What's the most epic photo ever taken? - Quora

What's the most epic photo ever taken? - Quora

The answer is a photo of Earth taken from the edge of the solar system.

Pale Blue Dot is a photograph of planet Earth taken from a record distance of 3.7 billion miles, at the edge of our solar system. It was shot and transmitted by the Voyager 1 spacecraft almost 13 years after its launch.

See also my Google Docs presentation on Genesis and the Origin of Life.

Jesus's parting gift

Jeopardy's Watson computer: Just a high-speed moron

Here is the Youtube of IBM's computer, Watson, beating its human challengers like a mongrel dog on Jeopardy last night. Look carefully at the clues? Notice anything?



Almost none of the answers on the game board required any kind of abstract reasoning to answer. In fact, you could put a human with practically no knowledge of the subjects on the board in front of a computer connected to Google and that person could simply type in the nouns of the clues and get the same answers.

Example - the first question of the game:

And the Google:

Strip out Watson's blinding speed, and it is no smarter than human beings at all. Watson, for all its engineering impressiveness, simply did only what computers have always done: collate at blinding speed (and compute mathematical probabilities to choose an answer). It does not matter that Watson was not connected to the Internet since its mass-memory unit holds 16 Terabytes of data, processed by a 2,880 processor core. As my own computer professor said (many years ago!), "A computer is just a high-speed moron." There is nothing about Watson that I have read so far that obviates that observation.

I think its programmers must have realized this since they artificially crippled Watson by design. Note that Watson was programmed not to buzz in unless it computed an answer of at least 50 percent "confidence" of being right. This was an entirely artificial barrier. Why not 75 percent? Or 25 percent? Or any level at all? Watson is so blindingly fast that it could have buzzed in for every question before either champion (making their presence merely ceremonial, which it almost was anyway). Then Watson simply could have given its top answer, regardless of confidence level, and the computer still would have got 90% of the questions right.

In other words, if the game had allowed Watson to give uncrippled answers, it would have always answered first and would have won even more decisively. But then, with access to the same amounts of data resources through Google, I could beat the two champions if the game always allowed me to answer first. In fact, I'd win under the same confidence crippling as long as I could answer first - because clearly Watson will always be able to buzz in faster than a person.

So what does Watson really prove? From a technical, engineering and programming perspective, it's an amazing achievement with enormous potential for a wide range of applications ranging across broad multi-disciplinary subjects and problems. As for the Jeopardy game, there's less than meets the eye. Count it as a proof-of-concept exercise. What it did not do was reason abstractly. It just collated amazing amounts of information very rapidly. But we already knew that computers are faster than we are for specified tasks. That's why we build them to begin with.

Sorry, Prof. Reynolds, the Singularity has not arrived.

Update: Good discussion on this at The Speculist, including this nugget:

@stephentgo: Repercussions of IBM's Watson unknown, but any job that involves answering questions by phone will soon be at risk. http://bit.ly/hp91hW

"He has a demon, and is mad"

Nine years and a few months ago someone asked me whether I was surprised that 19 Islamists had hijacked four airliners and killed almost 3,000 people. The question struck me as odd. Why is anyone ever surprised of the evil men do? "There is no one who does good, not even one," said the Psalmist, and so why should we be surprised that some commit actual evil?

We have learned again, from Tucson, that we civilized people cannot constrain the devil that stalks the human soul. "Who knows what evil lurks in the hearts of men?" asked the Shadow, so far be it from me to psychoanalyze Jared Loughner. Best leave that to Sheriff Clarence Dupnik, whose flashing-quick diagnosis of Rightwing Derangement Syndrome for Loughner surely was the fastest-ever solving of the "motive" side of the means and opportunity triangle. What the psychs will discover about Loughner I leave to them.

"He has a demon, and is mad."

Yet how odd that in our postmodern conviction and scientific certainty that we can easily find the answer, we gloss right over one that no one seems willing to utter, mayhaps 'cept I: "He has a demon, and is mad." Of course, that was an accusation made against Jesus, and is today an excellent summary of the mainstream-media commentary (such as the NYT's Paul Krugman's) on the Jedi mind-control that they claim the Right's "climate of hate" exercised over the hapless Jared Loughner. So we mustn't take it too far.

