Thought Loose

Sustainable Underwear

2011-12-12T08:04:00.000-08:00


Another blogger of homemade underwear

I have now sewn myself two pairs of underwear from the fabric of old T-shirts. One is lavender, the other pink and white stripes. They are much more colorful than my traditional white ones. I need to sew myself a few more as my white ones are reaching the end of their useful life.

I got the idea for sewing my underwear from a seamtress' website where she was finding new uses for old favorite T-shirts, particularly those with great slogans. After a bit of research, I decided to follow the instructions of ripping apart an old favorite pair of underwear and using them as a pattern for the new pair. ehow After carefully cutting apart the pieces I discovered that the front and back did not have left/right symmetry. The curve out of the back corresponded to the curve in of the front and visa versa.

I've had a bit of challenge with the elastic. With the first pair I tried to follow the example of the traditional store bought pair I pulled apart. I got wide elastic for the waist and thinner stuff for the leg holes. I debated whether to make a separate band of fabric to cover over the elastic but decided against it. I stitched the elastic on to the pantie and then folded the elastic under and stitched it again so fabric covered the band. I decided not to do the leg elastic for the second pair and as long as I don't wear tight fitting pants the lack of elastic is not a problem.

I have not quite figured out how long to make the elastic for the waist. I measured my waist and cut to the right length. I needed to stretch the elastic some when sewing it to the pantie, but apparently I used too much elastic because it doesn't pull as tightly around my waist as I would like.

I may decide to find a different way of securing the waist. Elastic in small quantities is not cheap. I hate the fact that the cost of the elastic makes homemade underwear almost as expensive as store bought ones. But my desire to make homemade underwear was not motivated primarily by saving money. I want to change how I get my clothes so as to reduce my environmental footprint.

Reuse is a great way to reduce my environmental footprint. The environmental footprint of new clothes is huge. Cotton is farmed using large amounts of irrigation. One notable example of cotton irrigation misuse is the Caspian sea. It is much smaller today because so much river water has been diverted to irrigate cotton fields. Irrigation in general is not a practice that is good for the environment. It increases the salinity of the soil thus increasing the amount of irrigation necessary to grow crops. It decreases aquifers. Water from aquifers is useful in cases of drought, but used as a general practice is harmful.

Cotton is grown using lots of pesticides and herbicides. After it is grown, it is bleached with more chemicals. There is some organic cotton out there. However, there is not enough demand to bring down the price with economies of scale. Eventually, I would like to buy bolts of organic cotton to make my clothes, but at the moment I am focusing on figuring out how to reuse what I have.

My goal is to turn all my old T-shirts into underwear. Then I want to turn all my old turtlenecks into T-shirts. The parts of turtlenecks that wears out the quickest are the cuffs and the collar. If I cut those off I essentially have a T-shirt. I figure if I turn the turtleneck inside out and restitch the seams the out facing fabric will look nearly new; the T-shirt will fit better and more snugly, making it easier to layer under other turtlenecks. If I bought organic cotton to make turtlenecks and then converted the worn turtlenecks into T-shirts, and the worn T-shirts into underwear, then the extra cost of buying organic cotton would be spread over three garments instead of one.

Making my own clothes reduces my carbon footprint. Most of the world's cotton is grown in the USA. It is then shipped overseas to be spun, woven, and then made into garments. Each of those processes could require material to be shipped to a different country. By reusing old garments to make new ones, I am reducing the amount of material that needs to get shipped around the world. When I get around to buying my own organic cotton fabric I'm hoping to buy something where all the spinning and knitting has been done locally so that the carbon footprint of the fabric is significantly smaller than that of a ready-made garment.

Making my own clothes takes away jobs from poor people in other countries. I have mixed feelings about that. On one hand I want people to have jobs and recognize that my purchases give people jobs. But on the other hand, I feel like the conditions under which those people have their jobs is not good. By purchasing ready-made clothes I feel like I am supporting a system which takes advantage of other people.

The economic argument for trade benefiting both parties does not seem to apply here because the exchange of goods is not coming out of a surplus of local resources, but out of a surplus of cheap labor and subsidized fossil fuels. If fossil fuels were not subsidized, it would not be economical to ship resources around the world. The reasons there is a surplus of cheap labor has to do with how unfair trading practices have undermined local industry; how local governments do not protect the welfare of the worker; and how education is significantly lacking in some parts of the world. Subsidized fossil fuels have only exacerbated these problems.

I don't feel like I have influence to change system structures which cause people to work in clothing sweat shops. But by entering into their world by making my own clothes, I can better empathize with their situation and reduce my small contribution to the system that binds them.

Earth's Fever Sends Thailand Floating

2011-10-31T23:39:00.000-07:00

In January of 2009 I had the great fortune to take a trip to South East Asia. As the plane began to descend, I could see a patch work of green fields across a great low lying plain whose elevation was not much above the ocean. Winding between the endless acres of rice fields came the great Mekong river shackled in the middle of the plain by the huge city of Bangkok spiked with sky scrapers and ancient temples. From the modern airport terminal we boarded a large air-conditioned tour bus that took us past miles of monoculture managed western style. Our guide explained how snails were infesting the crops, and the birds that normally ate the snails were not being able to keep up, but were congregating on the few groves of trees left. Their large concentrations were denuding the trees, causing a mess and a nuisance for the farmer instead of being helpful to him. Now that the fields were managed by large tractors, the land owners did not need the hundreds, maybe thousands, of peasants who had previously worked the land for generations.

Where did those people go? What were they doing now? What was not said could be seen along the edges of towns. Families living in corrugated metal sheds, often times without running water or electricity, whose children would surround us and beg us to buy their postcards, or other handicrafts for a dollar or more. A hand to mouth existence vulnerable to the vicissitudes of Wall Street in currency manipulation, collapse of the economy and it's affects on tourism, lack of social and health infrastructure, and the ever present danger of environmental catastrophe.

These people didn't have health insurance, home insurance, an retirement investments, or savings in a bank. If disaster struck and took their meager house away, they had no way to replace it. is. I should say “when” instead of “if”. And the “when” that I anticipated in 2009 is “now” in 2011. There are record floods in Thailand. The 4% increased moisture in the air due to global warming is coming down in record monsoon rains. People who are used to annual floods are being driven from their homes by extreme inundation. Their very existence being threated by the failure of local and global crops.

Four percent may not seem like an insignificant increase, but let me ask you to consider your temperature. In order to keep you functioning at your best, your body regulates it's self to be approximately 98.6F. If your body's temperature increased 4% from it's normal 98.6F to 102F you would be very sick indeed.

Our planet is just as sick. Every natural area is under duress from mankind's indiscriminate use of resources. Every area of our world is becoming a desert. Oceans are losing their life due to excessive fishing, fossil fuel fertilizers, and carbon dioxide acidification. Forests, wetlands and prairies are disappearing under ax and plow, roof and pavement. The remaining soil is eroding. The plant and animal diversity is rapidly decreasing. The birds have no place to nest or food to feed their young. What flies through the air are man made machines leaving behind trails of destruction. Each trail of death linked to our wanton use of fossil fuels; carbon dioxide belched out at increasing rates as we rush about our feverish ways trying to get more.

The earth is sick of too much carbon dioxide. Our planet's atmosphere needs to be regulated to have no more than 350ppm of carbon. But as of September 2011, our atmosphere has 389ppm of carbon. That is 39 parts per million more than it should be for the well being of the earth. 39ppm is an 11% increase over what it should be. Just think, if your body temperature increased 11% to 109F, you'd be dead! The earth has a dangerous fever that is killing people. It's killing people with extreme weather events. In a place that has adapted to live with floods, recent extreme flooding has killed more than 370 people. As famine hits the vulnerable Thai people, many more will die a long excruciating death.

When I came home from my trip to South East Asia and drove my car to the grocery store filled with food shipped in from thousands of miles away, I remembered the faces of the children living on the edges of life -children who had no hope of a future if I continued to use fossil fuels. When set food on my table for my children to eat, I thought of the mothers who would not be able quench their children's cries for food, their crops having been washed away. Could that someday be me? Is my part of the world imperious to extreme weather events? Will the price of food become so high that I cannot afford to feed my children? What hope is there for the future if we continue to force the fever higher with our continuous use of fossil fuels?

As I read about the plight of those in Thailand, I am haunted by the images of vulnerability I saw in 2009, haunted by the fact that I contribute to the fever that is killing our world. The ghost of Jacob Marley that warns me to change my ways and I cannot send away by sending money to some relief organization to help in time of crisis. The tears of the Thai cry out whenever I chose some fossil fueled entertainment. Should my pleasure come at the cost of another's survival? I choke on my 'let them eat cake' attitude and pedal my bicycle, I buy organic, I look for local.

Yet, I'm like Frodo, bound up the web of oil unable to break free. Every purchase is stained with the blood of oil. I cannot get out of bed in the morning without incurring the burning of fossil fuels. My very existence depends upon the thing that destroys me. In the midst of Mordor I need a Samwise community that will cut through the threads that bind me; a community that cannot be seduced by the power that oil offers. One whose economic life is not prey to oil's poison. Together we will bear the powerful ring of oil oligarchy's control to it's destruction, so that it's watchful eye will no longer penetrate the halls of government and threaten the very survival of those who live on earth. Our mission faces impossible odds and yet there is no other choice for hope. We must persist.

We must chose to put one foot in front of the other. We must chose to forgo the easy shire life for the rocky hills of sustainability. We must venture into new territory where our only guide is the gaunt Gollum figure of our past -primitive, hunting, gathering, with the deformed desire of 'Precious'- and form a new life of contentment, forgiveness, and generosity. And when at last our desire for more is returned to the forge from whence it came, the powers that be will shatter, earth's fever will break, and a new day will dawn.

Occupy Wall Street and the Unforgiving Servant

2011-10-20T11:22:00.000-07:00

pic found on www.comicvine.com

Watching what is going on with OccupyWall Street has reminded me of a parable Jesus told of theunforgiving servant. Below I have retold Matthew 18: 21-35 using moderncharacters/situations that people in the USA would be familiar with.

Then Petercame to Jesus and asked, “Lord, how many times shall I forgive mybrother or sister who sins against me? Up to seven times?”

Jesus answered, “I tell you, notseven times, but seventy-seven times.

“The Kingdom of Heaven would be like if Uncle Sam requiredannual and quarterly reports of the corporations and citizens who didbusiness within his country. When the taxes were due, some largecorporations who should have paid millions of dollar visited theMinister of Finance. The corporations were broke and begged not tobe sent to bankruptcy court where the company would be dissolved, allthe employees would lose their jobs, and any assets would beliquidated to repay the corporation's creditors.

“The CEOs wrote personal checks to Uncle Sam's favoritere-election campaign and begged the Minister of Finance, 'Be patientwith us, and we will pay back everything!' After some discussionUncle Sam took pity on the thousands of employees and constituentswho would suffer from the dissolution of the companies, andunderwrote the companies' debt, leaving the companies free tocontinue to do business.

“But when the CEOs left the Minister of Finance and went back totheir corporations, they began a series of lay-offs and had theiraccountants notify them of anyone who owed the company money. Theyordered their attorneys and debt collectors to foreclose onproperties and reclaim assets that were owed to the company even ifit meant forcing someone to live in a homeless shelter.

“The debtors begged the lenders, “Be patient with me, theeconomy is bad. In time I will get a new job and I will pay itback.”

“But the corporations refused. Instead, the attorneys and debtcollectors brought the debtors before the courts, seized what assetsthey could and forced the debtors into bankruptcy, ruining theirability to borrow for many, many years.

“When other citizens saw what was happening they becameoutraged. When told their representatives how upset they were, therepresentatives didn't solve the problem. So the citizens gatheredtogether to protest. They protested everywhere the corporations hadpower. More and more citizens sympathized with the protesters suchthat when elections came none of the old representatives gotre-elected. All the contributions of the corporations had no effect.

“Then Uncle Sam called in the CEOs of the corporations. 'Youwicked business men,' he said, 'I underwrote your millions of debtbecause you begged me to. Shouldn't you have had mercy on yourfellow debtors just as I had on you?' In anger Uncle Sam handed theCEOs and the corporations over to the courts to be prosecuted to thefull extent of the law.

