The Thoughts of CS Lewis

'I'm ready to accept Jesus as a great moral teacher, but I don't accept His claim to be God.' That is the one thing we must not say. A man who was merely a man and said the sort of things Jesus said would not he a great moral teacher. He would either be a lunatic--on a level with the man who says he is a poached egg--or else he would be the Devil of Hell. You must make your choice. Either this man was, and is, the Son of God: or else a madman or something worse. You can shut Him up for a fool, you can spit at Him and kill Him as a demon; or you can fall at His feet and call Him Lord and God. But let us not come with any patronizing nonsense about His being a great human teacher. He has not left that open to us. He did not intend to.

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There can be no moral motive for entering a new morality unless that motive is borrowed from the traditional morality.… All the specifically modern attempts at new moralities are contradictions. They proceed by retaining some traditional precepts and rejecting others: but the only real authority behind those which they retain is the very same authority which they flout in rejecting others.…You can attack the concept of justice because it interferes with the feeding of the masses, but you have taken the duty of feeding the masses from the worldwide code. You may exalt patriotism at the expense of mercy; but it was the old code that told you to love your country. You may vivisect your grandfather in order to deliver your grandchildren from cancer: but, take away traditional morality, and why should you bother about your grandchildren?

– “On Ethics”, Christian Reflections.

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A great many of those who 'debunk' traditional or (as they would say) 'sentimental' values have in the background values of their own which they believed to be immune from the debunking process.
  -- The Abolition of Man, ch. 2

The first quote is CS Lewis’ most famous one in Christian apologetics.

16 Booker T. Washington Quotes on Liberty and Personal Responsibility

Commentary from Gary M. Galles on FEE.org:

Booker T. Washington, who sought “the most complete freedom compatible with the freedom of others,” attracts surprisingly little attention. That is an important oversight because, rather than promoting government coercion of others as a “solution,” he demonstrated the moral means to success — self-improvement, which also benefits others through voluntary arrangements.

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Washington was a tireless advocate of self-improvement, emphasizing individual responsibility, the dignity of work, and moral character. He encouraged industry and entrepreneurship. Unlike many, he understood capitalism, recognizing that those who serve others thereby serve themselves best.

Washington recognized that for blacks’ advancement, starting from the legacy of government-enforced slavery, coercion of others was not the answer. Instead, it would be found through self-improvement and voluntary arrangements because, regardless of past injustices, only voluntary arrangements prevent additional injustices from being committed, and “No question is ever permanently settled until it is settled in the principles of the highest justice.” I find his expressions of that theme particularly insightful.

• Whenever people act upon the idea that the disadvantage of one man is the good of another, there slavery exists.
• I have never had much patience with…[those] always ready to explain why one cannot succeed. I have always had high regard for the man who could tell me how to succeed.
• Nothing ever comes to one, that is worth having, except as a result of hard work.
• There are two ways of exerting one’s strength; one is pushing down, the other is pulling up.
• One constructive effort in the way of progress does more to blot out discrimination than all the whinings in the world.
• Our republic is the outgrowth of the desire for liberty that is natural in every human breast…and the most complete guarantee of the safety of life and property.
• The individual who can do something that the world wants will, in the end, make his way regardless of race.

Booker T. Washington’s character and actions are both inspiring. His emphasis on rejecting coercion of others, relying instead on self-improvement and voluntary arrangements, is exactly what we need to teach our children today, regardless of race, as we prepare them to make the most of their lives. And despite the fact that self-improvement requires hard work and sacrifice, which a tide of modern influences fight against, it is as necessary today as it was for Washington. Of course, we must apply that principle to ourselves as well, or our actions will speak too loudly for our children to hear our words.  [read more]

Passing through a black hole could open up a whole new future, but it would erase your past

From Fox News.com (Mar. 7):

It’s a controversial idea. But an enticing one. A new study has once again tackled the implications of a black hole’s event horizon — the point beyond which not even light can escape its gravitational pull.