I retreat from such rhetorical arguments. In arguing that, "He has a demon, and is mad," I am not trying to argue the literal existence of demonic beings who actually enter the bodies and spirits of human beings, taking "possession" of them and controlling their actions. The modern mind has no room for that. I refer instead to sickness of the mind and of the soul, a spiritual sickness that aligned itself with the evil that is out there.

Evil is within us, but not only within us

French philosopher Paul Ricouer argued in his book, The Symbolism of Evil, that one of the things taught by the temptation stories of the Bible is that evil resides within the human breast but not only there. There is an "externality of evil," as he put it, symbolized in Genesis by the serpent. Within these texts is a strong subtext, not only in the Bible but in cultural myths around the world that there is a seduction of the human mind and the human body by the "tragic" of creation into which we are born, "which is already there and already evil" (his emphasis). There is, he says,

... a mystery of iniquity which is not reducible to the clear consciousness of actual evil, of the evil beginning in an instant; it points toward an underlying peccability which, as Kierkegaard says in The Concept of Dread, endures and increases quantitatively. That underlying peccability is like the horizon of actual evil... .

"Peccability" means that we mortals are temptable. Because of this fundamental fact we will be tempted by an externality much and yield to it often - usually, happily, on harmless things like another piece of chocolate but not infrequently to evil itself. When we yield to the harmful rather than the merely frivolous it is sin, indeed, too often mortal sin which, as we saw in Tucson, can be lethal as well.

This is not a modern world view. We have exorcised sin conceptually from our vocabulary, our discourse and hence, our understanding of the human condition. "He has a demon, and is mad" is eye-rolled for the former part and medicated for the latter - psychiatry today exorcises pharmaceutically, not ritually. And yet for all its chemically-reliant wonder, no mental-health professional will ever be able to explain away that the human being is predisposed to cooperate with the iniquitous, a cooperation that not merely endures but increases until it forms the horizon of actual evil, evil that erupts so tragically.

The human condition is tragic

"Tragically" is a key word, for the ancients did not use it as we do, simply to mean "sadly." The Greek playwrights knew tragedy as the unfolding of human character, hence human events, not as they are predestined but as they are predisposed. Tragedy is not random or accidental. It is the result of human striving, whether for good or ill, not exactly inevitable but not altogether avoidable. Even the heroic can be tragic.

Always, the ancients knew that the tragic is woven inherently in the human condition because they understood what we have progressively dismissed: that "there is no one who does good, no not one," except now and then, here and again, but almost never as a habit. Virtue, said Aristotle, is excellence made habitual, which is exactly why virtue is so rare: the habits of man are rarely excellent and left to themselves, without rigorous moral training or an externality of constraint to the good, will always become corrupted.

What makes the human condition tragic in this sense is that evil is never temporary and triumphs are never permanent. Salve of compassion, care and grieving is being applied to Tucson, but some must be saved for the next venue. For certainly another there will be.

Update,Jan. 13: This is very similar to what President Obama said in his speech the evening of Jan. 12:

Scripture tells us that there is evil in the world, and that terrible things happen for reasons that defy human understanding. In the words of Job, "when I looked for light, then came darkness." Bad things happen, and we must guard against simple explanations in the aftermath.

For the truth is that none of us can know exactly what triggered this vicious attack. None of us can know with any certainty what might have stopped those shots from being fired, or what thoughts lurked in the inner recesses of a violent man's mind.

That is very close to what it means to say, "He has a demon, and is mad." Bad things happen for which facile, "just so" stories offer no insight or understanding, especially if we agree with progressivism's mantra that, "people are basically good." This is a very modern world view, dating only about 130 years back. But it is empirically, provably false considering only the history of humanity of the last 100 years.

The president's quote from Job, "when I looked for light, then came darkness," is actually quite appropriate because the light of human reason and ability is simply too weak to overwhelm the darkness of the tragic of creation and the human condition. That is the primary, bitter lesson that Job must learn by the end of the book, as well as that human understanding is exceedingly partial, fragmentary, incomplete and usually misguided.

So how can the darkness be overcome? Again, Scripture gives us the answer: "The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it."

Update: God and Las Vegas

Is Jesus just a fictional character?