“This is how my heavenly Father will treat each of you unlessyou forgive your brother or sister from your heart.”

There may be some theological angstwith equating Uncle Sam with the heavenly Father, however, I'm trying to follow the pattern that Jesus set forth in equating God with a King and since thegeneral scenario is very similar, the moral of the story is thesame. I have framed Jesus' parable in modern language with moderncharacters because I want the reader to see how grace and mercy fitsinto their everyday real experience, albeit a rather grand societal reality. I believe the modified parablealso clarifies the present day future outcome of those who aren't practice mercy.

The Occupy Wall Street movement couldbecome a movement consumed with anger and revenge, or it could seekjustice and mercy. To the extent that the movement remains peacefuland seeks justice and mercy, I believe that a lot of good will comefrom it. This is a difficult time for many people. Economies gothrough natural cycles of boom and bust. But through it all we needto have mercy whether we are a big corporation or a sole individualon unemployment. The mercy we show towards others is the mercy wewill receive. Those who seek justice without any mercy, willexperience justice without mercy. Seeking justice without mercyimplies that the seeker is perfect, but there is no one who doesn'tneed mercy. Justice without mercy is harsh and will ultimately killus.

There is a lot of fear going aroundright now. Some of it is legitimate, other fears are irrational. Part of the fear is based on who is going to lose out in this debtgame of musical chairs. Mankind's justice takes an eye for an eye.It makes the offender pay through deprivation. And so, since we areall guilty we pass the buck just like Adam and Eve while the musiccontinues to play. But eventually it's not possible to pass the buckany more, the music stops, and we have to own up. We have deludeourselves into thinking that as long as we have a place to sit, we can go onplaying the game. But the truth is we need to start playing adifferent game; a game that adds chairs rather than takes them away. We need to start practicing the justice of God; a justice that givessight to the blind and causes the lame to walk.

When we seek to love others the way Godloves us, then we won't be living in fear any more. When we startgiving others mercy, we will start experiencing the grace of God. AsGod's justice becomes the new norm, a new day will have dawned; theold will have passed away. The fear of death, and debt, anddestitution will be gone forever. And the American Dream can be a reality for everyone.

Solar Beans and Bread

2011-07-21T19:11:00.000-07:00

We have a heat wave where the temperatures are reaching above 90F every day. I am very thankful for the coolness my geothermal heatpump is providing me. But I hate to tax the system by cooking. Two years ago I made a solar cooker, a simple insulated box with a glass lid and large reflectors on the side. I used it periodically until one night I forgot that I had been cooking granola and left it out over night. The raccoons tipped it over broke the glass and enjoyed my granola. The cooler outside temperatures and the waning daylight hours discouraged me from making immediate repairs that this intense heat has motivated me to do.

I have decided to log my cooking results so that maybe I can start to get a handle on the cooking qwerks and times necessary for a solar cooker. In many ways I imagine using a solar cooker to be similar to an old wood stove in that the heat is not regular or uniform, but without all the ash and smoke. Getting the right results will always be an art form, but if I can add some scientific rigor to it, I might be able to do so with a little more regularity.

Day 1, Pinto beans: 1 ½ cup dry soaked close to two days, cooked in two separate sealed quart jars covered by at least an inch of water from about 10am to 5:30pm. Started cold out of the refrigerator. Ended at 180F after having been in the shade for a bit. Outside temperature reached 98F.

Day 2, Bread: baked in two glass loaf pans that had been pre-heated by the solar cooker. Solar cooker was started warming about 9:30am. Baked bread from 11am to about 2:30pm. Average outside temperature at time of cooking was 96F. Bread cooked from the top down. Inside the pan the bread was very moist. Hard crust on outside. The bread slid down while cooking as the pans were tilted.

Day 2, Refried beans: some of the pinto beans cooked from the previous day were put back in the afternoon sun with chopped onions, green peppers, garlic, and spices in a sealed quart jar. Some water had been drained. The beans and green pepper started out cold from the refrigerator, the onions and garlic room temperature of 80F. The outside temperature reached 100F. They cooked for about 3hrs or less. When we brought them in we decided to add the remaining refrigerated beans and some additional spices. They were cooked on the stove top to remove excess water for twenty minutes.

I was very pleased that the pinto beans cooked soft in the sun. The last time I tried to cook pintos I had to cook them additionally in the house before they were soft enough to eat. Pintos are some of the longest cooking of the beans. I think I could improve cook time by not refrigerating the soaking beans. When beans soak they let off gas. I wonder if I soaked them in a sealed quart jar I could the bean gas possibly add pressure which might reduce cook time. Canning jars are designed to keep pressure out. What kind of jar design would keep pressure in? What is the most gas soaking beans give off? I am wondering if I soak them in a sealed jar the sun, if that would kill bacteria? Do I need to change the water between soaking and cooking?

The top of the bread seemed done after an hour of cooking but the inside was not when it was taken out of the loaf pan. The bread seemed to cook from the top down. Glass loaf pans are great when baking in the oven as they provide an even cooking surface/container. But considering how bread baked in the solar cooker with a very thick crust on top and a very moist bottom, I'm thinking that a thin walled form or no form at all might be better. Cooking on a board might be better too as it would absorb the extra moisture. I've thought about venting the oven to reduce moisture, but then I would also lose heat. And I definitely need to find some way to keep the bread level. The problem is I have to keep adjusting the tilt of the oven to the angle of the sun. One solution is I could limit bread cooking to the time of day when the sun was at it's height, particularly if bread didn't take too long to cook.

Hosannah!

2011-04-18T10:55:00.000-07:00


Image borrowed from http://blog.adw.org

Sunday was Palm Sunday the beginning of Holy Week. It is the day we remember how the Jews celebrated Jesus coming to Jerusalem riding on a donkey. They carpeted the road with their jackets and waved flags of palm branches as he rode past. They were sure that he was the Messiah and was going to save them from the oppressive rule of the Romans. They shouted “Hosanna” which means 'God save us'. And when Jesus saw Jerusalem he cried. He cried because even though the people asked to be saved, Jesus knew that in their hearts they would reject him. They would continue in their power hungry ways instead of turning the other cheek. He knew that Jerusalem was on the brink of destruction and without true repentance it was going to be destroyed.

The world is now also on the brink of destruction. Every pound of carbon we put into the atmosphere brings us one step closer to our demise. A demise that will cause severe famine, catastrophic storms, and permanent flooding of coast lands. A demise that will disrupt ecosystems, result in massive extinctions, wide spread plagues and severe pestilences. In our churches we shout “Hosanna”, 'God save us', yet ironically every Sunday we put pound after pound of carbon into the atmosphere getting to a building warmed or cooled by burning fossil fuels in order to ask God to save us. We want God to change our hearts, and yet we refuse to change our actions that will prevent our demise.

John the Baptist preached against a false repentance -a repentance without a change in action. He said “You brood of vipers! Who warned you to flee from the coming wrath? Produce fruit in keeping with repentance. And do not begin to say to yourselves, ‘We have Abraham as our father.’ For I tell you that out of these stones God can raise up children for Abraham. The ax is already at the root of the trees, and every tree that does not produce good fruit will be cut down and thrown into the fire.” Most Christians wouldn't claim Abraham as their father to think that they don't have to change their actions in order to be saved from destruction. Instead they would claim that they are saved by faith rather than works, Christ as their brother and God as their Father. They depend on their personal relationship with Jesus to save them from the coming earthly demise, and yet refuse to acknowledge their own destructive behavior.

In Romans, where Paul reminds us how we are saved by faith, he talks about how “the wrath of God is being revealed from heaven against all the godlessness and wickedness of men who suppress the truth by their wickedness”. In our society, we have scientists who have spent years reading the revelations from heaven and earth. They tell us the truth about the destruction burning fossil fuels is bringing upon us; how the consequences of climate change are apocalyptic visions in biblical proportions of God's wrath. But those who sell us fossil fuels also sell us lies that try and discount global warming and our responsibility as contributors. They try to further suppress the truth through financial influence in our political system.

Paul warns us about ignoring the truth. He describes how those who “neither glorified him as God nor gave thanks to him” became fools even though they claimed to be wise, how “their thinking became futile and their foolish hearts were darkened”. With our scientific progress we claim to be wise, but at the same time we use our scientific progress to ruin God's creation, the glory of God. Instead of being grateful for what God has given us, our unquenchable desire for more further rapes our planet and takes advantage of the poor. Our thinking becomes futile when we seek to compensate for burning fossil fuels through some new engineering way to store carbon from the atmosphere rather than avoiding burning fossil fuels to begin with. Our hearts become darkened when we wish to compensate for burning fossil fuels by taking away crop land and forests from the poor to grow trees that will consume the carbon from the wealthy rather than avoiding contributing carbon in the first place.

Paul describes the progressive degradation of those who refuse to acknowledge the truth and repent. First they will minimize who God is. Then they will become sexually licentious. Then their lives will revolve around material things. Following which they will further break down moral barriers in thought, word, and deed against authority, family, neighbor, and gender. Compassion will be replaced by lust and greed.

When we use fossil fuels, others suffer at our expense. We lose compassion for the poorest and the most helpless when we use fossil fuels in order to promote our agendas, to acquire more, and to bring comfort and entertainment to our lives at the expense of others' well being. When we lose compassion, we lose an awareness of the destruction we are bringing upon ourselves, we lose an awareness of the wrath of God.

Jesus cries because he sees the destruction we are bringing upon ourselves. He sees the ax ready at our root and he wants to save us if only we would repent. God wants to save us, not through the wisdom of our technological advances but through the repentance of changed behavior, through our willingness to walk the extra mile and turn the other cheek. He wants to open our hearts to forgiveness and compassion; a compassion that goes beyond the superficial donation when the news media broadcasts a natural disaster. He wants to give us a compassion that changes the very underpinnings of our society; a compassion that is willing to suffer so that others might have life. He wants to give us a forgiveness that owns the wrongs and is willing to die for righteousness.

Using fossil fuels to save our lives will only result in our losing our lives. But losing our lives because we refuse to use fossil fuels will save us, and our children, and our grand children down to the third and fourth generation. By refusing to use fossil fuels we will lose the material things around which our lives presently revolve, but we will gain a compassion for the creation that declares the glory of God. We will once again be able to enter into true worship with the wonder of a God who cares for the least of these with the grandeur of the universe. Hosanna! Hosanna in the highest!

The Law of Nature and the nature of Grace

2010-09-28T08:44:00.000-07:00

Lotti is an example of a sheep not content to stay within the boundaries. http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-498961/Meet-Ewe-dini-sheep-open-locked-pen--tongue.html

We are very familiar with certain laws of nature such as gravity and entropy. All of nature obeys these laws. Gravity exists through out the universe. It draws the particles together creating stars and the black holes in the center of galaxies. Entropy causes the universe to expand and the light of suns to radiate away. Entropy seeks the lowest energy state making molecular bonds in chemicals.

As Life turns chemicals into creatures, the organisms it creates under the laws of random mutations, natural selection, and survival of the fittest are a diversity of form and function. All this diversity lives within nine larger planetary boundaries that determine the life giving conditions of the air, water, and soil.

Even though we can build planes that can fly, bombs whose atomic particles separate in massive explosions, and genetically modified plants and animals, we are still subject to the same laws as the rest of nature.

The spiritual world also has laws. All religions have some version of the golden rule, even atheists. But unlike the physical world, we can chose to obey or disobey spiritual laws. Embedded in the law of love is the freedom to chose.

We can chose things that are life giving or life destroying. We can chose use gravity for our own destruction by jumping off a cliff falling to our death below, or we can build wings and use gravity to provide us lift so we can sail for miles. We can use entropy to destroy buildings, people, plants, and animals in a nuclear blasts or we can harness that same energy to generate power to heal, teach, and build in hospitals, schools, and factories. We can use natural selection to domesticate wildlife to our needs or we can hunt wildlife to extinction. We can treat our air, water, and land in ways that fit within the boundaries of life making it so all of life thrives, or we can try and exceed those boundaries to the destruction of ourselves and the rest of life on this planet.