This time, mathematicians have been crunching the numbers to determine if an object can cross this point of no return — and travel beyond.

It’s generally thought an even horizon is an impenetrable line in space and time.

Whatever goes over the edge is lost, forever.

Many astrophysicists say what’s inside is impossible to study. The laws of physics break down to a point where they’re simply incomprehensible.

But one international team of researchers have been busily poking holes in this assumption.

Their research, published in the journal Physical Review Letters, looks at a particular type of black hole.

It must be calm. It must be supermassive. It must be electrically charged. It must sit in an expanding and accelerating universe (like our own).

They argue these conditions open up a path enabling someone to pass through to what lies beyond — without being “spaghettified” down to elemental components.

There is a problem, though. Your past would evaporate. And an infinite number of futures would open up for you. All at once. [read more]

Well, I guess if you don’t care about your past being erased it would be okay assuming you survive the trip of course. Then again you have infinite choices in the future. Talk about choice-overload! Some people have a hard time deciding what to wear in the morning or what to eat on a menu.

By the way, what does “calm” mean? Not gobbling up stars and space dust? Hmm.

Temptation in the Garden lecture notes

• The nakedness of Adam and Eve has more to do with their vulnerability than their lack of clothing.
• God intended the serpent’s craftiness to help Adam and Eve learn wisdom (Proverbs 1).
• The first sin is believing the word of the serpent rather than the Word of God.
• Faith has 4 interrelated elements:
1. Knowledge of the person and plan of God
2. Assent (James 2)
3. Love commitment as changed behavior and risk
4. Hope (Romans 4 and Hebrews 11)

Source: Genesis: Week Three: Temptation in the Garden.

The tyranny of algorithms is part of our lives: soon they could rate everything we do

From The Guardian.com (Mar. 5):

For the past couple of years a big story about the future of China has been the focus of both fascination and horror. It is all about what the authorities in Beijing call “social credit”, and the kind of surveillance that is now within governments’ grasp. The official rhetoric is poetic. According to the documents, what is being developed will “allow the trustworthy to roam everywhere under heaven while making it hard for the discredited to take a single step”.

As China moves into the newly solidified President Xi Jinping era, the basic plan is intended to be in place by 2020. Some of it will apply to businesses and officials, so as to address corruption and tackle such high-profile issues as poor food hygiene. But other elements will be focused on ordinary individuals, so that transgressions such as dodging transport fares and not caring sufficiently for your parents will mean penalties, while living the life of a good citizen will bring benefits and opportunities.

Online behaviour will inevitably be a big part of what is monitored, and algorithms will be key to everything, though there remain doubts about whether something so ambitious will ever come to full fruition. One of the scheme’s basic aims is to use a vast amount of data to create individual ratings, which will decide people’s access – or lack of it – to everything from travel to jobs.

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It would be easy to assume none of this could happen here in the west. But the 21st century is not going to work like that. These days credit reports and scores – put together by agencies whose reach into our lives is mind-boggling – are used to judge job applications, thereby threatening to lock people into financial problems. And in the midst of the great deluge of personal data that comes from our online lives, there is every sign of these methods being massively extended.

Three years ago Facebook patented a system of credit rating that would consider the financial histories of people’s friends. Opaque innovations known as e-scores are used by increasing numbers of companies to target their marketing, while such outfits as the already infamous Cambridge Analytica trawl people’s online activities so as to precisely target political messaging. The tyranny of algorithms is now an inbuilt part of our lives.

These systems are sprawling, often randomly connected, and often beyond logic. But viewed from another angle, they are also the potential constituent parts of comprehensive social credit systems, awaiting the moment at which they will be glued together. That point may yet come, thanks to the ever-expanding reach of the internet. If our phones and debit cards already leave a huge trail of data, the so-called internet of things is now increasing our informational footprint at speed. [read more]

Frederick Douglass and a Constitution for all

Commentary from Star Parker on One News.com (Mar. 2):

President Trump has signed into law bipartisan legislation establishing the Frederick Douglass Bicentennial Commission to celebrate Douglass' life and work. I have been honored to be appointed, along with Dr. Alveda King, niece of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., and others, to this commission.