James Hannam:

The thesis that Jesus never existed has hovered around the fringes of research into the New Testament for at least a century but it has never been accepted as a mainstream theory. This is for good reason. It is simply a bad hypothesis based on arguments from silence, special pleading, and an awful lot of wishful thinking. It is ironic that certain atheists will buy into this idea and leave all their pretensions of critical thinking behind.

A huge amount has been written on the internet and elsewhere about the "Christ Myth." The only in-depth refutation in print is Shattering the Christ Myth (2008), which goes into great detail. However, some academic historians have taken the time to rubbish the idea that Jesus never existed and a few other books on the subject have appeared over the years.

In this four-part series, it is not my intention to study the minutiae of the various arguments. Instead, I will focus on three central contentions often advanced in discussions about Jesus. These are 1) the lack of secular references, which I cover in this installment; 2) the alleged similarities to paganism, which I deal with next; and 3) the silence of St. Paul. Finally, in the fourth part, I will bring all these arguments together to show how ideas similar to those that deny Jesus' existence can be used on practically any ancient historical figure. With this in mind I set out to "prove" that Hannibal never existed.

Part one is here, part two is here.

What sort of star did the wise men follow?

A fascinating analysis of just what was the star that led the wise men to Bethlehem is given at Bethlehemstar.net. I talked about this in the service this morning. I urge you to read the whole thing at the site, but here is my summary.

After Jesus was born, wise men, or Magi, from the east made their way to Judea. Being astronomers, they had read the stars and concluded that a new king had been born to the Jews. This is related in Matthew chapter 2.

No historian today claims that there nothing happened in the sky that corresponds to what the wise men saw. Just what it was has been a scientific quest for about 400 years, since Johannes Kepler developed the first mathematical description of how the heavens worked. Kepler, whose equations are still used by NASA and astronomers around the world, himself spent may laborious hours trying to calculate the position of the planets and stars above the ancient Near East in the year of Jesus’ presumed birth, 6 BC. But he found nothing.

Since Kepler, many others have suggested that the star Matthew describes might have been a comet or a supernova, but there are no records of such events at this time anywhere in the ancient world, especially in China, whose astronomers were detailed and meticulous record keepers.

Jesus was presumed to have been born in 6 BC based on a book by the ancient Jewish historian Josephus, whose book, Antiquities, says that Herod died in 4 BC. Since clearly Jesus was born in the time of Herod, Jesus had to have been born before 4 BC, a year or two before.

But in fact, Herod did not die until 1 BC. This date is in fact what Josephus wrote, and is stated in manuscripts of his book relate dated earlier than 1544. It was in 1544 that Antiquities was first set to the printing press. In that first edition, the typesetter erroneously set the wrong year of Herod’s birth, and this edition became the standard from which all subsequent editions were made, including the one Kepler used.

Computers today solve Kepler’s equations in a snap. And what astronomers now know is that in September, 3 BC, the planet Jupiter came into conjunction with the star Regulus. That is, when viewed from the earth, Jupiter and Regulus appeared to touch or come very close together.

Jupiter is the largest planet. The ancients called it the king of planets. Regulus was called by the Romans, Rex, Latin for king. In Persian its name was Sharu, which also meant king. To an ancient astronomer, for the king of planets and the king of stars to come together would have been weighted with portents. But Jupiter and Regulus did this not merely once, but three times over the course of the next year.

After appearing to touch Regulus, Jupiter’s path moved beyond. But after a few months, earth caught up with and passed Jupiter in its orbit. Jupiter then appeared to move backwards in the sky. This movement is called retrograde. All planets’ paths retrograde when seen from earth, that’s why they are called planets, which is Greek for “wanderer.” So Jupiter went back and touched Regulus again. Then the earth moved on and by September of 2 BC, Jupiter had retrograded once more and had touched Regulus a third time.

To astronomers as skilled as those of Babylonia heritage and learning, which the wise men almost certainly were, this three-time conjunction of the king of planets with the king of stars would have started them packing. But why did they decide that the Jews had anything to do with it?