We have these choices and although it may seem obvious what the right choice is, often times we make a choice based on our own immediate wants and desires, our own fears. Instead of being patient, kind, and exercising self control, we become angry, demanding, and manipulative. Our shame causes us to deny the truth and pass the buck. Our guilt reinforces our poor choices in a negative feedback loop that cycles closer and closer to destruction.

Christ breaks into our destructive habits and forgives us. He loves us in spite of our choices. He holds out to us the promise of who he made us to be, and calls us into living within the boundaries of nature. He calls us to chose life over death.

Christ's forgiveness is a grace we don't deserve. Left to our own devices we will destroy ourselves and the rest of nature with us. But by the power of his grace we can chose life, we can chose to live within the limits of our purpose; we can chose to let God be God.

Jesus tells a parable of the good shepherd who has one hundred sheep. He brings his flock within the boundaries of the fold or sheep pen. It is a confining place that limits the freedom of the sheep. But without the walls that limit the sheep's freedom, the sheep would be vulnerable to things that would harm them like wolves and lions and thieves. When the good shepherd finds he is missing a sheep he leaves the ninety nine and goes looking for the lost one. He searches and he searches until he finally finds it and brings it within the fold.

     Each time we chose to live lives of pride and selfishness we walk outside of God's fold. Each time we violate our planetary boundaries we are one step closer to bring destruction upon ourselves. There are dual messages in the bible: one is the certainty of destruction for following evil, the other is the hope of salvation for following God. It is our choice to love God and live within his boundaries or to seek our own way and come to destruction. And if we chose him, he helps us live within the fold.

     These themes are reiterated in the writings of the apostle Peter. He tells us that “the Lord is not slow in keeping his promise [of destruction], as some understand slowness. He is patient with you, not wanting anyone to perish, but everyone to come to repentance.

      "But the day of the Lord will come like a thief. The heavens will disappear with a roar; the elements will be destroyed by fire, and the earth and everything in it will be laid bare.

     "Since everything will be destroyed in this way, what kind of people ought you to be? You ought to live holy and godly lives as you look forward to the day of God and speed its coming. That day will bring about the destruction of the heavens by fire, and the elements will melt in the heat. But in keeping with his promise we are looking forward to a new heaven and a new earth, the home of righteousness.

     "So then, dear friends, since you are looking forward to this, make every effort to be found spotless, blameless and at peace with him. Bear in mind that our Lord’s patience means salvation”.

The Lord wants to take away our fear and shame and make us spotless and blameless. He wants to give us patience and self control so that we can live holy and godly lives. He wants to bring us all within the folds of his grace, into the boundaries of his love in order to keep us from the dangers that would harm us; from the destruction that will destroy the heavens and the earth. And he promises that if we live within his boundaries whether they be spiritual or physical we will have a home of righteousness, a place which works so beautifully well that it will be a new heaven and new earth.

Canticle of Praise

2010-09-18T15:14:00.000-07:00

Image by Carlye Calvin

When doubts cloud the Son

Let your nature remind me to praise you.

The winds wave branches at your coming,

So let my hands quiver like the leaves.

May I echo back the thunder clap,

Exulting in the blessings raining on my head.

Quench my anger with your grace;

Wash away my bitterness;

Saturate my spirit with your love;

Renew my wilted soul.

Beaten down by tempest blow

Your truth has zapped my pride.

But roots in you blossom still

Fragrant flowers of praise.

Learning from History

2010-07-09T06:11:00.000-07:00

      All of my life my environment has been quite stable. There have been small wars, but none of them have been where I live; none of them have affected me in a significant way. The economy has been relatively stable. I have just lived through the longest sustained economic growth period of the twentieth century. Until recently things were only getting bigger and better: McMansions sprouting up here and there; multiplying bathrooms, bathrooms turning into marble temples with tubs the size of beds; economy cars being replaced by SUVs, SUVs becoming bigger and bulkier until we have the ultimate Hummer, no wait...the strrrrrretch Hummer; air travel becoming common place with people zipping off to here and there at the drop of a hat, for a weekend to visit family and friends, see the show or ski the slope.

     I live in a city that has escaped much of the drama that has affected other regions. We don't have significant earthquakes. We're out of the range of hurricanes. We get too much rain to worry about forest fires or significant droughts. We haven't had any oil spills. No buildings bombed. Our city has doubled or tripled the number of tall buildings with the definition of tall doubling or tripling in height. Minimum wage has gone up, taxes have gone up, public services have gone up. Teacher strikes are about as exciting as it gets for protests. Drama is what I read about in history books, not what I live, not what is happening around me. Drama is what happens on TV.

     With life just getting better and better why should I believe in global warming? Why should a few scientists cause me any concern? Because I happened to have a grandfather who loved history and science. Because I happened to have a grandfather who live through the Great Depression and the Second World War. He thought carefully about the events he lived through. He did research about what led up to such catastrophes. And he taught that those who don't learn from history are doomed to repeat it. And so I learned my history and my science.

      I learned how people in the 1920s believed that life was just going to get better and better. They ignored the signs of economic slow down and continued to leverage their futures in hopes of a better tomorrow. And then one day reality set in and people began to panic. Trust was gone and each one tried to grabbed what they could, causing the whole system to collapse. Over night my poor farmer great grandparents lost all their life savings. The money that had been collected for my grandparent's school yearbook was gone, leaving the students to cobble together a homegrown scrapbook of memories.

     My grandfather loved to tell me stories of the German depression and run away inflation. How people had to go to stores with wheelbarrows of money in order to buy anything. How wives would pick up their husbands' paychecks each day and cash them and go shopping before his wages became worthless. How one fellow survived because he was able to redeem his clutter of old bottles for cash, but his neat, clean neighbors who regularly threw out their trash went destitute. I think it was his way of reminding himself that the hardships he endured were not as bad as what others had.

     Because my grandfather grew up on a farm, he always had something to eat. Because his parents didn't believe in debt, he always had a roof over his head. His family worked hard and didn't have much, but they stayed together. Grandfather would tell me the story of how the French survived because of their farms. How the French had experienced war after war and so they depended on their farms. When times were good, they would go to the city and work and bring home some extra cash. But they always kept their farm so that in time of crisis they had a roof over their head and food on the table.

     Probably the first history book I ever learned from was the Bible. When I visited my grandfather, we would have family devotions. As a little child I learned the story of Noah. How people were bad and God sent a big flood to cleanse the earth. How Noah was good and obeyed God, built an ark, and so was saved to live another day. How the destruction was quick and greater than anyone had imagined.

     When I got a little older, my grandfather read to me about Pompeii. This beautiful Roman town near Mt Vesuvius. One day people saw smoke coming from the mountain. There were a few tremors, but nothing that caused the people to leave their homes. And then in the space of a few hours the whole city was covered in ash. Only a handful of survivors made it out alive. A historical adventure story was followed by a Bible story. Like the story of Lot, a man living in a wicked city whom God sends angels to get him to leave his home before it is covered in burning sulfur. Lot escapes with only two of his daughters because the rest of his family doesn't believe that destruction is coming and his wife looks back to the city. And then one day on TV, Mt St Helen begins to smoke. A couple days later we get pictures of the mountain blowing apart and ash covering the countryside. One minute a beautiful nature preserve, the next a wasteland.

    Destruction, I learned, could come with very little warning. Only those who knew the signs would be able to escape. Only those who obeyed God, who lived according to his principles, would survive.

     Going to school I learned about science. In science I learned how people make observations and try and use those observations to predict the future. I learned how people created situations to test their predictions. I learned how people created new instruments with which to make observations and test their predictions; telescopes, microscopes, and stethoscopes; ohm meters, ammeters,and thermometers; clocks, scales, and gieger counters; wind tunnels, atomic accelerators, computer modeling. Every new experiment led to better understanding of how nature worked. Every new experiment led to new and interesting questions. The amount we could know about a topic kept expanding the more detailed our inquiry.

     I learned the universe is very old and during its history, abrupt destruction happens periodically. Stars explode into super nova. Asteroids hit the earth causing extinctions. Weather can turn abruptly cold freezing mammoths and mastodons so quickly and permanently that thousands of years later hungry dogs will eat their meat. I learned about Krakatoa blowing a whole island apart; about people swept away when tsunamis lay bare the ocean floor inviting speculation; and earthquakes breaking off the shore of Alaska.

     I learned about gravity and lemmings falling off cliffs to destruction below. How Malthus predicted overpopulation and the how foxes and hares go through cycles of population boom and bust. I watched on Nova programs how the cycle of drought and rain affect prey and predator.

     I learned how heavy water can become an exploding bomb that wipes out whole cities if it is concentrated enough to start a chain reaction. How noise reverberating in the mountains can start snow cascading down the slopes smothering homes in an avalanche. How if you bring a highly charged rod close enough to a grounded one, electricity will arc across the gap just like lightening striking the earth.

     And I learned about global warming. Global warming wasn't a new discovery, but it was one that scientists were beginning to apply the tools of the trade into exploring what the future would hold. And what they were learning wasn't good. What they learned was that warming the planet could have some disastrous consequences; consequences that could quickly destroy the world as we know it.

     But unlike news reporters, scientists are a cautious lot. Rarely do they claim the sky is falling. If you want to know if the projectile that is coming towards you will hit you, they will observe the arc of the projectile, look at their clocks, measure the wind speed, and get out their calculators punch in the numbers and tell you that the chance you will get hit is fifty percent plus or minus two feet. Scientists need to get funding to survive the next year so they come up with more questions to solve. What is the projectile made of: feathers, or lead, or some other material we've never encountered? How much damage could it do? How big of hole will it create? Would your position be within the hole's radius? How much damage would you experience from the expulsion of material from the hole? What's the likely hood another projectile will come this way? And in the mean time while scientists are figuring all this out if you haven't moved, the chances you will get squashed by the incoming what-ever-it-is become greater and greater.

     Maybe I've read about too many catastrophes, but I really don't need to know all the gory details about what possibly could be. If it's a catastrophe, I want to be well out of the way of the danger. I don't want to depend on angels showing up to drag me out of impending doom. If it's a catastrophe I can stop or mitigate, I want to do something. Like the story my grandfather told me of the Dutch boy who noticed a leak in the dam. First he plugged the hole with his finger, then two fingers. As the hole became larger his fist, then arm, then finally his whole body. In the end someone noticed his heroic deed, rescued him, patched the hole and the whole town was saved from drowning.

     Left unchecked global warming will drown millions of people in storms, hundreds of millions of homes in sea level rise, and leave billions of people homeless and jobless. Left unchecked global warming will destroy thousands of ecosystems and millions of species. Plagues will abound, earthquakes become more frequent, and deserts will become larger. Animals will starve; people will starve. The earth might even get turned upside down -it's happened before, it can happen again.

     Scientists have predicted the future well enough for me to know that I don't want to put any more carbon in the atmosphere. I will walk if I have to, and grow my own food, but I don't want to do any more damage. If you will join me, we can learn how to be sustainable together. Together we will be two fingers plugging a hole in a dike. If everyone joins in we can patch this climate and save the earth from destruction. And for that my grandfather would be proud.

Eroding the Temple of God

2010-07-01T20:11:00.000-07:00

In all cultures, the building of temples are an imitation of a heavenly temple. In the beginning of Genesis God is making the earth his temple. Genesis 1 uses temple dedication language to talk about God making the earth. http://www.asa3.org/ASA/topics/bible-science/6-02watts.html http://www.amazon.com/Lost-World-Genesis-One-Cosmology/dp/0830837043 As the story of Adam and Eve progresses, we observe language and features that are later used when God instructs Moses to build the tabernacle in the dessert. These same forms are reiterated again in John's vision of heaven in Revelations. http://www.askelm.com/temple/t040301.htm

In the Old Testament, the temple had several section: the courtyard of the gentiles, an inner courtyard for Israelites, the holy place that only priests could enter, and the holy of holies that only the high priest on the day of atonement could enter. The world in the beginning of Genesis was divided similarly: the earth in general was the land of Nod or wandering, the land of Eden where Cain and Able lived, the garden of Eden where Adam and Eve originally lived, and the midst of the garden where there was the tree of life and the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.

