Ungovernable

What if America has become ungovernable? What if the problems that beset us cannot be rectified by a new President, a new party, new policies? What if the problem is us, that we are so sated with materialistic consumption that we no longer hold our representatives accountable; that we no longer vote and legislate on the basis of principle but according to the whims of fashion and self-interest; that we too (and not just our representatives) are addicted to government spending and unwilling to confront the appalling realities of our collected indebtedness and the sacrifices it will require of us; that we have self-segregated into a thousand warring camps, and would rather bicker and demonize than stoop into the trenches of social problems and strive together with every bone, muscle, and tendon to solve them?

…If the Church today lives at peace with the world, it is because it has become so like the world, so harmless to it, that it no longer presents a substantial threat to the ways of worldly sin.
HT: Jesus Creed

Communion vs. Fellowship

I know this is one of the main driving forces that has pushed me into a much more Orthodox/Catholic view of things.

My complaint, as I am raising it here, is that translations frequently mislead. The entire concept of Church as a fellowship of believers, meaning a free association of like-minded Christians, is simply not a Scriptural notion, unless your Bible happens to be one of the many that has bowdlerized the clear Orthodox meaning of Scripture. We are saved by union with Christ, by participation in His life. We are Baptized into his death and raised in His resurrection. We eat His Body and drink His Blood. We have participation in the life of one another such that we cannot say to one another, “I have no need of you.” Such examples can be multiplied from every page of the New Testament and not one of them will support the weak image of an associational fellowship. This sad translation of a powerful word has helped support a notion of the individual believer with a relationship with Christ (what sort of a relationship is fellowship?) and his Bible. This is not the language or imagery of Scripture nor the doctrine of the Church.

Is fellowship with God possible? I’m not certain how to answer the question. I’d rather have communion.
Father Stephen

Seeing Double

I really think the only thing I’m capable of doing well is seeing qualitative patterns. I don’t care about finding patterns within quantitative data, but rather in people, art, discussions, philosophy, etc. And I’ve just seen another one. The section on trade patterns/economy of production in the context of economics bloggers meeting with the Dept of Treasury (and Timothy Geithner), compared to an article in Bloomberg by Andy Grove on what it’s going to take to create American jobs.

The pattern being: the grand realization that our consumer economy is irreparably damaging to our long-term sustainability. If we cannot produce (something other than entertainment consumer goods) we will always have a trade deficit and can always be hung by our dependency on others. In the era of the multi-national corp this becomes even harder to accomplish. Company HQ has no reason to be in the US when costs are lower elsewhere. And once something becomes multi-national our economy can’t trade their specialization with other economies. The multi-nationals become the respective economies, not the countries.

The bigger question in my mind is, how and when will national lines change or be re-drawn to accept this new-paradigm of economics?

Too True

Theologians are people for whom the Christian faith is especially difficult, incomprehensible, infuriating. As a rule they are not especially talented or spiritually adept individuals. Faith-Theology

Managing Dependancy

Huzzah, a post about programming! I am consistently miffed, nay pissed off, when more dependencies are introduced. I do not mean using libraries to Get Things Done. I mean writing what amounts to pseudo-code. Writing structs* (in whatever language) that get parsed and turned into objects and executable code. Unless you’re writing in a language where code is data do not do this. Pseudo-code will never be flexible enough to do what you will need it to. Unless you are purposefully handcuffing the developer – don’t do it.

This is why I love python and django. You can actually execute statements in the class-space. In many other languages you cannot. Hallelujah! I can instantiate objects right there, instead of having to do it later on in another function while a struct* sits in its place. The only dependancy in django is the python language itself. You may, or may not, use the other django libraries. And it is often beneficial to do so. But when it comes down to needing to alter how something gets done you are not dependent on the ordering of the framework itself. Since it can always be overridden at the python level.

*I don’t mean a C-struct, I mean any semantically ordered piece of meta-data that you code relies upon. Generally these take the form of arrays, maps, and hashes.

Holy Wars

Every now and then I check out trailers for new movies that are coming out. Today, I saw this: Holy Wars.

David, the Naked Pastor reveals a good explanation
of why fundamentalism works for people. Though, it doesn’t work for David or myself any longer. Fundamentalism is a rigid and strong structure which is self-affirming. The self-affirming nature of the system cannot be assailed. Every system, even science and math, is self-affirming (see Polanyi Personal Knowledge). These structures we impose on the world must reify themselves in the wake of new evidence. There does come, however, a breaking point in all systems. It all goes downhill when the adherents of Fundamentalism refuse to allow the evidence and experience that comes to them to override what they believe (Polanyi recounts many stories of scientists where this exact system of belief needed toppling, and they were unable to allow it to happen).

The problem is not with Fundamentalism as such, but the adherents unwillingness to challenge what they believe. It is really interesting to contrast this ideology with what is going on in NYC with the mosque near Ground Zero. I’m a New Yorker born and raised, and I know the people of the city can deal with this issue perfectly fine. It seems to be all the competing interests that are causing problems over this issue.

Ultimately systems of belief (of any field or topic) will be toppled by another that comes after it. The issue of faith and loyalty is not to a specific dogmatic expression – but to the ineffable core which grounds all those expressions, and to the loyalty of your fellow human being.