All three conjunctions took place within the backdrop of the constellation Leo, the lion. The lion is the symbol of the Jewish tribe of Judah, which takes it name from a son of Jacob named Judah. In Genesis chapter 49, Jacob gives his son, Judah, the lion as his symbol and then dictates that only Judah’s descendants shall provide the rulers for subsequent generations. King David was a member of the tribe of Judah and so was Jesus’ father, Joseph, according to Matthew chapter one.

The wise men were obviously conversant with the relationship of lions with the tribe of Judah and Judah’s parentage of all the kings of Israel. The wise men may well have been (though probably weren't) Jews themselves, since a thriving Jewish colony remained in Iraq until a generation ago even though the Jews’ captivity in Babylon was ended in 538 BC. The kingly conjunctions of Jupiter and Regulus within the constellation of the lion were all the wise men needed to start heading toward the Roman province of Judea, which we know as Israel.

But what they did not know was just where the new king was to be born. So they stopped at the palace of the Roman vassal, King Herod, to inquire. Herod’s counselors quoted a prophecy from Micah that said the Messiah would be born in Bethlehem.

At Herod’s deceitful urging, the wise men went to Bethlehem, only five miles from Jerusalem. In the sky, Jupiter had just begun a third retrograde, this one, however, not to be followed by a conjunction. The thing about planetary retrogrades is this: just as a planet appears to reverse direction, it seems to stand still in the sky.

Here is what computers using Kepler’s equations show. Jupiter’s full stop for this retrograde took place on December 25, 2 BC. If you had been in Jerusalem on that evening, you would have seen the kingly planet Jupiter motionless in the sky almost due south, directly above Bethlehem.

Why is Christmas on Dec. 25?

The urban legend that many Christians think is true is that early Christians appropriated the pagan, Roman Feast Of Saturnalia of Dec. 25 and converted it into the Christian holy day.

Nope. Saturnalia was not established by the Roman emperor until AD 274, when the date of Jesus' birth had already been set (though not widely celebrated) for three-quarter century.

It is the Western church that celebrates Christmas on Dec. 25. The Eastern church does so on Jan. 6, the date of Epiphany in the West. But curiously, the reason the West celebrates Christmas on Dec. 25 is the same reason the East does so on Jan. 6.

And that reason is (most likely) actually the dating of Easter, not Saturnalia.

Read it all here: "How December 25 Became Christmas," by Andrew McGowan.

Jesus' other father

He was faced with a detestable duty. He was a man of compassion, even of tenderness. But he was also a man honor, of a stern code. His obedience to the Law was unwavering. The moment he learned that his fiancé was pregnant he knew that it was the end. The end, certainly, of their engagement, and perhaps even the end of her life.

It was two millennia ago in the Roman-occupied land of Judea. The man was named Joseph. His fiancé was Mary. She was going to have a baby and it sure wasn't his. Compassion, honor and duty dueled within Joseph.

He could not pretend there was no problem. She had obviously betrayed him. The whole town of Nazareth was watching.

Finally, Joseph decided Mary would have to pay the price for infidelity as his honor and the Law required, but on terms formed by Joseph's compassion. He would break his engagement to her and send her away without fanfare, leaving her to fend for herself. It would clear the slate, restore his honor and was least hurtful to the young woman.

What the outcome would have been by Joseph’s plan we don’t know, because God revealed to him what was really going on, and Joseph changed his mind.

Joseph dreamed of an angel, who informed Joseph that Mary’s unborn child was of the Holy Spirit. The angel gave Joseph instructions: take Mary home as his wife and adopt Mary’s child as his own, giving him the name Jesus, a common and undistinguished name then, meaning,“God helps.”

These things came to pass. In Joseph’s day, when a Jewish man gave a name to the child born to his wife, it confirmed the child as his own. Maybe others knew that Joseph was not the baby’s natural father, maybe they didn’t. It didn’t matter. When Joseph named the baby Jesus, he was also giving to Jesus his own identity, his own lineage. That is why Jesus could truly be said to be of the line of David, because Joseph was of David’s line and Joseph adopted Jesus as his own son. “This child belongs to me, this child is my child, ” is what Joseph proclaimed when he named the child Jesus.

In the Gospels, Joseph is treated somewhat cursorily. Mary gets a lot more play. Joseph never speaks. Joseph hears, Joseph dreams, Joseph acts and Joseph obeys, but not even one syllable he ever uttered is related. Mary is the one with the speaking part. Her role is the most sought after in Christmas pageants.

