen Armstrong interview on Speaking of Faith.

It’s not that religion has sparked these traditions, it’s rather that violence has become endemic in a region and religion has got sucked into that vortex. The Arab Israeli conflict began on both sides as a secular conflict. Zionism was originally a secular movement, a secular movement — a secular revolution — against religious judaism and the PLO was essentially secular liberation ideology. The lesson is, let’s settle disuptes while we can while they’re still secular…

My most recent post on M* is Mormons as Modalists. Here is a preview:

An interesting fact of Divine Investiture is that it makes Mormons “Modalists,” after a fashion.

Here I pause to the storm of disaffected Mormon and anti-Mormon protest. “No, Mormons aren’t Modalists! They are the opposite of Modalists! They are Freakin’ Tritheists!”

I also pause to let the Believing Mormons protest (assuming they’ve even heard of Modalism before). “No! I am not a Modalist! That’s… a heresy! It’s worse than… than… the Trinity Doctrine!”

This quote is from an interview by Krista Tippets (Speaking of Faith) with Karen Armstrong. It seemed to relate to my Divine Investiture post, so I wanted to capture it.

Gregory of Nyssa.. is 4th century, a wonderful mystic. And he… formulated the Eastern Orthodox doctrine of Trinity. And he said, first of all, this doctrine can only be understood in a ritual context and in the context of prayer and contemplation. It’s not something like an equation that you can just follow rational. But he said, “When I think of the three I think of the one. When I think of the one I think of the three. And then my eyes feel with tears and I lose all sense of where I am.” And that’s a theological formulation of the Trinity should do to us.