Easter, Ishtar and Passover

Easter fell on March 27th this year. As it turns out, Easter can fall on a day anywhere from March 23 until April 24. It is usually in late April, though.

The calculation for the Easter date depends on numerous factors so it's quite long and complex. It involves a series of tables and various steps, with each step requiring three or four calculations themselves. It's enough to make your head spin, especially if you have to make a computer program for it like I have. For those that want to inflict a little pain on the brain, I've included a couple of links at the end of this post that get into the history and the equations.

More interesting, there's some debate in Christian circles because the Easter celebration, complete with the painted eggs from the Easter Bunny, is derived from a pagan festival. This pagan festival celebrated the goddess Asherah. Rabits and eggs were both part of the celebration of fertility, hence the Cadbury eggs every year.

The whole thing sounds like the controversy over Hallowe'en but this time a major Christian celebration is tied to it. More than that, Jesus died just before the Hebrew Passover began, so why don't we celebrate Easter just before Passover?

One of the main reasons, apparently, is that the early Catholic church wanted to celebrate using Friday and Sunday. Since Passover follows the lunar calendar, it doesn't usually follow the Friday-Sunday weekend. So Passover usually falls in later April but the Easter calculation very rarely matches it. Throw in the idea that we Christians tend to create our own celebrations because we don't want to share the Hebrew ones and the reflection in the water gets a bit muddy.

So there's some food for thought as you munch away on leftover chocolate bunnies and marshmallow eggs.

Related Links:
Easter History & Equation
Easter Equation
Easter & Ishtar

Hot Enough For You?

We were having pizza tonight for dinner. My dad likes his food with some kick so he pulled out the hot sauce. To be specific, it was Frank's Red Hot XTRA HOT Cayenne Pepper Sauce. My dad sprayed it liberally over his two slices of pizza.

The two South Korean kids that are staying with us are also prone to using plenty of hot sauce on their food, so they did the same. John, one of the two kids, didn't just spray it, though. He poured it onto the pizza so that it was pooling on all of the pepperoni and then dripping off. He covered one of his slices and then my dad stopped him before he started to put sauce on the second one. My dad explained that it was hot and that he should try it first.

Y'all know what happened. John proceeded to put even more sauce on the second slice.

All in all, we had a pretty fun time at dinner this evening. My dad ordered John to finish eating both slices since he had ignored my dad's advice. John went through 6 full glasses of water and juice in a feeble attempt to wash the sauce down. (Of course, I know that milk or bread is better for that but I wasn't going to ruin John's fun.) John eventually finished both slices about twenty minutes later. He kept complaining that his skin was hot and there were tears in his eyes and snot dripping from his nose as he held back the flames. The prolonged process alternately included jumping around in pain and making bold statements that it wasn't so hot after all.

Good story, I just wish there was a moral for it.

Cinema Subterrain

This past Saturday night, Mike and I went to Cinema Subterrain in downtown London. It takes place in the basement below the L.A. Mood comic shop. They have a free evening of geek movies once a month and this time the theme was "Forgotten Heroes."

We opened with the original live-action Japanese Spider-Man pilot from 1978. It came complete with alien space ships, ropes for webs and a giant Spiderbot that looked a lot like the Voltron robots. We followed that up with various live-action superhero TV pilots, each worse than the last.

We capped the evening off with the 1994 Fantastic Four movie. There's a new big-budget FF movie coming out this summer, but this was done back in the day for almost no money. Bad effects all over the place, although the Thing was all right. Mr. Fantastic's stretching ability was mostly displayed via clothing draped over a long stick. This movie was never released because it was so bad so I never expected to see it. Lucky me, living in a town with such geekfests.

On an unrelated note, I'm having various guys over to my house for penny-ante poker this Friday night at 6:00 pm. If you're interested then just give me a call.

Current Events and Past History

In case you haven't heard, there's a half-hour show that is aired daily that re-enacts the ongoing Michael Jackson trial. I heard that it's a pretty good show, actually. The Toronto Star had a recent article about it. I saw a small bit about it on TV that had an interview with the Michael impersonator on the show and I tell you, that guy doesn't look much like Jackson when he dosn't have his costume on.

