This past year, I bought my first house. A townhouse really, but it's very nice, and it's mine. It is two stories, two bedrooms, two and a half baths, and there is a loft at the top of the stairs, so really I have three bedrooms worth of space.

Since this was now my home, I decided that I wanted to actually decorate it and furnish it properly. Until that I point, I had lived in apartments, and had never really thought of them as my home. The furniture was all hand me downs from family from when I went to college, and is still in good condition, though old and mismatched. And the decorations were mostly posters of Hubble photos or nature scenes, along with random glass paper weights, and various knick knacks I had gotten from medieval fairs. But I wanted my house to be a home, not some cheap college bachelor pad.

So I have set about the task of decorating. Having some rather different tastes from modern America, and wanting to get quality furniture instead of cheap, 'it'll do' stuff, it has turned out to be surprisingly hard.

Overall, I want my house to have a fantastic feel to it. I want a hint of exotic and magical to my home. I say hint because I want subtle, not over the top. It should suggest strange worlds to the imagination, not look like the set to a cheesy fantasy movie. It is a very hard target to hit.

For the great room downstairs, I am going for what my friend termed 'old European.' It goes past traditional and Victorian, and into the old world, such as you would find in a 17th century palace, with all the gilt and gaudiness removed. The first piece is an entertainment center.


I really like the dark wood. That color wood is popular right now, so it should be easy to find. More difficult will be finding wood with clean lines and simple adornments. Contemporary furniture is very flat and plain, no adornments at all. And I don't like the curves and curlicues of traditional furniture.

I also got this chair. While it is definitely contemporary in style, the color and pattern of the fabric help break up the plain shape. It should fit in well with the style of living room I'm making.


But now I hit my first road block. When I picked out the entertainment center and chair, I also found a sofa and matching chair and ottoman. Cream colored upholstery, same dark wood trim. It definitely fit the old European style. But I couldn't afford everything. My plan is to buy a few pieces, pay them off before interest starts accruing, then repeat for the next few pieces. Rather than buy an entire room and spend 2 years and twice as much money paying it off.

So I bought the entertainment center first, since at the time my movies and video games were just stacked on the floor, and then threw the chair in for color and to split the cost of everything I found evenly.

And then they discontinued the sofa set. In six months and half the furniture stores in the city, it was the only sofa that looked right and was also comfortable to sit in. So now I have to start my search all over again. This is the trouble of only buying what you can afford; sometimes when you can finally afford it, it's not there anymore. Still, new things should have come out since last I went looking, so perhaps I can find a replacement in the coming months. By which point I should have paid off the last set.

I am reading through Dinesh D'Souza's book What's so Great About Christianity. In part 5 of his book, he talks about the limits of reason and senses and empirical evidence, and Pascal's Wager. I want to go a little deeper into Pascal's Wager.

Pascal's Wager begins as follows: either God exists, or God does not exist. These are the only two logical possibilities. Likewise, we as humans can only make two choices, to believe God exists, or to believe God does not exist. Since it is impossible to know with absolute certainty whether or not God exists, Pascal analyzes the risks and rewards associated with each choice in light of each possible truth, and comes to the conclusion that it is reasonable to believe in God.

Here's how it goes. If God does not exist, and choose not to believe in God, then I can do whatever I want on this earth, and the afterlife does not matter, because there is no afterlife. There are no eternal consequences to our actions or beliefs. Therefore, I can do whatever I want on this earth that pleases me. But if God does not exist and I choose to believe in God, then I make sacrifices to live a good life, but I get no eternal rewards. Therefore I have not done whatever pleases me, and all for nothing. Though it should be noted that many people are still satisfied with this life.

If God exists, and I choose to believe in God, then I make sacrifices to live a good life, and in return I go to heaven in the afterlife where I receive rewards from God for all eternity. But if God exists and I choose to not believe in God, then I do whatever I want on this earth that pleases me, and in return, God sends me to hell for eternal punishment.