Adam and Eve's sin forced them out of the holy parts of God's temple. Cain's sin forced him out of the main temple area. But God invites us back into his presence through the sacrifice of his son. He re-ordains us to become priests of his temple.

In the Old Testament, the Jews are the mediators between God and the rest of the world. In the New Testament, those who follow Jesus, the priest of priests, are the mediators to the world. In the New Testament we see a shift away from the formal laws that define worship in the man made temple to the transcendent laws that are written on our hearts. (Jer 31:33, Heb 8:10) In the Old Testament, the ark was where the laws were kept. The ark was placed under the mercy seat or footstool of God. Isaiah refers to the earth as the footstool of God. (Is 66:1) Our hearts are the ark for God's laws.

Food was a central part of temple worship. In all cultures food was offered to their gods. In the Old Testament animals were sacrificed to God and bread, oil and wine were also offered. In the New Testament Jesus institutes the Eucharist. Pagans believed that proper worship of gods helped to guarantee success of crops. Fertility rites were an integral part of their temple worship. Prostitution was often part of the fertility rites.

God does not want us to go through rituals to try and manipulate him into providing for us. He does not want us to prostitute ourselves. He wants us to trust him and the provision he has already given us through creation. He puts his Spirit in our hearts to guide us in how we care for creation. Our bodies become the temple of the Lord or in other words God's holy of holies. (1 Cor 6:12-20) The holy of holies resides within the holy space. Our bodies live in homes and churches. Our homes and churches live in countries. Our counties reside on the earth. The earth is the foundation for the physical temple of God.

Jesus told a parable of the wise man and the foolish man. (Mt 7:24-27, Lk 6: 46-49) One built his house on the rock, the other on sand. Jesus said that if we followed his teachings we were building on a firm foundation like the wise man. Jesus teachings were for us to love. He showed us a spirit which will lay down its life for others. When we love others and we love the earth, we are building a firm foundation. When we hurt others and destroy the earth, we are destroying the foundations of the temple of God. We become like the foolish man and when disaster strikes we will be swept away.

Melting Fears

2010-06-21T21:45:00.000-07:00

Many of the people I meet who deny that there is any climate change are afraid that if we limit oil or put a tax on carbon that such policies will cause economic hardship to people here in the United States and around the world. And since oil drives our economy, I recognize that their fears have validity. But the consequences of global warming will have a much more devastating impact than the transition from oil to cleaner greener fuels. We are already seeing some of the consequences with increased frequency and severity of hurricanes, other extreme weather events, large swings in temperature creating record highs and lows, delayed or decreased rains in some areas causing droughts, while increased rain in others causing flooding.

If global warming continues we will have much more severe ecological and societal consequences to deal with than just the occasional record setting temperature or snowfall to deal with. The climate change will have not only greater economic hardship than an oil to clean fuel transition, but cause wide spread property destruction, dislocation, and death. The disparity between those who have contributed to the problem of global warming and those who experience the consequences will be so unjust as to create a religious crisis and threaten the relative peace of the entire planet.

Due to the efforts of weathermen, and popular publications like the National Geographic, some people have begun to recognize that climate change is happening. However, oil companies have been doing and excellent job providing disinformation. They have wormed their way into our churches, schools, government, and news agencies, telling their audiences that if they actually believe in climate change, it is a natural phenomena that is cyclical and there is nothing we can do about it. Their lies are believable because they contain half truths: there is a kind of cyclical climate change that is a natural phenomena. However, the truth is there is lots we can do about global warming whether it is a natural phenomena or man-made. The truth is if we don't do something about global warming, a lot more is going to hurt than our pocket books.

There is great urgency to doing something about global warming. The natural phenomenon of global warming works on a positive feedback loop, much like a snowball rolling down a hill. Each small change gives momentum for more changes in the same direction. Given enough changes, the phenomenon moves of its own accord tumbling out of control in much the same way as a snowball which reaches enough mass to overcome friction and roll down the hill gaining more mass and more momentum as it goes along. If we want to influence the direction of global warming, the sooner the better.

In many ways the consequences of global warming are like debt on a credit card. At the beginning we can charge lots of consequences to our future and only have to pay a small monthly balance. The benefits we receive easily outweighs the climate debt. In the beginning we can emit extra greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide and methane and the oceans will absorb it. But the oceans ability to absorb carbon is not a constant. It has a saturation limit. The more we emit, the closer we reached the limit the less carbon the ocean can absorb, the more saturated the atmosphere becomes, and the more we experience the greenhouse effect of carbon in the atmosphere increasing the average global temperature. It is this average global temperature that wrecks havoc with our ecosystems and eventually our lives.

Similarly with a credit card, the more you charge and the longer you delay paying the principle, the more the debt increases. The monthly payment continues to become larger and larger until there is no way to pay back the debt because paying the interest alone consumes all a person's income leaving a person in financial ruins. The more we delay reducing our carbon debt, the more saturated our atmosphere becomes until the consequences of global warming are consuming all of the benefit we experience from emitting carbon in the first place. Nature does not have a bankruptcy court. Eventually we must pay for our actions; we cannot cheat nature. And what we don't pay, future generations will. Nature will ask us to pay life for life, eye for eye, tooth for tooth.

It is urgent that we start paying our carbon debt now. Up until the mid 1970's the temperature of the earth did not significantly rise in proportion to the amount of CO2 emitted. The interest on our debt was less than our debt. But in the past twenty years, we have begun to reach the limits of the ocean to absorb the carbon and the average global temperature has begun to rise. It has already begun to exact a toll on our environment, melting glaciers and arctic ice; heating up oceans and increasing the variability and severity of weather patterns.

http://www.cru.uea.ac.uk/cru/info/warming/

http://earthguide.ucsd.edu/globalchange/global_warming/03.html

As our arctic ice caps melt our day of reckoning gets closer and closer. We don't have time to dilly dally or parry with global warming deniers. Our hard working scientists have been using all the resources at their disposal to determine how soon and to what extent we will experience the damage of global warming. In the report of Wieslaw Maslowski we learn that if present trends continue the arctic will be predominantly ice free in three to nine years, with six being the most likely. http://climateprogress.org/2010/06/06/arctic-death-spiral-maslowski-ice-free-arctic-watts-goddard-wattsupwiththat/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&http://climateprogress.org/2010/06/06/arctic-death-spiral-maslowski-ice-free-arctic-watts-goddard-wattsupwiththat/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+climateprogress%2FlCrX+%28Climate+Progress%29&utm_content=Yahoo!+Mail utm_campaign=Feed%3A+climateprogress%2FlCrX+%28Climate+Progress%29&utm_content=Yahoo!+Mail While some may see the reduced ice as opening up economic opportunities, I fear that such an event will increase the natural feedback loops to an uncontrollable amount ,setting off a cascade events with disastrous consequences. Whatever economic benefit from burning of fossil fuels that we have experienced before the arctic ice disappeared will all melt away to nothing from the costs of the natural disasters that will plague us.

One of the natural feedback loops that will exacerbate our contributions to global warming is melting the permafrost. In the permafrost are vast reservoirs of the natural gas methane. Methane is twenty times the greenhouse gas that carbon dioxide is. As the permafrost melts, the methane evaporates into the atmosphere, accentuating by twenty times the warming trend that our use of fossil fuels is generating. There is even more methane at the bottom of the ocean stored on the sea bed as blocks of ice. When there is no ice to reflect back the sun, the arctic waters will warm up. They may warm up even faster because the lack of ice allows the Gulf current to penetrate the arctic ocean. Warming surface waters and new current paths may send methane up to the surface, further accentuating our warming trend.

Whatever extreme weather events we have now will only become further compounded. Hurricanes will occur in regions that have never had hurricanes before, causing increased flooding, mud slides, and property destruction. Tornadoes will be common. Droughts and warmer temperatures will allow for insect populations to explode. Wetter conditions will increase fungus attacks. Glaciers will disappear leaving the mountains dry, killing the forests and making them ripe for further destruction from forest fires.   And the ice caps on Greenland and Antarctica will melt and flow into the ocean causing the sea level to rise. These things are difficult to adjust to on a slow scale. They will be catastrophic in short time frames.

The ice on Greenland and Antarctica are already melting faster than scientists predicted ten years ago. http://nsidc.org/sotc/sea_level.html And current projections are that sea levels will rise between 0.22 to 0.44 meters above 1990 levels by the period 2090-2099 (IPCC 2007). But as methane enters the atmosphere in increasing quantities, the average temperature of the earth will rise faster changing from a linear increase due to increasing fossil fuel consumption to an exponential or logarithmic increase due to the combination of carbon and methane entering the atmosphere. Scientists do not yet know the rate at which methane will be entering the atmosphere or how it will affect their climate change models. http://santitafarella.wordpress.com/2009/02/22/global-warming-methane-and-the-melting-of-permafrost-see-here-methane-being-released-from-permafrost-by-dr-katey-walter/

The rate at which the glaciers melt on Antarctica and Greenland depend on the overall temperature as well as the quantity and kind of precipitation that occurs on those land masses. Currently central Greenland has been experiencing increased snow, but as ocean temperatures continue to rise, it may be that instead of snow, Greenland will experience rain. If/when hurricanes track further north, Greenland may experience a lot of rain in a short period of time. Rain melts snow quickly. Rain creates gullies and mud slides, eroding mountain passes and carving canyons through which massive volumes of water, snow and ice can pass.

Greenland has about two miles of ice in a central valley surrounded by mountains with a few channels that allow the glaciers to move to the ocean. The National Geographic did a very nice article recently on how this ice is melting. Dark dust is accumulating on the surface and is causing the ice to melt faster than normal because the dark dust radiates more heat, rather than reflects the light like white snow does. The melt water creates vast lakes on the surface that eventually disappear down into the interior, but the scientists have not been able to track where all the water goes. Because of the geography of Greenland being a basin and the fact that ice is less dense than water, I suspect that most of the water is pooling in the interior raising up the height of the glacial ice mass much like a pitcher of water raises the ice cubes to the top.

My fear is that in a very short period of time the ocean levels could change in feet. Melting of the Greenland ice sheet would produce 7.2 m of sea-level rise, or about twenty feet. a b "Some physical characteristics of ice on Earth". Climate Change 2001: The Scientific Basis. http://www.grida.no/climate/ipcc_tar/wg1/412.htm#tab113.    http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/science/earth-environment/article6875260.ece Greenland has very few trees, and none near where the glaciers are emptying into the ocean. If it had trees, the roots would hold in the dirt when the ground becomes saturated with water. But without trees rain, the weight of the ice, and the flow of the water, will quickly erode deep gullies. These deep gullies will allow the lake in the interior of Greenland to drain to the ocean rapidly, taking whatever remaining ice that floats on top. Events like this have happened before in geological history. The flooding of the Black Sea is one example. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Sea_deluge_theory The draining of lake Missoula in northwest Montana is another. http://vulcan.wr.usgs.gov/Volcanoes/ColumbiaPlateau/description_columbia_plateau.html http://www.glaciallakemissoula.org/

Glacial Lake Missoula drained the “glacial-outburst waters that crossed the Channeled Scablands during the Spokane floods (Missoula Floods) were channeled through Wallula Gap. For several weeks, as much as 200 cubic miles of water per day were delivered to a gap that could discharge less than 40 cubic miles per day. Ponded water filled the Pasco Basin and the Yakima and Touchet valleys to form temporary Lake Lewis”. http://vulcan.wr.usgs.gov/Volcanoes/ColumbiaPlateau/description_columbia_plateau.html Greenland has a volume of 630,000 cubic miles, if it all drained at the rate of 200 cubic miles like Lake Missoula then in about eight years the oceans would rise about twenty feet. How fast Greenland drains depends upon how wide and how many channels the water has in which to travel. It is possible that Greenland could drain more quickly given that it has a wider area and many fjords.

The volume of water contained on Antarctica is more than double that of Greenland. And it is unclear how fast Antarctica will melt, but according to wikipedia, ”there has been a 75% increase in Antarctic ice mass loss in the ten years 1996-2006, with glacier acceleration a primary cause[11].” “Large parts of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet (WAIS) sit on a bed which is below sea level and slopes downward inland.[4] This slope, and the low isostatic head, mean that the ice sheet is theoretically unstable: a small retreat [in the ice shelves] could in theory destabilize the entire WAIS leading to rapid disintegration. Current computer models do not include the physics necessary to simulate this process, and observations do not provide guidance, so predictions as to its rate of retreat remain uncertain. This has been known for decades.”