On an unrelated topic, I wrote this post back in the day regarding the different ways that my friend Mike and I have been trained to analyze and research. He lent me his book, "After the Fact: The Art of Historical Detection." It was cool to read the different methods that historians have to use to piece together past events. From hunting down evidence to posing the right questions to proposing motives, it's a pretty complex discipline. It's very different from my forte of strict computer logic and software design. I have a much greater respect and more understanding of what it takes to be a good historian now - and I'm glad Mike's studying it and not me. Heh.

Interestingly, a lot of the skills that the book helps to explain are the exact kinds of things I was referring to in this recent post. When we study the Bible, it's not enough to read the black-and-white text and leave it at that. There are numerous current and historical factors that effect our interpretation of the Bible. Reading the Bible, like studying history, isn't always the easiest thing to do.

A Logical Proof of the Existence of God

Full credit goes to William S. Hatcher for the following proof. As I mentioned here, I'm paraphrasing a presentation that he gave last week at UWO. This proof shows that there must be one unique uncaused thing from which everything else was caused. He applied the term 'God' to this concept and the two ideas mesh well but the actual proof is intentionally limited in what it tries to do.

Here's the complicated quote from Hatcher's book, "Minimalism."
P.0 V is composite.
P.1 Every existing phenomenon (B) is either cause (other-caused) or not caused (self-caused), and never both.
P.2 Suppose that A->B holds, where B is a composite. Then A->E also holds where E is any part of B (i.e., where either EεB or E(B ).
P.3 A->E cannot hold if E is a component of A.

Now let me break it down a bit more.
Proof #0: Something exists. Hopefully we can agree on this one. :)

Reality (V) represents the everything that ever was, is or will be. A phenonmenon (A, B, C, D)is the word that represents any old aspect of reality. All of reality is one big phenomenon, made up of a bunch of smaller ones.

Proof #1: Everything was caused by something else or by nothing else.

No assumption made either way. Maybe things can pop into existence on their own, maybe they can't. We just have a rule that clearly states this, plus the fact that it can't be both.

Proof #2: If A causes B, then it also causes everything inside of B.

B may be made up of a bunch of smaller pieces like E, F and G. If that's the case, then anything that causes B must also be the cause of E, F and G. For example, if we say that Homer and Marge Simpson created Bart then they also created Bart's hands and eyes.

Proof #3: A thing cannot be the ultimate cause of something inside it.

Bart Simpson canot be considered the cause of creating his own hands and eyes. Sure, he might be the reason that those hands and eyes aimed and threw a super-tomato at Principle Skinner but Bart himself didn't pop into existence from nothing. So what caused Bart? And what caused that cause? (I'm sure Matt Groening enters into the equation somewhere.)

Final Proof: Reality is made up of smaller pieces. If we compare reality to my example of Bart, then P.2 shows that reality can't create itself. To expand on Bart's example, it also means that anything that is made up of smaller pieces can't create itself - and the opposite must be that anything that pops into existence on it's own has to be one piece.

So G ('God' or 'the uncaused thing') can pop into existence on it's own and it can cause everything else in reality to appear, either directly or indirectly. All of reality boils down to one cause and it's God, who is outside of reality but can interact/has interacted with it.

So there you go, that's my version of Hatcher's proof of God's existence. His point is that to disprove or disagree with his conclusion, then you have to disagree with one of the first few ideas. Since each idea is straight forward, they're hard to disagree with. By all means, though, feel free to post your own comments or arguments.

The Existence of God

I joined three friends last week for a lecture at UWO with this same title. I had said beforehand that I wouldn't be surprised if it wasn't a Christian organization promoting it. It wasn't, it was run by a Baha'i group at school. They had invited a philosopher/mathematician by the name of William S. Hatcher from a university in Quebec.

He captured my interest when he started his talk by mentioning that computer languages and computer logic are based on Relational Logic that was developed around the 19th century. That was right up my alley, programming geek that I am.

He presented a lecture that he uses on tours that presented 'simple' logic that proves that God must exist. To be more clear, he wasn't saying that a Christian God exists or anything as specific as that. His proof actually showed that there must be one unique uncaused thing from which everything else was caused. He applied the term 'God' to this concept and the two ideas mesh well but the actual proof is intentionally limited in what it tries to do.

He threw in a lot of extra parts during his lecture, diverging onto tangents about the history of philosophy and the basis for certain theorems. As complicated as it was, I still managed to stay with him for the first two thirds of the talk and then I lost track towards the end. I bought his book so that I could clarify the details that I missed.