This being the case, Pascal states that it is better to believe in God, because if you are wrong, you have not done everything you wanted, but probably still lived a satisfying life, but if you are right, you are given eternal rewards. The rewards are great and the risk is low. Contrast that to not believing in God, where if you may do as you please, but if you are wrong, you are eternally punished. The reward is low and the risk is high. Therefore a reasonable person should choose to believe in God.

But now I want to look at whether the wager is even valid or not. For the wager to be valid, two conditions must be met:

1. First, we must not be able to know whether or not God exists. For if we know which is true, then there is no need to make the wager in the first place. We simply choose to believe the truth.
2. Second, we have to have made an accurate assessment of the risks and rewards. If believing in God leads to atrocities, then the risk of believing in God and being wrong is much higher than if believing in God leads to good behavior. Similarly, if not believing in God leads to atrocities, then the rewards of being right are not as great as we would assume.

So can we know, with absolute certainty, whether God exists or not? According to Kant and Hume, the answer is no, since we cannot know anything with absolute certainty.

Kant's position was that since we can only perceive the world through our human senses, we cannot know everything there is to know. What we can see, hear, touch, taste, and smell is only a portion of the universe. There are things beyond our senses. And even the devices we build to see beyond our senses merely translates something into something else we can perceive. Because of this limitation, there is no way to verify if what we perceive is true. We have only our senses, and to use the senses to prove the senses is circular. Therefore, everything we know about the world is based on the unproven assumption that our senses are accurate.

Hume had a different take. Hume stated that all our scientific knowledge is based on empirical observation. That is, we repeat something many times and measure how it behaves. The problem with empiricism is that it is not proof. It is evidence, yes, but for it to be proof, you have to observe every single instance of the cause and see the same effect. So while we may be confident that X causes Y, observing X then Y many times with a very high correlation does not mean that there are not cases where X happens and then Y doesn't happen.

So while we may be very confident of God's existence or not, we cannot know with certainty. So the first premise of Pascal's Wager is satisfied.

So now let us look at the risks and rewards. We shall start with the eternal risks and rewards first. If God does not exist, then there are no eternal rewards. Nor are there eternal risks. There is no box on the other side of life we have to fill in in order to make our assessment. There are no positives or negatives. But if God does exist, then the reward is eternity with Him in His heaven. Whether you call it heaven or paradise, you receive what makes you happy and satisfied for all time. (Whether what you receive is what you think makes you happy is another discussion). But the risk is the opposite. Eternal suffering. For some it is living in a pit of flame and despair forever. For others, it is returning to live again on the earth. (This last had more impact before the Europeans created ubiquitous luxuries and living was actually hard). So if God exists, it's eternal bliss or eternal suffering.

But what about the temporal risks and rewards, those that affect us in this life? If God does not exist, then there is no moral truth, no right and wrong. There is no transcendent meaning to our lives. The universe just is, for no particular reason, and we just are, for no other reason than because the universe just is. And that's all we've got and we can do with it as we will.

For those who accept this as truth, they are free of all moral obligations, and can do anything their heart desires. And the only limit on this is what others (such as society) allow them to do. Might makes right, for their are no other external limits on behavior. So the reward is to do whatever you can get away with. But the risk is that someone could come and do whatever to you.

For those who believe that God exists when he does not, they are deluding themselves. They may be content in this life, believing that ultimately everyone will get their just rewards, but won't ever find out that they are wrong, since they just cease to exist upon death. In the meantime, they place limits on their behavior. They do not do everything they want, because sometimes God says it's actually bad for you, and sometimes what they want hurts others, and God doesn't want them to hurt others. This prevents anarchy and armed conflict and generally allows people to get along, so most people, even those who don't believe in God, consider it a good thing. However, in their zealousness, the believer often imposes these limits on the non-believers. The non-believers do not like this, especially in cases where the harm of the behavior is not obvious. This can cause conflict, and would be the downside of believing in a God who does not exist.

Interestingly, the temporal risks and rewards are very similar if God does exist. For those who do not believe in God, they still have no moral limits or meaning to their lives. And they are still in conflict with those who do accept the morality of God and the meaning He gives to life. What changes is that if God exists, He can step in and give blessings to those believe in Him, and withhold them, or even punish, those who do not.