Even though scientists are unable to predict how quickly the ice might flow into the ocean, we are getting some ideas. The more the ice melts the faster the glaciers move, not in an even creeping manner, but a slide and stick manner causing earthquakes or glacialquakes that can reach an order of magnitude seven. http://www.livescience.com/environment/080606-glacial-earthquakes.html “Two bursts of seismic waves are released every day, each one equivalent to a magnitude 7 earthquake, and are seemingly related to the tidal action of the Ross Sea. During each event a 96 by 193 kilometer (60 by 120 mile) region of the glacier moves as much as .67 meters (2.2 feet) over about 25 minutes, remains still for 12 hours, then moves another half-meter.” http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glacial_earthquake When the ice shelf in the Ross Sea melts the glacier will be able to move more quickly into the ocean and not necessarily be paused for twelve hours by the tides. The melting of the Antarctic ice sheet would produce 61.1 m of sea level rise.[11] The collapse of the grounded interior reservoir of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet would raise sea level by 5–6 m.[12]
11 ^ a b "Some physical characteristics of ice on Earth". Climate Change 2001: The Scientific Basis. http://www.grida.no/climate/ipcc_tar/wg1/412.htm#tab113.
12 ^ Geologic Contral on Fast Ice Flow - West Antarctic Ice Sheet

Right now, the weight of the ice has depressed the Greenland landmass as well as parts of Antarctica into the ocean. But as that ice and water leave, Greenland and Antarctica will rise up out of the ocean displacing more water. The water they shed will depress the land masses which have become flooded. These shifting land mass will set off a series of earthquakes, even possibly a few volcanoes as the continents move to a new equilibrium. Areas not prone to earthquakes will be shaken, and since much of the construction in those areas is not designed to withstand earthquakes many people will die like we saw in Haiti. The earthquakes will also cause tsunamis and break communication cables. Many of the people on the new coasts will not have experience with tsunamis leading to further loss of life. Breaking communication cables will challenge our economic system since we depend so much on information flowing around the world quickly and easily.

http://www.globalwarmingart.com/wiki/Special:SeaLevel has a map of the areas that will be affected by rising sea levels. If the oceans only rose one meter 145 million people will be directly affected. If it raises seven meters a quarter of the world's population will be affected. People will lose their homes, their businesses, and their farms. One meter rise will inundate 2,223,000 km2 with over 800,000 km2 in Asia alone. In 2007 US$ there will be property loss of close to a trillion dollars.   http://maps.grida.no/go/graphic/population-area-and-economy-affected-by-a-1-m-sea-level-rise-global-and-regional-estimates-based-on-

Displaced people, with nothing to do, nothing to eat, and nothing left to lose makes for a political nightmare. Where will all these people go? How will they get new jobs? According to a 2006 census there are already 33 million people that are refugees or displaced for some reason or another. We are not being able to handle the refugees we have, what will we do when the number of displaced persons quintuples or more?

What will these people eat? According to the UN there are already a billion people who are starving or suffering malnutrition. http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=14032 Our agricultural lands are already stretched to their limits; our aquifers are becoming depleted and poisoned; we are loosing tonnes and tonnes of soil through erosion; our artificial fertilizers are destroying the fertility of the soil and washing into our streams, rivers, and oceans where it destroys the aquatic life for miles and miles; the herbicides and pesticides are creating super resistant strains of plants and insects while poisoning those who eat the crops. Genetically modified crops do not mitigate any of the issues that are destroying our environment, they only secure profits for those who design them. And lots of land we used to farm will be inundated with sea water. With the extreme weather conditions that global warming brings, crops will fail for lack of water or too much water. Crops will fail because of freezing at critical times, or crushed by hail, or damaged by wind. We will have trouble feeding those people who could afford food, not to mention all those who have lost everything and have no jobs.

Will we in America be generous with those who have lost so much, or will we be frightened that we might lose our security and grasp to maintain the status quo? Will we continue to be in denial of our contribution to the problem, or will we embrace change? Will we exercise self discipline with our finances, food, and freedom so that the problems of global warming will diminish, or will continue to strive to be king of the mountain even if means destroying the planet in the process? And if we don't willingly change, how long will the rest of the world tolerate such behavior? How long will starving people stay passive while people in the United States die from obesity related problems? How long will persons displaced by hurricanes, drought, or rising sea levels put up with the average North American generating 20 tons of CO2 per year, when the the global average carbon footprint is only about 4 tons of CO2 per year? http://www.eoearth.org/article/Carbon_footprint

America is the only country in the world not to have ratified the Kyoto Protocol. Everywhere I turn I find people in active state of denial about global warming. If someone recognizes there is a warming problem, they attribute it to natural causes. If they recognize that we might be contributing to the problem, they feel there is nothing that can be done, or that it is someone else's job to change, or that it is too expensive to change. I hear many people claim to value life here in America, but few are willing to give up their convenience, time, or money for the life of the planet, for the poor who will suffer the consequences of greenhouse gases we have emitted. We have a choice now to change to postpone or advert the disaster global warming is bringing. We may not be able to advert the disaster too much longer.

Flood Plain Refrigerator

2010-06-07T18:39:00.000-07:00

One the biggest uses of electrical energy in the home after the dryer is the refrigerator. That is why green blogs recommend that you clean the coils so that your refrigerator works more efficiently and saves electricity. Because I do not get my electricity from renewable energy sources, I have been thinking about going without a refrigerator.

When I go camping, I don't use a cooler. I find it is too much hassle with getting ice, and keeping things from getting soggy. Instead I use more processed food than I do at home. I would prefer to eat fresh vegetables, fruits, and milk without having to go to the store every other day or so. Any kind of meat spoils quickly unless it's preserved in salt or vinegar. And I would like to keep leftovers cool so I didn't have to eat them immediately. In the winter, I could keep all my refrigerated food outside or in the garage where it stays cool. But in the summer, that won't do.

Before there were refrigerators people used cool springs and ice houses or ice boxes. I've thought about building an old fashioned ice house, but that seems to be a lot of work both in the construction and maintenance. And I have no idea where I would get an annual supply of sawdust. I don't have a cool spring on my property, but since I live on a flood plain, I do have a sump pump. At certain times of year, my sump pump is running very frequently. And my basement is very cool.

I was thinking I could create an insulated box which had a heat pipe running through it and out of the bottom and into the sump. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heat_pipe Without any additional electricity the heat pipe would conduct the heat out of the box and into the water. If I dug my sump a little deeper so that no matter what the level of the water in the ground was, when the water warmed up I could always pump the water out, then for little more than the cost of normally running my sump pump, I could keep my food cold to the temperature of the ground water. Even if I didn't have a sump, I could constructed a drain back system where water I pumped out of my sump, circulated through the ground and returned to my sump. The cost of maintaining circulating water would be a lot less than powering a compressor and could easily be powered by a PV panel.

Of course, that doesn't solve the problem of melting ice cream or keeping turkeys frozen. I guess it's back to the drawing board. Maybe I can find a fluid that would have a phase transition at such a low enough temperature that conceivably with the influence of gravity, it could draw off more heat energy bringing the temperature of the insulated box lower than the temperature of the sump water.

Oil Theology

2010-06-01T11:02:00.000-07:00

There is this black sticky substance that fuels our empire. That motivates us to go to war and have military bases all over the world. We feed off of it. We use this black sticky substance to supply our every need and desire. It energizes our greed and chokes out the life God made. This black sticky substance has even oozed into our religion and our theology; our thinking has become so black and sticky that we try and use the Bible to justify its use.

Our thinking has become so darkened that all we consider is ourselves. We have fallen into the hubris of pride and tell ourselves it is our God given duty. We believe that “God gave man the stewardship of the earth, to look after it and to use it for our enjoyment while living from its benefits. Plants, animals, fish, and fresh water. Minerals, such as coal, copper, gold, silver to make things and earn a living,” including that black sticky stuff.

We can be sad and shake our heads at the damage that black sticky stuff causes; the creatures that gasp and drown, the trees that fall, the mountains that crumble, the water that's poisoned, the air that's polluted. But we don't have to do anything different, after all, we need that black sticky stuff and God gave it to us to use for our enjoyment.

Instead, we can blame the problems on someone else's greed. Never mind the fact that they were only trying to make a living off of suppling our greed; making so we can go where we want when we want; making it so we can eat what we want when we want; making so we can wear what we want when we want; feeding our insatiable desire for something new, whether or not its really better, whether or not what we had could be fixed.

We can be sad and shake our heads at the damage that black sticky stuff causes, because after all “the earth we inhabit is not a permanent planet. It is, frankly, a disposable planet – it is going to have a very short life. It’s been around six thousand years or so – that’s all – and it may last a few thousand more. And then the Lord is going to destroy it.” If what we do causes a little damage here or there, that's regrettable, but in the long run it doesn't really matter because it's going to get destroyed any way.

The only thing that really matters is if “I confess with my mouth to be a believer and accept Jesus is Lord and I believe in my heart that he died for my sins and God the Father raised Jesus to life after his death. Romans 10:9” Since our salvation depends on faith and not works, black sticky stuff can still ooze into our lives and serve our every whim, even at the expense of other parts of creation, even at the expense of other human beings.

We can criticize our societies for having “departed from a Biblical worldview to that of a Humanistic and post modern one,” filled with “those who reject Jesus”. While at the same time we can believe that humans are God's pinnacle of creation, that creation is here to serve human needs, and whatever the reality of global warming might be, it is subject to individual interpretations. The word that became the flesh of earth and sky, beast and bird, we reject as separate from God. And what we do to the least of creation is divorced from our beliefs in Jesus.

We can criticize our Jewish forebearers for not obeying the Mosaic Law, or listening to the warnings the Lord gave them of removing them from the land (Deuteronomy 28) if they apostatized. We can sadly shake our heads that the children of Israel did not listen and came under judgment – the Northern tribes falling to Assyria in 722 B.C., and Judah to Babylon in 605 B.C. In our Bibles we read how God designated the Babylonian captivity as a seventy-year captivity to rest the land for all the Sabbath years that Israel violated (cf. Leviticus 26:33-35; 2 Chronicles 36:17-21). And yet we never stop to think about giving our own land a rest.

We think we are smarter than the Israelites because we practice crop rotation, we have chemicals that fight off pestilence and weeds, and we have black sticky stuff that makes it so we don't have to follow the natural rhythms of the earth. We have black sticky stuff that we can pump out of the ground every second of every hour of every day of every year. We never rest from pumping, shipping, refining, buying, selling, using and burning. We are so dependent on our black sticky stuff that we feel threatened whenever someone suggests we stop using it.

Instead we vilify environmentalists, claiming that because they serve creation, they worship the creature rather than the Creator. We vilify environmentalists for wanting to undermine the power our empire feeds upon. How dare they try and impose upon OUR freedom! How dare they suggest that our black sticky stuff could be irrevocably damaging the planet we live on! God's in control and he would never let human greed and pride to murder millions of innocent people, not to mention many more plants and animals. This is just part of the natural cycle of things, over which we have no control. We are just innocent bystanders waiting to be raptured away.

And while we wait, we silence the groans of creation with pavement. We drown out its cries with our own noise bouncing through the airwaves, surrounding ourselves with incessant introspective chatter. We refashion creation according to our will and for our profit. All with the power of this black sticky substance.

By the power of the black sticky substance, we build bigger and better churches; we draw parishioners from afar off; we send our hand-me-downs and surplus to those who suffer from the poverty of supplying standardized products and services to a capricious market driven by fad and celebrity. By the power of the black sticky substance we proclaim the word of God louder, with cameras, lights, and action. By the power of the black sticky substance pages and pages of scripture, commentary, and devotion, are cranked out in version after version, language after language, until they weigh down our bookshelves, and overflow into our waste baskets.