I'm going to write up a simplified version of his presentation in my next blog. Hopefully my interpretation will make some sense.

Article: My Brother, The Homeless Person

The Toronto Start had an article yesterday written by Glen Grunwald, the former long-time General Manager of the Toronto Raptors. It's entitled "My Brother, the Homeless Person." I've heard a lot about homelessness from the perspective of social workers and nurses like Richard, Abe and Dan, but I haven't heard much from the perspective of the relatives of homeless people. Grunwald provides a glimpse into his experience with his brother and how he tries to help.

He has one line that says "...I have sadly concluded that homelessness and mental illness are inextricably linked." There is a strong statistical correlation (if I remember correctly) but I remember some of the first things that Abe mentioned to me about this issue. Abe was saying that the crazy homeless person is the stereotype but that there are numerous other reasons that people are homeless. He gave examples of a successful businessman that was on the street for six months and things like that.

I'm not offering a conclusion on this, just a link to the article. To be honest, I'm a little cautious about posting this because I half expect someone to throw in a couple of comments cursing the church or the average Canadian for various reasons. We'll see how the responses go, I guess.

Three Changes (Part IV)

In January I first wrote about the three Bs that I wanted to accomplish: Big Brother, Budget and Basketball.

Big Brother has called most (if not all) of my character references now and talked about me with them for a while, between 5 minutes and half an hour each. I'm just waiting for them to contact me so that we can get the ball rolling.

February was the first month in which I had a budget. I'm proud to say that I stayed under my budget (generous as it was) and put a nice chunk of money into paying off my van. It was tough when I was in Florida because I was at the comic shop just aching to spend another fifty dollars (US) and I decided not to for the sake of my budget. Heh.

And finally, I managed to track down the city basketball program. I found a reference to it in The Spectrum on Page 21. It costs $41.00 for me since I live outside of town and I'll get to play men's basketball every Monday from 8:30 pm to 10:00 pm at Lucas. It starts in the first week of April and runs for three months. GTA (my church) is also preparing to organize their baseball teams again and I will be joining that as well. I wasn't able to join the baseball team last year because we were in the middle of moving to the new house but I look forward to it this year, even if I will be on the third-tier team.

Related: Part I, Part II & Part III

Context Is Key

As in all the congregations of the saints, women should remain silent in the churches. They are not allowed to speak, but must be in submission, as the Law says. If they want to inquire about something, they should ask their own husbands at home; for it is disgraceful for a woman to speak in the church. 1 Corinthians 14:33-35

A woman should learn in quietness and full submission. I do not permit a woman to teach or to have authority over a man; she must be silent. 1 Timothy 2:11-12

Our 'modern church' tends to mark these two passages as inapplicable. We explain that these verses were intended for the churches of that time in the culture of that day and that they do not necessarily apply to us here in North America in the 21st century.

We're studying 1 Corinthians 14 in my cell group and a common question has been raised: If our 'modern' churches disregards these two verses, what other parts of the Bible should we ignore? Alternatively, why don't we dismiss other instructions or commands in the Bible in the same way?

A key part of the answer for the above two passages is the context of the chapter. What other topics are being addressed at the same time? What was the purpose?

In the case of the first passage, Paul wants to have order in the congregation; to limit the number of people that will speak in tongues during any one meeting; to have hymns, revelation and teaching all together. In the case of the second passage, Paul wants men everywhere to lift up holy hands in prayer; women to dress modestly; to intercede for kings and those in authority.
The context of both of these chapters is not about Sin Not or Do Not lists. It's not about commands for everyone. It's Paul's personal leadership for the people he is speaking to. In the first case it's the Corinthian church since they were getting a little out of control during their meetings. In the second case he's advising his protege Timothy and giving him advice. The way that we interpret these other things can help inform the meaning of the above verses.

When I was living at my townhouse in London with four roommates, we had a certain rule: Do not allow friends to sleep over night unless you have asked the other roommates at least twenty-four hours in advance. If you look at the black and white of it, that's just a straight, incontrovertible regulation.

In practice, though, it wasn't hard and fast at all. Exceptions were made many times. Some of us cared about this rule more than others and it generally wasn't a big deal. When I moved into the basement of my current house with my brother, this rule went out the window. The rule came into play because of specific circumstances that came up because five people were living in a four bedroom house. Those issues do not apply to my new house.