So for assessing risks and rewards of God's existence, they are mostly tied to eternity after death, with the temporal rewards being driven largely by our own choice. So it is still reasonable to believe in God even if we aren't sure, because the rewards in the here and hereafter are greater, while the risks of not believing are higher, both in the here and now and in eternity. So the second premise is satisfied.

1 In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God and the Word was God. ²He was with God in the beginning. ³Through Him all things were made; without Him nothing was made that has been made. ⁴In Him was life, and that life was the light of men. ⁵The light shines in the darkness, but the darkness has not overcome it.
...
¹⁰He was in the world, and though the world was made through Him, the world did not recognize Him. ¹¹He came to that which was His own, but His own did not receive Him. ¹²Yet to all who received Him, to those who believed in His name, He gave the right to become children of God - ¹³children born not of natural decent, nor of human decision or a husband's will, but born of God.

¹⁴The Word became flesh and made His dwelling among us. We have seen His glory, the glory of the One and Only, who came from the Father, full of grace and truth.

From the Gospel of John (NIV)

I went to the Christmas Eve Candlelight service at my church tonight. Everybody was given a candle when they came into the sanctuary. It's a vast auditorium, filled with over five thousand people. At the end of the service, they turned off all the lights. It is dark. I can barely see the candle in my hand. The people beside me, in front of me, all around me are just dark shapes, sensed more than seen. The rustle of clothes and the quiet stamp of feet mingle with the low strains of Silent Night. Up on the stage, a dozen candles flicker in the darkness, tiny pinpricks of orange light.

There is movement up at the front. Little candles begin to wander, multiply. The pastors and deacons can be dimly seen lighting their candles, and taking them out to the congregation. The little flickering flames grow in number. The unseen ceiling is revealed in the warm glow as the light spreads. I can see my own candle again. The people around me slowly regain their color.

The little flames finally reach me. I light my candle, and then pass it on, lighting others around me. The tiny flame is bright to look at, dancing on the wick. The vast hall, so dark before, is lit up, bright enough to read by. Thousands of little flames flicker amongst the people. As one, we begin singing Silent Night. We raise our little candles high, the flames wavering and flickering on unseen winds.

Five thousand candles. In the deepest darkness, a single candle is a bright and welcome sight. Five thousand together light the room enough to work by. We are the light of the world. In some places, we are single flames shining bright and lonely in the darkness. In others, our many lights push the darkness away. But we are little candles still. Our flickering, wavering flames overcome the darkness around us, but compared to us, our Lord is as the sun, great and mighty, vanquishing all darkness. By His Holy Spirit our little flames shine for all the world to see, a pale little light for those who cannot see the sun.

I have, over the past year, begun developing a philosophy to life. A worldview, if you will, that gives a foundation for knowing how things work and how best to deal with life. I first started thinking about my understanding of the world when my bible study did a series called the Truth Project. Its goal was to explain the Christian philosophy.

What makes this remarkable was that this was the first time I had ever heard of philosophy explained as a holistic foundation from which to approach life. I had gotten the impression in school that philosophy was a pointless exercise in debating and explaining things that nobody in the real world thinks about and has no bearing on one's decisions. The Truth Project showed me what the point of a philosophy is, and why it's worth thinking about.

Namely, that everyone has a philosophy. That is, the set of foundational beliefs that drives a person's decisions. You may not know what those beliefs are, and they may not have an 'ism' attached to them, but somewhere, there is something that makes you choose option A over option B. This is what drives people. It explains why people do the things they do. Something which often takes some serious explaining.

With my philosophical foundation being Christianity, I start off with an assertion that directly contradicts society: people are basically evil. People put themselves first, seeking after their own desires and pleasures, and only secondly, if at all, think of others. However, most Westerners seldom think of fulfilling your desires and pleasures as evil. Didn't Maslow say that self-actualization was the highest form of being? But they never seem to think that most people self-actualize at the expense of others. If your goal is yourself, then what do you care if you have to rape to get sex, or steal to get money?