Another pastor told me of one afternoon before the annual Christmas program, when a mother phoned the church office to say that her son, who was to play Joseph in the children's play, was sick and wouldn't be able to be there. “It's too late now to get another Joseph,” the director of the play said. “We'll just have to write him out of the script.” And they did. Joseph is easy to overlook and leave out.

In 1993, my wife played Mary in the Christmas pageant at our church. She got the part really because they needed our newborn daughter play the baby Jesus, there being no other small infant in the congregation. Mom and baby, Mary and Jesus, were a package deal, couldn’t get one without the other. But any guy off the street could have played Joseph. In fact, the pastor asked me, “Don, did you want to play Joseph or should we get a man from the choir to play him?” I said I would, but talk about feeling like a fifth wheel ... .

But more is going on with Joseph than is first apparent. A recurring theme of St. Paul is that Jesus' followers are adopted by God and made children of God, brothers and sisters of Christ. This should make us reconsider the significance of where Joseph fits in with God’s work. Joseph’s adoption of Jesus is highly significant.

What if Joseph had said no to the angel and had sent Mary away anyway. Can we imagine Jesus growing up in the home of an unwed, single mother, both Mary and Jesus outcast from society? How would Jesus have conceived of God as his heavenly Father if Joseph had never taken on the role of Jesus’ earthly father? It took courage for Joseph to claim Jesus as his own.

Before God adopts us into the family of Christ, God sent his son to be adopted by Joseph into the family of humankind. Joseph affirmed on behalf of all humanity that God belongs with us, "God with us."

Joseph adopted the Son of God as the child of humankind, and through Christ God adopts human beings as children of God. There seems to be a symmetry of salvation and relationship at work. We see in Joseph’s story that we and God belong to each other in the one whom Joseph named Jesus, “God helps.”

Bethlehem Today: Hamas Central

I am 55 years old. When I was born, Christians in Bethlehem numbered almost 90 percent of the people living there. Now it is less than 10 percent and falling. Christians in Bethlehem and the rest of the West Bank are ruthlessly oppressed by Islamists. Most Westerners are unaware that Hamas controls the town, with the Palestinian Authority of little influence. During the week I traveled there in autumn of 2007, 100 Christian families were physically kicked out of their houses by Muslim Palestinians while the PA police literally stood by and watched. I did not see it. I learned it from non-Israeli Westerners living in Jerusalem, one of whom I spoke with having personally assisted some of the families in their new refugee status.

Hamas might (or might not) intend to leave just enough Christians in Bethlehem to make sure the thriving tourism business of Western Christians stays profitable. By New Year's, almost 1.5 million tourists will have visited Bethlehem this year, a record. They bring an enormous monetary inflow into the West Bank. More Eastern European and Near East Christian pilgrims visit than Americans, but Americans are very numerous and tend to spend more money each. The gift shops are clean and well stocked (I bought my home's Nativity set in one) and are operated by Christian Palestinians, but they own the businesses in name only. They stay in business only by the forbearance of the PA, who taxes them heavily. Any Christian business operator and all Christian tour guides must be politically vetted by Hamas PA in order to operate. These Christians will unfailingly assure you that relationships among Christians and Muslims in the West Bank are simply superb. And then they will quickly move on to another topic.

The Israeli security fence, erected because of the Second Intifada's bombing campaign against Israel, separates Bethlehem from Jerusalem. Traversing means passing through a military-grade checkpoint. Driving from Israeli-controlled Jerusalem into Hamas-controlled Bethlehem was unencumbered. Vehicles pretty much breezed right through. The Palestinians have no fear of Israeli suicide bombers coming to devastate their buses or restaurants. After all, there are no Israeli suicide bombers.

I took the photo above from the Palestinian side of the checkpoint. As the backed-up traffic shows, there is no breezing through from Bethlehem to Jerusalem. Vehicles and pedestrians are inspected. Tour buses generally get through pretty quickly since not even Hamas is dumb enough (well, yet) to try to plant a bomb or terrorist aboard one, which would end tourists and pilgrim coming to the West Bank, a far too expensive outcome for them to accept.