Born into slavery 200 years ago, Douglass taught himself to read and write, escaped to freedom and became an anti-slavery and human rights activist, newspaper publisher and advisor to presidents.

I consider Douglass' life and struggles as I watch this latest round of public debate about the right of American citizens to bear arms. I watch with amazement the ease with which so many are ready to compromise the core freedoms that define us as Americans, for which so many have struggled and died.

In May of 1865, one month after the end of the Civil War, Douglass spoke to the American Anti-Slavery Society, convened at New York City's Church of the Puritans.

The topic of discussion was whether the society should continue its work in light of the formal abolition of slavery. By the end of that year, the 13th Amendment, prohibiting slavery in the United States, would be ratified.

Douglass's address was entitled "In What New Skin Will the Old Snake Come Forth?"

He spoke prophetically, questioning the value of the anti-slavery amendment if black Americans still would not be protected by rights guaranteed in the U.S. Constitution.

"...while the Legislatures of the South can take from him (the black man) the right to keep and bear arms, as they can ... the work of the Abolitionists is not finished."

Fast-forward 145 years to another black man, Otis McDonald, suing the city of Chicago because of its ordinance prohibiting him from owning a handgun to protect himself and his property from the vandalism and break-ins that were regularly taking place in his neighborhood.

McDonald's lawsuit made it to the Supreme Court, which ruled, in 2010, that states and localities cannot infringe on the Second Amendment protection for individuals to keep and bear arms.

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Frederick Douglass would surely be an NRA advocate today, and would be fighting to preserve our right to protect ourselves. [read more]

Another article about Frederick Douglass:

Frederick Douglass Insisted That Identity Politics Is Not the Answer

Hmm. It seems Frederick Douglass might have been a conservative.

In the Image of God lecture notes

• Humanity was created to rule because we were created in the image of God who rules.
• The sovereignty of man is like the sovereignty of God—a sovereignty of service.
• Both men and women make up the image of God because God is plurality in unity (Trinity).
• The Old Testament focuses on the unity of God because polytheism was the predominant challenge in those days.
• God rested on the Sabbath because salvation was complete.
• Israel rested on the Sabbath to show trust in God’s blessing.
• The Garden of Eden was a geographical temple like Mt. Sinai would be to Israel later in the Old Testament.
• Humanity was created to care for creation and pursue beauty. Human beings were created to worship through obedience.
• Woman was created as man’s helper. But this does not mean that woman was created to do the “grunt work.” Woman was created to be man’s helper in the sense that she was his savior—enabling him to fulfill God’s command to cultivate, till, and keep the garden. No masculine dominance exists in Genesis 2 (See Psalm 30:2 and Ephesians 5).
• The gold, pearls, and lapis lazuli placed in the Garden of Eden were a challenge to man to grow aesthetically.

Source: Genesis: Week Two: In the Image of God.

An American Coup D'état

From Bill O’Reilly.com (Mar. 1):

The story of our time is the coup d’état that is being planned in this country. Sounds pretty bad, doesn’t it?

In most countries, coup d’états happen when the military tries to overthrow the government. The United States military would never do that… but the national media certainly would.

With so many citizens refusing to pay attention to their country, the media is trying hard to influence policy rather than report facts.  The mission of the press has largely shifted into liberal advocacy and a hatred toward conservative, traditional Americans.

If you visit political websites on the net – always risky if you care about truth – you will notice article after article based on anonymous sources. Accusations have become convictions, fodder for late night comedians and cable news yakkers.

It’s a vicious, corrupt system that has taken deep root in our political landscape. Well known newspapers and television networks are also doing it - especially to the Trump White House.

More often than not, these stories develop into a get-Trump jihad. Accusations – not facts - are being used to destroy the Trump administration. This is a coup by the news media. And at this point, there’s no way to stop it.