But of course, those are the exceptions, not the rule, right? If people are really evil, why do we have the idea of progressivism, the idea that people are good and working to make things better? Perhaps somebody should tell Darfur that they are basically good people. But here in America's favorite baseline for everyone in the world, we are raised with Christian morals and values. Which seek to curtail our evil desires. Morals which most people don't have. Americans simply don't think of murder as a form of advancement.

So I behave according to the idea that people are evil and only moral teachings (Christianity does not have a monopoly on these) keep people from being totally depraved. This means I should expect, as moral teachings are more and more removed from society, that Americans will become more selfish and more likely to harm others in seeking their desires, with the level of harm increasing. Which, anecdotally, seems to be the case.

Believing people to be selfish rather than altruistic gives rise to a number of interesting realizations. First, you can't really trust people. Or perhaps I should say you trust people to work in their interest and not yours. So if you want something from someone, be it honesty, goods, or help, you have to make it in their interest to give it to you. Else why should they bother? There are any number of ways to make someone help you, but payment and force seem to be the most popular. So I can take what I want by force, or simply buy it from you.

Force is easy to understand. I get what I want and you get to live. Or you're strong enough yourself to keep me from bothering you. Of course, I could get some buddies to tip things in my favor, splitting the loot, but then, so could you. This ends when one side wipes out the other, or 'buddies' grows into nations and everybody goes bankrupt with a military industrial complex.

Or we can come up with some other method of getting your cooperation, one that doesn't involve wasting time or resources trying to take...your time and resources. Such as payment. I convince you that it is more profitable to give me some of your stuff in exchange for some of my stuff, rather simply taking all your stuff outright. Perhaps at the end of the day, we are both better off with the trade than if we'd devoted time and resources to fighting and taking whatever is left.

But we still have to keep each other honest in our dealings (or at least honest enough). If you have overwhelming force, it's easy to keep me in line, but the idea was to not spend everything on fighting (so you can spend it on yourself, remember). You could stop trading with me and tell other traders I'm too dishonest to trade with. Or you could start trading dishonestly yourself. Of course, I could force you to trade with me, but now we're right back at using force to coerce good behavior. But we have changed the dynamic somewhat. You want to trade, because you know is often times more profitable than conquest. So you need strength of arms to prevent me from taking from you. But you only need enough strength to make it too expensive to be worth invading. As more people figure this out, those who trade will become richer, and stronger, than those who simply fight.

So from the biblical premise that all men are evil, selfish beings, we arrive at not only the foundational logic for capitalism, but also with maintaining a relatively strong fighting force to keep people from taking advantage of each other. This also reveals the fatal flaw of capitalism, that what's good for me is not necessarily good for you, and a strong arbiter is needed to prevent me from forcing deals that only go my way. The use of force, either to coerce good behavior, or for theft and conquest, is a natural outworking of men being evil, and capitalism cannot escape it.

But what of capitalism's big rival, socialism (called welfare in America)? The idea behind socialism is that each person contributes what they can, and each person takes what they need, regardless of how much they put in or how much they need. What you put in the pot is unrelated to what you take out. If people are good, with a natural inclination to share, this would actually work. But if people are evil, they will quickly realize they can simply not produce anything, but still take what they want. This will lead to poverty as production approaches zero, or someone will come in with a big stick and force people to produce. The historical examples of each should be obvious.

I will end with a prediction, since the point of a philosophy is to understand the world enough to make informed decisions. And while it might be many years, perhaps decades, before I'm proven right or wrong, it is worth writing down so that I and others can look back and take note.

As America implements more and more socialist policies, and by this I mean wealth redistribution by which the wealth of those who produce is given to those who do not, the per capita income will go down, and the GDP of America will shrink. Left unchecked, America will come to resemble a third world country, eventually unable to provide even for the basic needs of its people. This will happen quickly enough that people will remember living in the land of prosperity.

This will be stopped in one of two ways; either people realize socialism doesn't work and they go back to capitalism, at which point wealth flows back through America, or America becomes so poor that it can no longer force socialism, and America splits in rebellion and civil war, as each person or group tries to find wealth outside of socialism.

All this, just from believing people are evil.

About a month ago I started working on a Tau army for Warhammer 40K. I had been working on a fantasy army (the Empire) for several years and felt it was time to make a sci-fi force.