Near the checkpoint proper there are instructions in Hebrew, Arabic and English. All street sings in Israel are in those three languages.

The Palestinians put up propaganda on their side of the security fence.

Another example:

The Israelis put up propaganda on their side, too, but of a definitely peaceful sort:

I found the mural ironic, since whatever they Israelis and Palestinians have, "love and peace" ain't it, on either side.

Most of the entire West Bank is enclosed by a security fence, about 700 kilometers. About six percent of the distance is a wall rather than a fence because of the density of the buildings present. The fence generally follows the "Green Line," but the Green Line is ill defined in some places. The Green Line, btw, is the ceasefire line agreed to in 1949, at the close of Irael's war for independence. It is not actually a border of any kind. It is called the Green Line because it was drawn on the negotiators' map with a green pencil. Really.

This shot of the security wall was taken near the unused Jerusalem airport. Rock throwers shut the airport down some years ago. They threw rocks over the wall above at airliners landing or just onto the runway, the horizontal, flat gray feature just below the wall. Any pilot who may be reading can imagine how eager airline pilots were to land on runways covered in rocks.

Despite the international controversy about the fence/wall, it would be very hard to find an Israeli of any political stripe who would call for its removal. The fence was erected by a government very reluctant to do so, and was opposed by both Labor and Likud. But the bombings of the Second Intifada, begun in 2000, became so severe that the people demanded the barrier go up. Since it went up, terrorist violence inside Israel has fallen by 80-95 percent, depending the on the region of the country.

The barrier has made life harder for the Palestinians, who complain that it has degraded their quality of life. The typical Israeli responds, "Our lives come before your quality of life." Hard to argue with that.

Yossi Klein Halevi, a prominent Israeli journalist, said the barrier should be named the "Yasser Arafat Memorial Wall."

But back to Bethlehem. During the 4th century Constantine declared Christianity the official religion of the Roman empire. His mother, Queen Helena, traveled across the Holy Land and managed to identify many of the precise locations of significance in Jesus' life. ("Why yes, your Highness, you're right: this is the place where Jesus fed the multitude!") One of those places was the birthplace of Jesus. Since that day, Christian shrines have been been successively erected atop it and other identified sites. Most of the present Church of the Nativity dates from the Crusades. This is the interior of the Crusader section.

The traditional birth site of Jesus is well below this level, the site of a (presumed) small cave in the rocky hillside.

During my time here, a large group of Eastern-church pilgrims came through. They were clearly overwhelmed with emotion. Most of them knelt on both knees and kissed the star embedded in the floor and left to the left, crying. I confess to have been stricken emotionally at two sites I visited, but this was not one of them (neither was the Church of the Resurrection).

Bethlehem is in economic boom times now, but Islam is overwhelmingly powerful there, with Hamas' brand on the rise. Hamas' candidates in fact won a majority of municipal elections in Bethlehem. Since 1995, only Christians are permitted to be the town's mayor, but present Mayor Victor Batarseh was hand-picked for the office by Hamas. Batarseh previously was known for his atheism, militant Marxism and very active membership in the radical Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine. The PFLP assassinated Israeli Cabinet Minister Rehavam Ze’evi in Jerusalem in 2002. Bartarseh has since held that the assassination “was legitimate retaliation for Israeli state terror.”

Occupying the majority of city council seats and with Batarseh as mayor, Hamas, whose charter calls for the destruction of Israel, is in iron control of the birthplace of the Prince of Peace. His followers there subsist at leave of the Islamists or, if they are able or compelled, move out of the West Bank. It is too dangerous to remain, just as it was for Jesus 2,000 years ago.

Related: "Bethlehem belongs to Hamas," in Israel Today.

If the Nativity happened today

Belief in nothing, or no thing?

Paul Wallace at Religion Dispatches uncovers the fundamentalism of New Atheism, personified by the truly elementary atheism of Richard Dawkins, who for some reason is taken seriously by pop culture as a serious thinker.

Wallace cites Denys Turner, a professor of theology at Yale:

“Atheists reject too little,” Turner writes, “This is why their atheisms lack theological interest. The routine principled atheist has but tinkered with religion.” This statement, with which I agree, will be unpacked in the remainder of this essay. In order to speak more specifically about this, I decided to investigate a single atheist’s stated beliefs. Since I have a few Richard Dawkins books on my living room shelf, and because his point of view is known to many, I decided on him....