I agree with those who claim that “we have collectively become ignorant and neglectful of God’s promised wrath on the children of disobedience.” We do not seek to put God's kingdom first, his kingdom of the lowly worm, the humble donkey, or the peaceful dove. Instead, we worry over what we will eat and what we will wear. We worry over what the Jones will think of us instead of what God thinks of us. We emphasize the love of God to the exclusion of the coming day of reckoning.

We do not recognize the disaster we are bringing upon ourselves, our children, and their grandchildren. We believe that when things become difficult, that we will somehow escape the consequences, either by divine providence or by being raptured away. We do not recognize that the black sticky stuff that has oozed into every area of our lives has become the ipso facto god of our lives -a god that is destroying our lives down to the very core of our souls, a god that has imprisoned us in a web of catastrophic behaviors and blinded us to our own folly.

God is not deceived by our greed. Our God is a jealous God and will not settle for second place -not now, not ever. He will not settle for a second rate kingdom, despoiled of its natural beauty -not now, not ever. We have been hiding in the garden, donning the symbolic fig leaves of prosperity to hide the nakedness of our souls. He calls us out, and asks us what have we done?

Let us not try and pass the blame, but humbly repent with changed actions. Let us forsake our comfortable lives bought with the power of the black sticky god, and instead receive the new life bought with his blood. Let us pick up our crosses and follow in his footsteps, giving up our lives for new life of his creation -all of his creation. Let us rule creation as he rules: not with a scepter but a towel; stooping as he stooped to care for the needs of his subjects.

The quotes used in this article were taken from comments left on Kurt Willems' blogpost http://groansfromwithin.com/2010/03/15/theology-affects-ecology-quote-to-ponder-john-macarthur-repost-12308/ and from the article “Evangelicalism and the Environmental Movement” written by John MacArthur previously posted at http://www.gty.org/Resources/issues/594 These quotes are typical of many discussions I've had with believers about the environment and are not used in order to single out certain individuals for criticism.

Farming Nature

2010-05-26T06:58:00.000-07:00

I have self-sustainable interests and over time I've been learning about how to garden. I've learned that there are problems with the traditional means of agriculture. From a sustainable perspective, traditional agriculture does not work because it relies on breaking up the ground and reducing all vegetation exposing it to erosion; and planting large areas of a single species, mono-cropping which creates an imbalance of insect supply and opportunities for disease to spread rapidly.

Nature does not propagate using traditional agricultural methods. Rarely does nature break up the ground, only with the rooting of pigs or the sharp hooves of large beasts is the ground ever broken up, and never over large areas. Nature has diverse species living together. Nature takes advantage of every possible habitat, some growing tall, some growing small, some in the spring, some vining up another, some grow all year, others only seasonally. Even in prairies where there are large expanses of grass, it is not just one kind of grass. There are several different kinds of grasses as well as forbs which grow at different times and heights.

The diversity of plants supports a diversity of insects, many of which are specie specific. Many bugs, like the monarch butterfly, only grow on one kind of plant. Some bugs thrive on multiple plants, but usually prefer the plants of their ecosystem. Introduced plants from another ecosystem are usually not considered a food source. By having a diversity of plants and thus a diversity of insects, nature provides a constant food source for birds, and other animals.

If only one plant were gown in an area, the the potential insect food source for animals would be seasonal and unable to support potential predators for very long. Potential predators would need to be migratory and would only naturally show up when the population of insects was so large as to be destroying the plants they lived upon. The only effective way to control insects using mono-cropping techniques is to use pesticides which kill the beneficial insects as well has the harmful ones, and get into the water supply and food chain causing all kinds of health problems for people as well as animals.

Permaculture, an agricultural technique that mimics nature, is an improvement over traditional agriculture. It uses a multistoried perennial approach, that inter mixes plants based on their needs for light, water, nutrients, as well as being prone to certain kinds of insects. But it still depends largely on a limited selection of non-indigenous plants.

Nature produces copiously in each ecosystem. Many indigenous plants are edible, those which are not particularly tasty often have medicinal qualities. Others are good for making into fabrics, paper, or furnishings. There is not a plant in the world that is not good for something. It is only up to our imagination what a particular plant or animal is useful for.

The plants we eat are the ones we have historically found to be easiest to harvest, store, and ship. But there is no reason we need to limit our diet to those plants. We are smart enough to build machines that can lift us high into the trees. We know how to build tents that can funnel dropping seeds to a central collection place. We now have freezers that can preserve food instantly for long periods of time. We have machines that sort seeds, presses that can squeeze out the oil of any kind of seed, and vacuums that could suck up seeds that are not easily picked or that would be lost to the wind. We now have chemistry and machines that make use of every aspect of nature.

Since we can make use of all of nature, I see no reason to limit our use of nature to only a few plants and animals. In fact I see lots of reasons to use every part of nature. First of all it would be a waste not to do so. Secondly, the waste is a form of disrespect to our creator. But more importantly, nature needs us to do so. A National Geographic author writing about the area around Mt St. Helen said that nature on its own goes through boom and bust cycles. Nature needs someone with intelligence to manage those cycles so that the cyclical bust does not lead to extinction. Nature needs someone(s) who will manage it so that no one part thrives at the expense of another. Ecosystems have a natural balance which go through extreme cycles. If we cull the excesses of nature, keeping it from booming, then we will also keep it from going bust. And we are smart enough and capable enough and adaptable enough to live on whatever nature provides. This is why God made us. This is the reality we need to live into.

Creation care

2010-05-16T19:38:00.000-07:00

I am encouraged to read in various media about living sustainable lives and reducing our carbon footprint. I am beginning to hear some bold Christians advocating creation care. However, I am concerned that most of the changes that are advocated are superficial at best. While I agree that every little bit helps, and that you have to start somewhere, I am concerned that we move beyond token efforts to reduce harm to living a paradigm shift of viewing creation as something to be valued and cared for its own sake. Even amongst Christian circles who advocate being good stewards, I am concerned that we do so from a distant yet self-centered vantage point -creation is here for our benefit, our pleasure.

I believe that the self-centered attitude comes from a misinterpretation of Genesis two, where people believe that the garden was made for mankind rather than the other way around. We have a long history of self-centered thinking that probably originated in the garden of Eden when mankind chose to take control and eat from the tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil rather than obey God. Our self-centered thinking makes us aware of how vulnerable we are. We try and hide our nakedness with symbols of prosperity, but death takes away the charade.

In our self-centered thinking we worry, plan, and manipulate the creation God made in order to provide for what we need. In trying to hide our vulnerability we confuse what we want with what we need. In our attempts at control, we destroy prairie, forest, and wet land, breaking up the soil and exposing it to the degradation of erosion by wind and rain. We select only a few species to provide for our needs and pleasures, importing them and their accompanying diseases, feed stock, and pests, into habitats they weren't designed for, displacing and destroying the creation God made for that location.

Over the course of time we have searched for way to guarantee that our needs will be met in the way that we have chosen to meet them. We have learned to irrigate, diverting water from its natural habitats and aquifers to our fields. In the process we destroy the long-term productivity of the soil through increased salt build up while simultaneously reducing or destroying the native habitats God created from which we took the water. We have learned to mine minerals and oil to create fertilizers, instead of using the plants and manure that God made to naturally fertilize the earth. By taking control, we end up destroying the microbial community that turns dirt into soil and causes plants to thrive. By taking control, we cause ecological imbalances in our rivers, lakes, and oceans, killing off diverse populations within those environs. As we kill the diversity of the natural ecosystem, we need more mined fertilizers to maintain the security of our harvests. We end up in a negative cycle that destroys rather than gives life.

With the use of technology, the negative cycle which destroys God's creation happens so much faster. Our machines give us the ability to cut down forests faster, destroy prairies quicker, and drain wetlands more effectively. Our machines not only deliver to our fields man-made fertilizers which destroy the native habitat, but poisons as well. And while they roam up and down the rows, they pollute the atmosphere and change the acidity of the ocean. With the use of technology we exchange a diversity of seeds that can withstand environmental changes for a few engineered ones that are designed for boom, but vulnerable to bust. We use technology to secure against the potential bust by creating chemicals that kill anything we don't want, -pest, weeds, and diseases. In the end, all our attempts to control end up in disaster. We are never able to out compete what we wish to destroy. And in the process of trying to control, we destroy the land we need to grow things on and poison ourselves as well as the nature around us.

For a long time people have attributed a fundamental change in nature because of Adam and Eve's sin. The rest of creation was considered to be 'fallen' -somehow less than the perfection God had made because mankind had sinned. But history shows a slightly different picture. Creation is still as good as when God made it, but because humans have sinned and disobeyed God, we have made a mess out of the good that God has created. Mankind has thought about himself instead of caring for God's creation. We sought and still seek after knowledge to control creation for our own benefit. In our search for control, in our desire to bend creation to serve our will and pleasure, we seek to become like God, and in so doing we destroy the good creation he made.

But there is good news: The Kingdom of God is at hand! We can be saved from our self-centered thinking that destroys us and the world around us. Jesus Christ has come to show us the way. He has come to bring us the freedom of forgiveness and the hope of the resurrection.

This is not a way of pride, but of humility. Christ shows us the way by humbling himself, giving up his glory in heaven; giving up immortal life for a mortal life filled with pain and suffering; being willing to endure the ignobly of the stable, the discrediting and slander of the religious leaders, and shame of the cross, so that he might demonstrate his love for us and redeem his creation -all of his creation from the ravages of our sin. He came that he might serve us, washing our feet. He asks us to be servants of others. And admonishes us that if we want to become the greatest in the kingdom of God, we will have to become the least.

When we follow Christ, we become part of the redeeming process. We must become willing to accept the role of a servant and tend his garden in such a way that the garden gives glory to God, its creator. The Lord of life receives glory when when all of his creation thrives, when the well being of whole is greater than any of the parts. And to do this requires great faith -faith that if we care about creation's needs before our own that our own needs will still be met. Jesus uses the illustrations of the birds and flowers to reassure us of the love and provision God gives those who obey him.

“Therefore I tell you, do not worry about your life, what you will eat or drink; or about your body, what you will wear. Is not life more important than food, and the body more important than clothes? 26Look at the birds of the air; they do not sow or reap or store away in barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not much more valuable than they? 27Who of you by worrying can add a single hour to his lifeb?
28“And why do you worry about clothes? See how the lilies of the field grow. They do not labor or spin. 29Yet I tell you that not even Solomon in all his splendor was dressed like one of these. 30If that is how God clothes the grass of the field, which is here today and tomorrow is thrown into the fire, will he not much more clothe you, O you of little faith? 31So do not worry, saying, ‘What shall we eat?’ or ‘What shall we drink?’ or ‘What shall we wear?’ 32For the pagans run after all these things, and your heavenly Father knows that you need them. 33But seek first his kingdom and his righteousness, and all these things will be given to you as well. 34Therefore do not worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will worry about itself. Each day has enough trouble of its own.”

Those who exercise faith in the way of Christ not only experience God's provision, but also experience God's love and forgiveness. The love and forgiveness God extends to us allows us to extend that same love and forgiveness to others. Through forgiveness we destroy evil. The hope of the resurrection that we have through Christ takes away our fear of death, takes away the self-centered thinking that destroys creation. We are empowered to endure through all difficulties, even death, and still forgive because we know that death is not the end. God's provision extends beyond the grave to new life, to eternal life. Because we have this hope, let us live into the way of Christ, not only of love and forgiveness, but in being obedient stewards of creation, caring for creation to the glory of God.

Spiritual Practices for Conflict

2010-04-12T19:39:00.000-07:00

My church is having a Sunday school about dealing with conflict. I think this is a fabulous idea and wish more churches had classes like this. Most of conflict management teachings I've heard start and end in Matthew where people are being confrontive about other people's sin. But there is a lot of conflict in life that may or may not have to do with sin per se, and even if the source of conflict is sin, focusing solely on Matthew 18 without taking in the larger context just makes for a lot of heartache.

I believe that God uses conflict to transform his church into his bride. It is in large part how we learn. Each of us have insights as to how God is leading and together we discern how to grow and change. Change itself creates conflict with the past. And as we lead others along the paths that God is leading us, we inevitably have conflict with others.