As I enjoy the painting and modeling that goes with the hobby as much as actually playing the game (I spend way more time painting than playing) I chose my army based off how it looks. Basically, which army had the coolest models. Several armies have awesome models, and I eventually went with the Tau since they are the most high tech, sci-fi, space models in the game. (After the Eldar, but one of my friends already plays that army.)


I have just finished my first batch of soldiers. These are Fire Warriors, the basic infantry of the Tau. They can be accompanied by a pair of Gun Drones. This is only part of a squad.


The color scheme is based of the old Ice Planet Lego Sets. So all the infantry will be painted like these fire warriors. I'm not sure about the battle suits, though I will probably be keeping the blue weapons and definitely the orange glowy things. The vehicles, I think, will be primarily blue instead of white.

I'll post more pics as I build the army. I have a lot of models now, but I probably only spend a few hours a week on them. So don't hold your breath.

For as long as I can remember, I have been an individualist. I've never gone along with the group for the sake of going along with the group. Even when I wanted to be a part of said group. In school, this was considered weird, and for many years I was the outsider.

The goal of school was to be popular, and many people worked very hard at it. I did not. I believed the teachers when they said the point of school was to learn and get good grades. So I tried very hard to learn and didn't bother much with popularity, since it didn't seem to have any bearing on learning. Which it didn't. Learning and being popular are two entirely separate, though not necessarily exclusive, goals of the grade school child.

But which one you choose to focus on says a lot about who you are. The popular kids worked very hard on their image. They wore the right clothes, had the right accessories, all of them looked good. There were no ugly popular people. But they also tended to be outgoing. They were the showoffs, charismatic, always putting themselves out front where people could see them. What was important was not what they did, but who they were. Their goal was status.

At the bottom of the social heap were the geeks. These were the people who never even realized they were supposed to climb the social ladder (as opposed to those who were simply bad at it). They were the doers. They worked very hard at learning new things, building, trying new ideas. The geeks had their side projects and hobbies, but generally neglected to develop their social skills or fashion sense. What was important was what they did, and who they were was ignored. Their goal was accomplishment.

So you end up with two classes of people, those to whom it is important to belong, and those to whom it is important to do. The belongers are collectivists. They think it's important to belong to a group, which means going along with that the group does, regardless of what it means. The doers are individualists. They think it's important to make the right decisions, regardless of what the group thinks.

In looking at biblical principle, I realize that people are made to do both: belong and do. Humans are made to have relationships, to belong to a group or family. But we are also made to do, to create, to 'subdue the earth.' So both individualists and collectivists are following their human nature. The problems occur when you place all your focus and importance on one or the other.

It has been my experience that individualists have less trouble doing both than collectivists. Individualists still have relationships; we still have our groups to which we belong. It may be harder for us to form relationships, having neglected social skills in pursuit of some project, but few individualists are complete loners.

Collectivists, on the other hand, seem to have trouble accepting doing as important. They want to be popular or fashionable, and they aren't concerned with whether it makes any sense. As long as it's what the group wants, they'll do it. Here, the skilled are those who can recognize which trends will become fashionable so they can be the first ones on it. These are the leaders of the collectivists, the most popular.

But notice something. Collectivists fashion (at least in politics) is always described as doing something. Saving the environment, reducing poverty, educating the poor. It's all phrased as some kind of worthy goal. Who doesn't want to reduce poverty? But what is important to the collectivists isn't the goal, it is being part of the group working on the problem. It doesn't matter if they are actually accomplishing anything, or even if they are actually causing more problems, as long as everyone can see that they are part of the group that's 'solving' the problem.

This is one of the reasons for the political clashes in America. Individualists argue results and methods, saying that this program isn't helping or is causing the problem it purports to solve. Collectivists argue that certain people aren't in the Problem Solving Group and therefore don't care about the problem or want it to continue. So individualists say collectivists aren't achieving their stated goal and collectivists say that individualists aren't joining the group that's working on the problem. Both sides have valid arguments, but neither side is correct.