This rule change isn't without reason, right? A new situation means some rule changes. I'm sure you all understand exactly what I'm getting at, which is that the Bible has to be understood in context as well. Some rules apply to everyone, some apply to Paul's audience only.

The trigger point comes from comments that were raised in posts like this back in November 2004. Why can't verses denouncing homosexuality be dismissed as advice to the culture of the time? The question was phrased otherwise in my cell group: Why do we accept the command not to murder if we can so easily dismiss other parts of the Bible?

Again, context is key. Likewise, no one is dismissing verses out of hand with no consideration and the first two passages are not dismissed 'so easily.' It does require a fair amount of research, discussion and thinking so it's not a flippant conclusion.

Regarding the specific argument about homosexuality, this issue is referred to in passages like 1 Corinthians 6:9, Leviticus 18:22 and Leviticus 20:13. I'm not here to denounce homosexuality but you can feel free to look at the context of those verses and those chapters. How does that compare to the first two chapters that I referenced in this post?

I actually started to write this back on November 29, 2004 in response to the blog post that I linked to above. I've held off finishing it because this can be a tricky subject, especially with so many different view points around. I'm not here to draw a line in the sand, I just want to explain my own conclusions. (And I'm not even pretending that my arguments represent anything close to full-out textual criticism.) I know that this kind of question can bother Christian and non-Christian alike but hopefully this discussion proves useful.

Weekend Recap

Well, that was certainly a weekend and a half. Or maybe half a weekend. I'm not sure if my glass if half full or half empty right now but I've always been an optimist.

I've posted the 'moral of the story' in the comments for this story.

The annual business meeting at church yesterday was the most entertaining annual meeting that I've ever attended. As they introduced the speaker for each department in the church they projected their name and a picture of that person - which was actually a picture of some celebrity. Various puns and jokes were made and it helped to liven up the meeting.

They also showed artists' renditions of possible designs for the new church that GTA will eventually be building on Sarnia Road. Apparently a key issue for the city planners is water reclamation on this property so it has to have some sort of pond system. The design keys into that with water falls and small rivers at the front of the church with mostly-glass exteriors for the building, the idea being that you would like to be outside in the park area as much as inside.

The rendition of the foyer was wide and tall with an impressive view of the outside through the glass walls. It had a big globe with a focus on world missions, which tied into future goals that Pastor Rick mentioned. The church included a Starbucks style cafe to encourage mingling, which we already do in a more limited way at our present location.

The sanctuary was a hexagonal design, with five sides around the stage rather than the usual oyster-shape. The idea is that we can fit more people into less square footage while allowing everyone to feel closer to the front.

Finally, the children's area was described as a "Disneyworld kind of feel." The rendition included full out themes built into the walls and furniture and it included various jungle gyms and whatnot. The idea here was that "this is where dreams are made." George Barna has a statistic that states that most people develop their worldview by the age of 13, so this design keys into developing the children's dreams and inspiring them.

These were merely early-stage artists' renditions and the design may be quite different in the end. They wanted to dream big in the earliest stages and work backwards from there to deal with practical issues and necessary changes. They didn't want to copy existing buildings to being with but they admit that we'll probably make mistakes during this entire process of designing, building and moving to the new church. No one's pretending that we're doing something that hasn't been done hundreds and thousands of times before by other churches.

The key danger, they said, was that the church can build you instead of you building the church. You can end up focusing on what we'll do in the new place without properly devoting all of our current resources to our current location. We need to be the best church we can be now as well as in the future.

Tongues

I would like to write down a quick recap about the topic of speaking in tongues. I don't intend to initiate a theological debate so don't be surprised if I don't reply to specific criticisms of my explanations, although I hope this proves useful to some people. I will, of course, discuss this further if there are questions.

There are two kinds of tongues:
1) Personal: For our own use. It's okay if someone hears us speaking in personal tongues but they're not meant for anyone else.

Purpose:
a) A sign of baptism in the Holy Spirit, and some (like me) would say that it's a required sign.
b) "Edifying" or building ourselves up. (1 Cor. 14:4)
c) Allowing the Holy Spirit to pray what we don't know, speaking mysteries. (1 Cor. 14:2)
d) We're made of body, soul and spirit. It's easy enough to communicate with God through action or with our minds, but tongues allows our spirits to do so as well.

