apologies and euclid (edit...other one was kinda lame)

apologies for the scarcity of posts. since returning from Michigan, it's been some running around, trying to figure out what it is that we should be doing, as well as some typing up of my mission trip journal, which i think i could get up in a reasonable two days or perhaps by tomorrow, and there will probably be two versions again - a spiritual light and heavy.

as far as news go, i have about three or four weeks until moving in at OU. MACCSR is about a week and a half after school starts, and i am anticipating something amazing. our youth pastor is one of the three main youth speakers, and he or our church is in charge of the worship, which means that i have been blessed with the invite to learn bass and join the worship team. Mike's birthday is tomorrow and then he is headed out of town for about two weeks, but when he gets back, we're all going to start getting together and playing. so truthfully, i've been thinking about MACCSR more than i have OU, but OU should be pretty amazing.

and so that i don't leave you with just a bunch of news and updates, i wrote this a while ago and found it on my computer:

truth is my anti-drug. don't need drugs. need truth.

from a book entitled "what we believe but cannot prove":

"Einstein said, 'you must learn to distinguish between what is true and what is real.' science is a relationship between what we can represent and think about and what's actually 'out there;' it's an extensions of good mapmaking. when we guess in science, we are guessing about approximations and mappings to languages, not guessing about 'the truth' - and we are not in a good state of mind for doing science if we think we are 'guessing the truth' or 'finding the truth.' this is not at all well understood outside science, and unfortunately some people with science degrees don't seem to understand it either...[after stating a conjecture]...this still seems like a good guess to me - but 'truth' has nothing to do with it."

i want to stick away from scientific, logical arguments, just because i don't want to battle theory. there are smart people out there and some might agree with me and some might crush me with their intellect, and the argument gets to be about the argument sometimes and not about truth at all. it's just who can convince the other, and usually it seems like no one ends up being changed or convinced; it's just people trying to prove to the others that they are smarter or better because they are in the right.

mike was talking, a while back, how two people can be in a debate and argue convincingly for both sides and how the all-too-common case can be that both are wrong - neither is right. we have ways of thinking of things, sometimes black and white ways, and since these ways are limited to our own perceptions or even intuitions, to make a claim of truth would be guessing at things so infinitely huger than yourself and your own understanding.

[in the account of Joshua's Battle of Jericho, Joshua is met by the Commander of the army of the Lord right before they choose to enter into battle. Joshua, frightened, "said to Him, 'Are You for us or for our adversaries?' So He said, 'No.'" i like this because it shows how we truly look at things as for us or against us, or what kind of significance or relevance does this have for me? and when the Commander of the Army of the Lord answers No, it ends up a very appropriate answer to the question]

bertrand russell learned geometry as a little kid, but when he learned that it was founded on euclid's four axioms - axioms that could not be proven and relied strictly on the validity, or truth, of our perceptions - he was outraged and didn't want to learn geometry anymore. the foundations to geometry are not proven and were only there because they make sense or appeal to our views. well, people wanted to call geometry true. bertrand russell didn't, because he wondered what would happen if our perceptions of truth were not true at all - just because a different kind of geometry (than one based on Euclid's axioms) seemed impossible, unimaginable, and completely wrong to us, didn't mean that it couldn't be truth. so now we have non-euclidean geometry, which is incredibly hard to think about for me, because it just takes out the axioms/foundations and says things like "two parallel lines can cross" and that there is a chance that a straight line cannot be drawn from two points. the argument is that what we understand has little effect on what is truth.

one of my friends said that us trying to live Christian lives means that we only get to see glimpses of the painting of God's plan. we don't see the entirety of the painting, we just see little spots of it, tiny portions where we fit in that we can actually comprehend. this is true. people like me get mad at God because we don't understand Him. because we can't package Him and sell Him and control Him. because tragedy happens and people die and His ways are so high that the path to Him is not only a narrow path, but it seems impossibly narrow. but if we could know some of the things that go on, some of the promises that have been made, some of the truths that are going on behind the scenes, we wouldn't care. in fact, our whole perceptions would change. instead of the path being an impossibly narrow path, we would realize it is indeed very possible. we would realize that as long as we never gave up on it, we wouldn't be able to help but find the end and finish the race. we would realize we need for God to be controlling and loving on us instead of our own desires for us to be gods and for the authority to manipulate the real God.