In The God Delusion, Dawkins presents his central argument against the existence of God in the fourth chapter. His thinking goes something like this: The universe is a complex thing. Therefore the God of the Christians, who, Christians say, made the universe, must be at least as complex as the universe God made. Therefore we are left with an even bigger problem than before: Who made this ultra-complex God? A hyper-complex megaGod? It makes plain sense, according to Occam’s razor, to stop before we get to the first God. The complex universe is enough. Ergo, in all likelihood, God does not exist.

This argument, which boils down to Well, who made God, then?, assumes that God is a thing like any other thing. It assumes that God must exist in the same way the moon exists, in the same way Dawkins himself exists. As Terry Eagleton wrote in his now-infamous review of The God Delusion, Dawkins seems to think that God is “a celestial super-object or divine UFO,” a creature like other creatures, only bigger and smarter: a kind of uberthing, but a thing nonetheless.

If God is a thing like any other thing, then his argument is really good: Any thing-making machine, which is itself a thing like any other thing, must be at least as complex as the thing it makes. In the case of God, the problem is worse, because of the standard Christian claim that God not only created the universe, but sustains it as well. So, if God is a thing like other things then Dawkins’ point is well made.

But nowhere does Dawkins get outside of himself and ask, Is my assumption that God is a thing like any other thing really necessary? On what is this assumption grounded? Where did it come from?

The problem is that God is not a thing. One problem for New Atheists is that they have literally never proceeded past an understanding of God that is more mature than childlike. Their so-called atheism is literally childish.

Another problem for New Atheists is not so much that they reject certain attributes of God, but that...

Most atheists reject far too little. They only have to be one kind of atheist: The atheist who stands against some kind of ridiculous super-object in the sky, who stands against a child’s theology. Christians, who, like Jews, are commanded to have no gods before God, do not have the luxury of disbelieving in so few things. In Turner’s words, "In order to deny every kind of idolatry possible, a Christian must be every kind of atheist possible." We are required to have faith in no thing at all; only then will our faith have any chance of finding its true home in God.

We can and should have faith in no thing while making sure not to believe in nothing.

Instant MBA - or lesson therefrom

"INSTANT MBA: Find Out What Employees Are Good At And Assign Tasks Accordingly."

Today's lesson comes from Geoff Vuleta, C.E.O. of Fahrenheit 212, an innovation consulting firm in Manhattan:

"I try to uncover what people are really good at doing and then give them a [snip] of a lot of that to do. I really, truly believe in that.

I am the sort of person who’s never really believed in obsessing over trying to get people to do things that they are no good at anyway."

What are you good at? Are you doing a lot of it? One of the most damaging things to individual productivity is trying to take care of many different things. Remember the saying about the hedgehog: "The hedgehog knows how to do only one thing, but he does it extremely well."

Christian discipleship's full flower is found in exactly the principle that Mr. Vuleta explained. While there are general obligations of discipleship that rest upon all those who want to follow Christ, the New Testament makes it abundantly clear that, to borrow Paul's analogy, some of us in the body of Christ are eyes, others are hands, some are feet. None do everything the body needs, but all are necessary.

What are you good at in Christian discipleship? Unless we follow the Bible's teaching of how to discover it, we won't. The central key is to discover your spiritual gifts. You can even do this online now at the UMC's web site page:
http://www.umc.org/site/c.lwL4KnN1LtH/b.1355371/k.9501/Spiritual_Gifts.htm.

Spiritual gifts are:

* Christian vocations given by the Holy Spirit to believers to shape and form their living as disciples of Jesus Christ

* Vocational capabilities that may be, but are not necessarily, related to skills, abilities or knowledge a believer already has

* The decision of our Lord in which person receives which gift - the Spirit knows us better than we do!

* Incredibly liberating and spiritually rewarding - they are the primary means by which we find our place in the Kingdom of God!

Remember: God does not call the qualified, God qualifies the called. How is God trying to "qualify" you? Through the spiritual gifts. Find out what you gifted for and do a lot of it!