Of course, not all conflict is either so noble or ignoble in origin. Much of conflict has to do with the fact that we are all individuals who have our own interests, gifts, and talents, and that it is very easy to misunderstand each other or accidentally cross one another's boundaries. Learning good communication skills is necessary for avoiding as much conflict as possible.

But beyond learning good communication skills and confrontive techniques, here are some spiritual practices that I have found helpful in dealing with people with whom you have conflict:

forgive -This may seem egotistical, but when you are in conflict, you usually think that your way is the better way and whomever is objecting with you is wrong. This may be true or not; either way it is important to not let any hurts get in the way of your relationship and to do that you need to forgive. Jesus, when he was on the cross is our example when he said, "Father, forgive them for they know not what they are doing." Jesus did not make any exceptions for those he forgave and neither should we. If we don't forgive, then evil has won the battle, even if we win the conflict.

listen -this is part of treating them as I would like them to treat me. If I listen to them, then maybe they will listen to me. If I listen to them, then maybe I can learn what the pain and fears are that drive them into what I perceive as denial, hopelessness, apathy, or clinging to lies. If I listen to them, maybe I can hear how the spirit is moving in their lives and affirm and encourage the path he is taking them on. If I listen to them, maybe I can find a place of common ground from which we can both work.

respond kindly with substantiated facts -this is the iron sharpening iron, the having an answer for the faith I believe. Not everyone learns in a quiet, subdued, or grateful manner. Some people learn by challenging others. Only by being kind, yet well informed can I win such a person over to my cause. And if I do win them over, they will become great crusaders. In many ways I am grateful for those who challenge me, because they help me to learn about what I believe in more thoroughly and they teach me to articulate what I believe in better, more convincing ways. Each time I am challenged, I learn better and better how to cut through the lies to the core of the truth.

reframe the issue so that it sits on common ground between you and those with whom you are in conflict -I believe that global warming is a moral issue because it kills people.I believe that it is an issue of justice because those who suffer from the consequences are not the same ones who contributed to the problem. Framing global warming as a moral/justice issue is something that any Christian can understand.

be an example -people will never listen to my words if my actions don't follow. Since I believe global warming is a moral issue, then I feel like I need to do all I can, even if its not much, to live as low a carbon emitting lifestyle as I possibly can. Global warming as a moral issue is no longer an issue that I can deal with if its convenient or affordable. I need to treat global warming as I would assenting to someone's death or condoning thievery.

pray -God's spirit gives us discernment as to where we should put our energies. Some people only want to argue for the sake of arguing and that takes a lot of energy away from other productive things. Some times while we won't convince the people we are debating, we may convince the people who are listening. There are a lot of things that happen that we cannot see or don't know about. Only through the Spirit's guiding will we know whether or not to continue.

patience -change comes slowly. Remember how long it took you to get to the place where you are now. God is in charge, so you can rest in following him instead of trying to be responsible and driving for the change. We can have confidence that he will move his church in the direction he wants, when he wants.

love -no matter what, we should show love for those who disagree with us, even if it means going the second mile and giving up our cloak as well as our coat. We need to show our 'enemies' hospitality like Elisha did for the armies who came to crush the town where he lived just because he informed the king of their where abouts. Paul quote Psalms in saying that true kindnesses done to those with whom you have conflict is like putting ashes on their heads. It serves to wake the conscious like nothing else can.

serve -most people cannot pull themselves up by their bootstraps. In fact it usually takes a community to make significant changes in a person's life. Be an encourager. Be an enabler. While sometimes serving others puts you in the spotlight, most of the time it puts you in the pigpen. I take comfort in the fact that Jesus commends us that if we want to be the greatest we must become the least. He commended the humility of tax collector over the pride of the pharisee promising that the reward that God gives later is much greater than any recognition we might get now.

Trojan Horse Weather

2010-04-04T14:26:00.000-07:00

We've had a week of unseasonably warm weather and two record breaking warm days. All my friends are oohing and ahhing and rejoicing in the sunshine and spring flowers. But I weep.

The weather is a function of averages. And if we are having warmer than usual weather that means the average temperature is going up. That means we are experiencing the consequences of global warming.

You might think 'if nice spring days means global warming, then bring it on! I'm tired of the snow and the cold. I'm glad it's spring already.' But wait, do you really understand what you are wishing for? The sooner spring comes, the more out of whack the migration patterns between bird, insect, and flower. I have not seen the bees sipping nectar from my flowers. No bees, no pollination, no fruit.

Bees are not the only insect that depends on plants flowering at the right time. Many, many other insects do too, including butterflies and moths. Birds depend on both the insects and the fruit to feed their young. If there aren't enough insects or fruit because the flowers bloomed at the wrong time, then there won't be as many young birds, and bird populations will drop.

Birds are not the only animals to eat insects. Many kinds of mammals do too. Changing when spring time comes is like slipping the clutch: the gears don't meet up right and grind upon making contact. Eventually you can grind your gears away such that the car won't move forward anymore. Some plants and animals can't change fast enough to keep up with the climate change we are creating. They will go extinct. I mourn for the loss of biodiversity.

Since the weather is averages out, if we have an unusually warm day, the chances are good that we will also have an unusually cool day as well. In the spring that could be a frost that kills pollinated buds or young fruit. If we have unusually warm days that cause plants to flower early, not only do they have the problem that they might not be pollinated as well, but there is a much greater risk that they won't have fruit because of a cold snap. Early warm weather is not good for business for a fruit tree farmer.

Global warming causes other extreme weather events too: like long period of drought and excessive flooding, both of which kill crops. If we have enough crop failures the price of food escalates causing starvation for those who live hand to mouth, and inflation for industrialized countries. I mourn for those who will go hungry and bankrupt.

If the weather is warmer earlier in the mid-northern latitudes where I live then think about what is probably happening at the equator or at the poles. This warm weather we are getting is coming from the equator sooner, so the equator must be getting warmer sooner. A warmer equator means more coral reefs are dying and there are going to be more and stronger hurricanes that will wreak property and threaten lives. I weep for those who loose all that they have worked for; for those whose lives are in tatters because of the forces of nature; for those whose loved ones have been ripped away by the wind; and for those whose livelihoods are wiped away by the sea, or forever altered by the increasing heat.

I have friends that care for the environment but they don't believe in global warming. They don't want to believe that all this good weather is really not a good thing. When I try and tell them, I've crossed over the line into political territory. My more gracious friends ignore my perceived indiscretion. Others try and correct me and bring me to my senses. I weep because I am ignored. It feels like no one will take my warning that this wonderful weather is just a Trojan horse.

The Bucket Bath

2010-03-29T20:59:00.000-07:00

I want to reduce my carbon footprint and I have been looking at the different ways I use energy. Some things I have no immediate choice about; if I want to visit family I have to drive, if I want to eat, I have to buy food that has traveled a fair bit. But there are other things I have a lot of choice about; how warm or cool to keep my house, how many lights I have on, or how long I spend in the shower.

Various websites that have suggestions for reducing your carbon footprint recommend taking a military shower; a shower that is about three minutes long and requires you to turn off the water after you get wet and then turn it on again when you want to rinse. But I must confess that I love being under a hot running shower. I struggle to reduce the time I take. And in my case, turning off the water after getting wet is not very practical; I have a slippery old two handled faucet and adjusting the water to the right temperature is tricky; I would take more time and water adjusting the temperature than I would in saving water.

The challenges and angst I have experienced in trying to reduce my carbon footprint is part of well documented phenomena known as the Jevon's Paradox. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox I've learned that the modern convenience of running water makes it easy to be wasteful. I waste more water and quite possibly more energy than I would if I had to haul the water out by the bucket full, chop wood, and build a fire just to warm it up. But if I could somehow use the same water I would have used before I had the convenience of running hot and cold water, then I would be saving more energy as well as time than before I had the convenience.

When I was a kid I learned about washing up when you couldn't take a bath. I'm not talking about just a sponge bath where you wash your hands and face, I mean cleaning your whole body with just a wash cloth and a sink of water. I've used this technique to great advantage when I've been camping at more rustic sites. I'm not sure how many people know how to do this, so I thought I'd post about it.

A bucket bath requires about the least amount of energy I know of for getting clean. I use a mop bucket which holds about two gallons of water, which is about a quarter of the water used in a low flow three minute shower. http://cadlab6.mit.edu/2.009.wiki/anchor/index.php?title=Water_used_for_3-min_shower_with_low-flow_head And if I had an electric hot pot, I could warm my water even more efficiently than with the traditional hot water heater during the time it takes me to get ready to take a shower/bath. I use two wash clothes: one to stand on so I don't freeze my feet on the porcelain tub and the other to wash myself with. I also have a small bowl with which to dish water out of the bucket onto my head.

I start by cleaning my face with a wet soapy washcloth. Hairy parts work best if I get them wet and apply soap directly before scrubbing. Extra suds can be applied to other parts of the body. I use the washcloth to wipe and rinse. Not having a lot of water on my skin at any given time keeps me from getting too cold. Next I do my hair: first getting it wet by using the bowl to scoop water over my head and dripping back down into the bucket, sudsing and squeezing excess suds out into the tub before rinsing into the bucket with the bowl. Finally, I slowly dump the whole bucket of hot water over my head and savor the feeling of hot water pouring over my body. When the glorious rinse is done, I quickly sponge off as much water as I can with a washcloth, and squeeze out as much water as I can out of my hair before stepping out of the tub and getting a towel.
By taking a bucket bath I found that I save more than energy on hot water. I save time I might have spent lingering under water that just poured down the drain. My bathroom doesn't get as humid so I don't have to run a fan. My towel doesn't get as wet so it dries more quickly and doesn't need to be changed as often. And my tub doesn't get as dirty when I take bucket bath as when I take a shower so there's less cleaning that needs to be done.

By using a bucket I can exercise self control over the convenience of running hot and cold water and not fall prey to the Jevon's paradox. I can use the convenience of running hot and cold water without wasting more resources and time than my ancestors who didn't have the convenience. By using a bucket every time I bathe, I save at least sixty gallons of water from having to be processed at a waste treatment facility, a savings of 237.6 J, and a savings of 147.6 kJ of energy in not pumping the water out of the ground, and a whopping 26.9 million J saved in not heating water. Altogether I save approximately .25lbs of carbon from going into the atmosphere each day by taking a bucket bath. Over the course of a year that is 91.25lbs.

91 pounds of carbon may not be a lot considering all the other ways I am polluting, but 91 lbs is still 91 lbs -I don't think I can lift that much carbon. Saving 91lbs of carbon from going into the atmosphere didn't cost me a dime. In fact, it probably saves me quite a few because of all the energy saved. Saving 91lbs didn't cost me any time either. It probably saved me time because I didn't waste time wasting water or doing extra cleaning. I did not have to sacrifice any needs to save 91lbs either. I still got clean in relative comfort. And I did not sacrifice the pleasure of having water pour over me, I only limited my pleasure to two gallons. Now if everyone in the USA could save 91lbs a year by changing their bathing habits, we would save 27 billion lbs of carbon per year.

The Confidence of Choice

2010-03-25T12:31:00.000-07:00

Calvinism's great appeal is its theology about the sovereignty of G-d and the security we have in his saving grace. The way Calvin frames salvation is both its attraction and its weakness. According to Calvin, we are depraved human beings incapable of being good on our own. Our confidence in salvation is the way G-d works to our change our hearts from being depraved to being good. And we can be secure in our salvation because G-d has chosen us. Knowing our own weakness and depending on G-d for grace expresses a certain humility that is very good, and I agree with the basics.

However, the draw backs I see are that Calvin's G-d is a wrathful G-d, ready to destroy anyone who is not chosen. Calvin's view of G-d creates an undercurrent of fear that I don't believe is dispelled by generous grace given to the chosen. Especially since the only confident knowledge one can obtain of being chosen is the changes that G-d makes in the chosen one's heart. Fear can change people's actions, but it closes down the heart. If I am in continual fear, I am less likely to be open to a loving relationship which is the whole purpose of salvation. If I am in fear, I am more likely to hold onto my shame, which is what G-d's grace is suppose to remove. If fear motivated changes, then there is doubt that G-d's grace is in my life and that I really do have salvation. If I fail to see changes in my life that I expect or that someone else expects, then the failure creates doubt in my salvation or election, which leads to further fear. So the fear creates doubts that the security of G-d's sovereign election is suppose to alleviate.