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President Trump and Chief of Staff John Kelly need to sit down and create a unit to combat this. Get the smartest lawyers and the most eloquent spokespeople, line them up and play whack a mole on these stories. Put that unit out and let them deal with all this horror. Because that coup is underway.  [read more]

I agree completely. And it is pretty sad that the media is going way beyond their role. They are not just a bias organization anymore. They are a hit squad.

The Clinton administration had a “bimbo eruption” unit for Bill Clinton accusations. So, why shouldn’t the Trump admin. have their own unit to combat the press?

A fake organ mimics what happens in the blink of an eye

From Science News.org (Feb. 20):

AUSTIN, Texas — A new artificial organ gives a new meaning to the phrase “making eyes.”

For the first time, researchers used human cells to build a model of the surface of the eye that’s equipped with a fake eyelid that mimics blinking. This synthetic eye could be used to study and test treatments for eye diseases, researchers reported February 16 in a news conference at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

BLINK OF AN EYE This artificial eye is made of corneal cells (dark blue) surrounded by a ring of conjunctival cells (white), grown on a contact lens‒like surface. The device “blinks” when a hydrogel film slides over a channel containing artificial tears (black) and spreads the liquid over the cells.

Dan Huh, a bioengineer at the University of Pennsylvania, and colleagues grew a ring of conjunctival cells — tissue that covers the white part of the eye — around a circle of corneal cells on a contact lens‒shaped platform. A faux eyelid made of a thin hydrogel film covers and uncovers the eye to spread tear fluid over the cells.

This artificial eye surface could help researchers study dry eye disease, a condition that affects an estimated 16 million adults in the United States. People with dry eye disease don’t produce enough tears or fail to make tears with the proper chemical composition to keep their eyes hydrated. Huh’s team could give the organ the symptoms of dry eye disease by making it blink less frequently, so the device could be used to test the safety and effectiveness of new eye drop medications.

This kind of artificial organ may also be used to study other eye injuries, like corneal ulcers, Huh said.  [Source]

Interesting and yet weird.

Strategies for pursuing the biblical-theological ideas that run through scripture

1. Let the Bible be what it is, and be open to the notion that what it says about the unseen realm might just be real.
2. The content of the Bible needs to make sense in its own context, whether or not it makes sense in ours.
3. How the biblical writers tie passages together for interpretation should guide our own interpretation of the Bible.
4. How the New Testament writers repurpose the Old Testament is critical for biblical interpretation. Also called intertextuality.
5. Metaphorical meaning isn't "less real" than literal meaning (however that's defined).

Source: The Unseen Realm. Recovering the Supernatural Worldview of the Bible (2015) by Dr. Michael S. Heiser.

Interesting book.

How to train a robot to do complex abstract thinking

From Kurzweil AI.net (Feb. 16):

Robots are great at following programmed steps. But asking a robot to “move the green bottle from the cooler to the cupboard” would require it to have abstract representations of these things and actions, plus knowledge of its surroundings.

(“Hmm, which of those millions of pixels is a ‘cooler,’ whatever than means? How do I get inside it and also the ‘cupboard’? …”)

To help robots answer these kinds of questions and plan complex multi-step tasks, robots can construct two kinds of abstract representations of the world around them, say Brown University and MIT researchers:

• “Procedural abstractions”: bundling all the low-level movements composed into higher-level skills (such as opening a door). Most of those robots doing fancy athletic tricks are explicitly programmed with such procedural abstractions, say the researchers.
• “Perceptual abstractions”: making sense out of the millions of confusing pixels in the real world.

Building truly intelligent robots

According to George Konidaris, Ph.D., an assistant professor of computer science at Brown and the lead author of the new study, there’s been less progress in perceptual abstraction — the focus of the new research.

To explore this, the researchers trained a robot they called “Anathema” (aka “Ana”). They started by teaching Ana “procedural abstractions” in a room containing a cupboard, a cooler, a switch that controls a light inside the cupboard, and a bottle that could be left in either the cooler or the cupboard. They gave Ana a set of high-level motor skills for manipulating the objects in the room, such as opening and closing both the cooler and the cupboard, flipping the switch, and picking up a bottle.