The problem is that collectivists believe that if everyone comes together in one big unified group, the problem would be solved. I have seen no evidence that this belief is true. The problem can, in fact, usually be solved, and it often takes a number of people working together to achieve it. But the act of unifying itself is not a solution. It is a means to an end. Collectivists treat it as an end.

At achieving this end, collectivists are quite successful. At least among fellow collectivists. Individualists of course don't believe in unifying for the sake of unifying. They want some purpose for the group to be working towards. Hence why collectivists' movements are defined in terms of accomplishing something. That gets individualists to join the movement, even though the real goal is really to show how fashionable you are. Interestingly, this would put the individualists at the bottom of the group's hierarchy, since they are actually trying to solve the problem, rather than working their way up the group.

So long as both sides pretend the goal is to solve the problem, then collectivists win over time. That is, their approach becomes the prevailing view. This is because individualists are still out accomplishing things (sometimes in the name of some collectivist group) while collectivists themselves sell everyone on the idea that coming together is what solved the problem. But eventually, we will reach a point where there are not enough doers out doing stuff, and too many people just being a part of the group.

When this happens, society will stagnate. You will have a great many people working very hard at... something. People won't be able to say what effect they are having, but they can definitely say they are working at it. Production, and thus wealth, will decline as more people concern themselves more with organization than with creating. But individualists will never go away. There will always be some people, however marginalized, that refuse to go along with the group and instead go off and accomplish something. Remember that doing is as much a part of human nature as belonging. When the individualists can no longer support the collectivists, the group will simply collapse, and all the vaunted unity will disappear, to be replaced by a bunch of individualists who will preserve what they may and start rebuilding.

The other week I was teaching a co-ed bible study. We were going over 1 Peter. We had read the whole thing through several times, and were then stepping through it verse by verse, chapter by chapter. But we ran into trouble when we started going though chapter 3.

3 Wives, in the same way be submissive to your husbands so that, if any of them do not believe the word, they may be won over without words by the behavior of their wives, ²when they see the purity and reverence of your lives. ³Your beauty should not come from outward adornment, such as braided hair and the wearing of gold jewelry and fine clothes. ⁴Instead, it should be that of your inner self, the unfading beauty of a gentle and quiet spirit, which is of great worth in God's sight. ⁵For this is the way holy women of the past who put their hope in God used to make themselves beautiful. They were submissive to their own husbands, ⁶like Sarah, who obeyed Abraham and called him her master. You are her daughters if you do what is right and do not give way to fear.

Some of the women in the room did not appreciate being told they had to submit to their husbands. Note that this is a singles bible study and no one in the room actually had a husband yet that they could submit to. But they did not even like the idea. The men's reaction to this passage was along the lines of 'yeah, that's right!' which of course just made the women more offended.

Everyone there was a Christian, so I find it curious that people would disagree with one of God's commands. Not surprising, in fact I rather expected the reaction, but curious nonetheless.

So what is it about submission that so gets women's hackles up?

The root of the problem lies in the difference between how God ordered society and how America has ordered society. Here in America, post the feminist movement, women are considered equals, and often times betters, to men. Women either want to be in charge, or do not want men to be in charge, but in either case, women do not want anyone telling them what to do. It is anathema to our society to place limits on our behaviors. This is as true of men as women, but women have an organized movement to make sure nobody thinks it's acceptable to limit women.

This is in direct contrast to God's plan, which states that the wife submits to the husband, and the husband submits to God. Here, the husband is in charge of the family, responsible for its instruction and behavior. The wife is to assist in this, but follows the husband's lead in how to go about it.

You can see the conflict between the two approaches to family. The two are not reconcilable. There is no middle ground and can be no compromise. There is no half submission and half in charge. You can try running your family like a committee, but ultimately, when a decision has to be made and the husband and wife have two different ideas about it, one prevails and one is discarded. Whoever has the final say is the one running the family. This is not to say that two people can't talk things through, but still, at the end, a decision is made by someone and the other goes along with it.

So there is the reason for our curious response. We have been taught the world is a particular way, or at least should be a particular way. But we find in the bible that God made the world a different way. So Christians who have spent more time learning the world's ways than God's ways become flustered when the two contradict.