2) Public: For the sake of giving a message from God to others. Much of 1 Corinthians 14 deals with this in the context of proper use in a group setting. The key is that public tongues are useless unless they're accompanied by an interpretation in plain language. Public tongues should also be tested by others (1 Cor. 14:29)

Purpose:
a) Prophecy to church. Serves the various purposes that prophecy does like revelation, encouragement, conviction, foretelling.
b) Edifying or building the church up. (1 Cor. 14:4)
c) A sign to unbelievers. (1 Cor. 14:24-25)

There are two kinds of languages of tongues and two kinds of interpretation.
1) Tongues can use a heavenly language that we cannot understand by our own skill, or tongues can use another earthly language that the speaker does not know.
2) The interpretation of public tongues can be more of a vague Spirit-led thing or it can be a direct translation because the interpreter speaks the earthly language that is being used.

Two potential problems with public tongues:
1) No interpretation may be given. The person speaking in tongues may be mistaken or there may be a person that was supposed to give an interpretation and they did not.
2) The interpretation that is given could be wrong.

Follow the way of love and eagerly desire spiritual gifts. (1 Cor. 14:1)

I Am So Smart S-M-R-T

George Burt, a guy I know from the dBase programming community, told this story recently:

When I was 16 or so (1977), I went with a couple friends to Bush Gardens in Tampa (about 30 miles from my home). Then, like now, I don't appreciate being told what to do, unless it makes sense to me. Don't run into the street. That makes sense. Changing lanes as soon as you see a "Merge left. Lane ends in 1500 feet" makes no sense, so I wait until I get to the end, then merge in front of all the idiots worry that they "won't be able to get over." True, there is the risk that I will get stuck forever trying to merge, but in almost 30 years of driving, it hasn't happened yet.

So now I approach the monkey cage that is ("was" actually, it is no longer there; I am using the future conditional pluperfect subjunctive for effect)... I approach the monkey cage that entertains people waiting to get on the monorail. The cage has about 20 very active spider monkeys. Plus, people feed them, so they paid careful attention to me as I approached. The cage is made of a rubber coated very fine chain link fence. The mesh is small, but just large enough so that the monkeys can get stick their tiny hands through the fence.

Now, here is part that challenged my intelligence. The cage bore a large, prominant sign "DO NOT GIVE THE MONKEYS YOUR KEYS!". Now, normally, it never would have occurred to me to give a monkey my car keys, but a sign like that gets an intelligent person to thinking. Clearly a monkey could grasp your keys through fence, but the mesh was much too small to pull the keys through. But, in addition to being intelligent, I am cautious and prudent. So first I let the monkey grab one of my fingers. If the animal's strength is sufficient to tear it off and leave me with a nub, then they might be able to pull a set of keys through the fence. Just as I suspected, the animal has some strength, but not nearly enough. I stand back, think about it, move to hand the eager monkey my keys and then stop and think about it some more. I am very cautious, but heck, the sign was insulting to me.

Finally, with great conviction and confidence, I hand the monkey my keys, but I am ready to grab them back the moment they are misused. The monkey instantly drops the keys and with a practiced motion snatchs them through a one inch gap at the bottom of the cage.

Acknowledgement:
This story is quoted as it was posted in the dbase.watercooler newsgroup on February 22, 2005 under the title "Monkey Cage and Bush Gardens." The author, George Burt, is a regular in the dBase programming community so I'm pretty sure this is a real story and not an urban myth.

Walking Along a Road

I was walking along a road one day and I came across three blacksmith shops lined up next to one another at the edge of a town. The first shop had large, ornate signs and banners and it was larger than the other two shops. There were several customers filing in and out of the shop and each one appeared to be quite wealthy. As I passed I noticed that the two people entering the shop each had broken swords.

I looked at the second shop as I continued down the road. It had a few simple wooden signs indicating a cheap cost for all of its items. There was also a pile of rusted armour out front, which I thought was odd. I saw two children playing up ahead and I noticed that they were both using armour that appeared to have come from that pile.

As I walked past the last shop I noticed only one small sign near the door with the word "Closed." I walked up to one of the children that I had seen playing and, while I dodged his swinging sword, I asked why that shop was closed during the middle of the day. The young lad responded in gasps while he continued fighting with his friend. "That shop is never open. The smithee only makes armour for his friends. Some people say that he makes the best armour, though."

And with that, the child continued to play fight and I continued down the road.

Related Stories: Part I