Ana was also able to learn a very abstract description of the visual environment that contained only what was necessary for her to be able to perform a particular skill. Once armed with these learned abstract procedures and perceptions, the researchers gave Ana a challenge: “Take the bottle from the cooler and put it in the cupboard.”

Accepting the challenge, Ana navigated to the cooler. She had learned the configuration of pixels in her visual field associated with the cooler lid being closed (the only way to open it). She had also learned how to open it: stand in front of it and don’t do anything (because she needed both hands to open the lid).

She opened the cooler and sighted the bottle. But she didn’t pick it up. Not yet.

She realized that if she had the bottle in her gripper, she wouldn’t be able to open the cupboard — that requires both hands. Instead, she went directly to the cupboard.

There, she saw that the light switch was in the “on” position, and instantly realized that opening the cupboard would block the switch. So she turned the switch off before opening the cupboard. Finally, she returned to the cooler, retrieved the bottle, and placed it in the cupboard.

She had developed the entire plan in about four milliseconds. [read more]

History Has a Way of Vindicating Great Presidents. So Don’t Prejudge Trump.

From Daily Signal.com (Feb. 18):

A recent event in Washington featured accomplished academics and government officials, some of whom had worked for either the George W. Bush or Obama administrations, discussing the first year of the Trump administration.

The moderator for one panel mentioned how a former president had been unfairly maligned during his time, and how a significant percentage of Americans had held a low opinion of him.

Since then, however, new evidence emerged that changed the perception of that president—declassified information on how he ran his meetings and made decisions. Essentially, the evidence shows that president to have been an effective commander in chief who made wise decisions.

It appears that this president’s critics—who had scoffed at and maligned him—were wrong in their assessment, and history’s evaluation has been much kinder.

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Throughout his tenure, Dwight D. Eisenhower was dismissed by critics as passive and disengaged—as a benign, grandfatherly figure who was ill-suited for the atomic age.

His occasional mispronunciations gave critics the impression that he didn’t have the intellectual heft to be president. The fact that he appointed several business leaders to his Cabinet convinced some that he was a puppet of Wall Street.

The year after Eisenhower left office, academics ranked him as a below-average president (21st out of 31).

Of course, presumptions about Eisenhower’s intellect ignored the fact that he was one of the most accomplished military figures in American history, leading the successful invasion of Normandy in 1944 and serving as the first supreme commander of NATO.

Since then, historians have discovered that Eisenhower’s supposed passivity was a misperception that resulted from his preference for working behind the scenes, and that in actuality, he was fully in charge of his presidency.

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More recently, Ronald Reagan also was dismissed as an intellectual lightweight, an “amiable dunce.” Reagan’s critics believed him to be a right-wing war monger whose defense budget increases and tough rhetoric against the Soviet Union (or, as he called it, the “evil empire”) could lead to nuclear war.

In 1980, Reagan insisted he was “willing to negotiate an honest, verifiable reduction in nuclear weapons.” Soon after entering office, he explored the possibility of reducing nuclear weapons and even eliminating all intermediate-range nuclear missiles in Europe.

These efforts seemed to go against Reagan’s image as a right-wing cowboy.

Critics, including those in the Freeze movement (which advocated a freeze in the building of nuclear warheads), dismissed Reagan’s moves as efforts to kill arms control efforts. There was no way, they believed, that right-wing Reagan was serious about reducing Cold War tensions.

But when Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev took power in Moscow in 1985, Reagan found a willing partner. The rapport they built up in their summits in Geneva in 1985 and Reykjavík in 1986 helped to end the Cold War.

Reagan’s critics no longer could question his sincerity when he and Gorbachev signed a treaty in 1987 that eliminated all intermediate-range nuclear and conventional missiles—far beyond what any previous Democrat or Republican president had achieved in nuclear arms control.  [read more]

Yea, I remember the press dismissing President Reagan as just a cowboy or actor.