This view of a wrathful G-d is part of Calvin's understanding of total depravity. While the purpose of Calvin's doctrine of total depravity is to elevate the beneficent and omnipotence of G-d, he does so by minimizing the value of human beings. The view that humans as totally depraved is one that is full of self loathing and shame. And instead of emphasizing G-d's goodness and power, the doctrine elevates the power of sin or the devil to that of G-d by making sin able to undo the good G-d created within us.

The shame is further compounded by helplessness because Calvin refuses to acknowledge that humans have the ability to choose. Without the ability to choose we become mere puppets or robots responding to stimuli. Neither puppets nor robots are responsible for their actions but their creator or manipulator is. If humans are not able to choose then either our creator is responsible for our sin which by definition of G-d is not possible, or the devil is and thus becomes as powerful as G-d which is also not true. If a person is responsible then they had to have had a choice to begin with. Calvin puts his followers in a double bind by giving them responsibility for their sin, but disallowing them the power to do anything about their sin. In denying our ability to choose, he is also denying our ability to love because foundational to the ability to love is the ability to choose. We failed to love G-d when we chose to eat the forbidden fruit. Jesus commends us to show our love to him by choosing to act according to his direction.

In contrast to Calvin, the Bible tells me I am a good creation. In Romans, Paul talks about how sin enslaves us, but our slavery does not undermine the original goodness G-d made. Instead it is like a trap or entanglement that ties one up so one can't swim and therefore drowns. Paul goes on further and talks about the power of G-d to transform the consequences of sin into something for good. So not only does G-d make us originally good, but he takes the entanglement of sin and turns it into something good as well. This power of G-d to work in us, to transform our lives, has to do with the choices we make to follow him.

The Bible speaks to me of a loving G-d who will go to any lengths to express his love and forgiveness for his creation. It speaks to me of a G-d who empowers me to do right, but does not overpower my choice to do wrong. I can have the confidence that G-d grace will flow through my life as long as I am choosing to follow him whatever mistakes I might make. I know I am forgiven and no longer have to hold onto my shame because I feel his love. And it is his love that frees my heart from shame and motivates the changes in my heart. Even when I feel his absence, I can rest on his saving promises because I know I am choosing to do what he commands me to. The freedom from shame allows me to open my heart to his revelation. By knowing my own heart and choices I am free from doubt. By opening my heart to his revelation, I can know who G-d made me to be, I can choose through his power to live into all the good that he made in me.

Coyote comments on Society

2010-03-15T09:08:00.000-07:00

Yesterday I walked to church. The snow was mostly gone, only small remnants remained of once mountainous piles. The grass was beginning to green. The leaves of spring bulbs were spurting out of the ground with each sunny warm day. The birds serenaded me along the way. Each week I walk, the chorus becomes more diverse.

I walk along a busy road because it is the most direct path. Even that early in the morning, SUVs whiz past me, some turning into a health club so the occupants can get their exercise. The sun does not warm their backs; the wind does not touch their face. And while I haven't seen trash leave a car, the side of the road is littered with careless deposits of empty bottles, cans, and wrappers.

Yesterday amongst the refuse, I saw a sad sight of a coyote which had become road kill. He was on the side of the road, head smashed, guts strewn out, and two surgical gloves on the ground next to him. Apparently a policeman had removed the animal from being a further obstruction to traffic. It was a poignant symbolic picture of what our society is doing to nature.

The come back of the coyote into our suburban landscape is a celebratory thing. The coyote helps to keep our ecosystem in balance. For the most part he eats small rodents: the mice, rats, and rabbits that eat our trash and gardens, and if given a chance would invade our homes. But sometimes the coyote will lunch on baby deer. His presences culls deer populations which over graze their habitats and encroach our yards when they have decimated the vegetation in their territory. Without predators like the coyote, we would not be able to grow the food we eat. Eventually, our limited man-made ecosystems of gardens and farms would overwhelmed by pests. Without the coyote, we doom ourselves to eventual starvation.

In spite of the hazards of destroying ecosystems, our busy lives run right over nature. Our roads run right through wild habitat with more concern for the dollars that will travel through than the ecosystem they bisect. We are in such a hurry for technological improvements, and so concerned for our own economy, that we don't even see the natural economy of plants and animals we run over. We are more concerned about the dent in our car from hitting a coyote than about the fact that a coyote family may starve because a parent has died. We care more about getting where we want to go right now, than about how long we can preserve our lives in an environment we are slowly destroying.

The way the coyote was removed from the road illustrated the callousness with which we destroy creation. Our hunter-gatherer ancestors depended on a balanced ecosystem to survive. They appreciated the life they took in order to feed their families, and many cultures practiced thanking their prey for giving up their lives. But the driver of the car in our culture did not even stop to consider what he had hit. The policeman who removed the body from the road insulated himself first with plastic -that man-made substance associated with imitation and the unnatural. Nature, that which had nourished our ancestors was now treated as contaminated. And the man that treated nature as contaminated, contaminated nature with his plastic surgical gloves which can never be recycle into life again.

The disrespect for nature the policeman showed by polluting with his rubber gloves was reinforced by how he disposed of the body. The coyote was not buried out of respect for the dead, nor were his fur coat and meat harvested for their usefulness to mankind. Instead they were wasted, left to rot with the rest of the refuse from modern society at the side of the symbol of man's progress -the road.

The rush and carelessness with which the body was disposed of only further strengthened the image of how quickly our society is progressing to its doom. The proverb 'waste not, want not' forecasts our society's future need. We are so intent on our own immediate wants and desires that we do not think about others. Whatever gets in our way, we run over; whatever we deem is not useful, we dispose of; and there is no time spent considering the consequences of our actions. If we did, we might be appalled at our own gruesomeness.

Angry like Amos

2010-03-08T05:15:00.000-08:00

I must confess I'm angry. I'm angry at all those Christian people asking me for donations to help out some poor person in Haiti, Africa or Asia. I'm angry with all those people who want to pray for peace. And I'm angry with church goers who give up TV, facebook, chocolate, or meat for lent.

Our world has a crisis going on right now; every minute, every second green house gases are getting added to the environment. These green house gases are changing the climate all over the world. The weather we depend on is becoming more undependable and more severe. The changes in weather is melting glaciers and arctic ice, raising sea levels, expanding desserts, flooding coastlines, destroying property and lives with storms, and increasing tectonic instability.

The people who are hurt the most from these climatic changes are those who live on the margins of society. Those who have no place or money with which to escape the path of the hurricane. Those who can't afford to build their homes with earthquake materials. Those who live on the edges of the ocean and those whose livelihoods are dependent on the vicissitudes of weather patterns and glacial run off.

Our world has a crisis going on right now; every minute, every second oil is pumped out of earth's reservoirs and coal is scraped from its rocky crevices. Every gallon of oil and pound of coal is carbon long sequestered from our atmosphere. Released again, it changes the balance nature works to maintain. Released again our atmosphere returns to a time when life consisted of algae.

The people who depend upon the diversity of life, upon ecological niches that have existed for thousands if not millions of years will be hurt the most by the wanton consumption of oil and coal. But even if there was no ill ecological affect to the use of oil and coal, the greed and need that drives the production and sale of such resources has in itself caused much human conflict and suffering. Those who have been hurt the worse have been the poor who find employment in their country's military, loosing their lives for their country's quest to protect its economic interests; the dispossessed whose land has been forfeited to large companies making money from selling energy resources cheaply; those whose employment is forfeited to opportunities that cheap transportation affords; and those wages are suppressed due to competition with machines fed by cheap energy.

There is a deep injustice to this crisis. An injustice that enters into every fabric of our lives. Most of oil and coal that is burned is not done so for the necessities of life. A very small portion is used for the sake of saving lives. Most of these green house gases are added to the environment because we are accommodating our convenience and pleasure. We don't want to be inconvenienced by sharing transportation -each one of us need our own car. We save our time by driving so that we can go to the gym and work out instead of choosing to walk or bike to places we need to go to. We want the opportunity to go to a show, a restaurant, a store -when we want, where we want. We don't want to wear extra layers in the winter, or sweat in the summer. We surround our selves with lights and electronic entertainment. It doesn't matter that there is a restaurant we can walk to or a board game we could play. It doesn't matter that we have more clothes in our closets than we wear, we need to purchase something new. We accumulate so much, we need more space to put it in -more space that produces more green house gases in its construction, more space that produces green house gases to heat and cool. We want strawberries in winter and most of our food comes from several states away, if not from another country altogether.

All these conveniences come at a cost to the poor of the world. All of these conveniences come at a cost to our environment. Those who enjoy these conveniences do not bear the true cost of poverty and environmental destruction. Instead, those who enjoy these conveniences are healthy, warm, well fed, and have extra time and money. Donating that extra time or money gained through ill gotten means does not undo the initial damage caused by obtaining those conveniences. If money saved by purchasing sweatshop products from half way around the globe were placed in the offering plate, it could not undo the poverty caused by poor wages or the damage done through contributing green house gases.

The prophet Amos was similarly displeased with the offering brought by the Israelites. Amos prophesies for the Lord saying: “I hate, I despise your religious feasts; I cannot stand your assemblies. Even though you bring me burnt offerings and grain offerings, I will not accept them. Though you bring choice peace offerings, I will have no regard for them. Away with the noise of your songs! I will not listen to the music of your harps. But let justice roll on like a river, righteousness like a never failing stream!” Isaiah makes similar comments at the beginning of his book. And in Hosea, the Lord says, “For I desire mercy, not sacrifice, and acknowledgement of God rather than burnt offerings.”

I'm angry at all those Christian people asking me for donations to help out some poor person in Haiti, Africa or Asia, not because they want to help some poor person, but because they are looking for offerings not advocating for true justice through a change in lifestyle. They are merely asking for a temporary handout that makes them feel good because they helped someone out. They are not asking me to help change the fundamental problems of injustice that caused the poverty like reducing my carbon foot print nor are they interested in changing their own carbon foot print.

I'm angry with all those people who want to pray for peace, not because they want peace, but because they are unwilling to forgo the conveniences and accumulations that create a climate for conflict. I'm angry with church goers who make symbolic sacrifices for lent, rather than make true changes in life habits that would reduce their carbon footprint or contribute to furthering justice in the world. Any offering or sacrifice we make that allows injustice to continue is worthless in the eyes of God, and he hates it more than I do.

But we serve a God of grace and mercy. If we change -if we act to bring true justice into the world and repent from the injustice we have committed, God is faithful to forgive us our sins. He welcomes us back home as the father receives the prodigal son, lavishing his mercy upon us. As we give up our conveniences, as we sacrifice our free time and spend our money more justly, we enter his grace where he satisfies our needs better than we could ever imagined. Jesus promises that whoever wants to save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for him would find it. If we want to save our time, our money, our lives by destroying the environment will lose, but if we lose our time, or money, or even our lives promoting justice, including environmental justice, will find life, and find it more abundantly.

Turning Stones to Bread

2010-02-24T10:09:00.000-08:00

Photo taken by Meg White

Last weeks Sunday scripture reading was about the temptation of Christ. I was struck by Satan's request to turn stones to bread. My first thought was of a madman eating stones as if they were bread -breaking his teeth and loosing his mind to the vicissitudes of deprivation as his body could not absorb the nutrients of the rocks. By refusing to eat stones, Jesus recognized the frailty of his human body rather than try to become super-human and invincible.

My second thought was how modern agriculture has turned stones into bread. Chemical fertilizer is made from petroleum and mined potassium. Both petroleum and water for irrigation come from drilling into the earth. The petroleum provides nitrogen fertilizer and fuel for farm equipment including pumps for irrigation. The vast majority of all the food we eat depends on mining these stones.

But turning stones into bread is unsustainable and has major environmental consequences. There is a limit to the amount of potassium or petroleum we can mine out of the ground. The water we pump out of the ground in minutes has taken many, many years to seep down to underground reservoirs. We are currently taking the water out faster than it is being replenished.

God created a microbial community to provide plants with the nutrients they need. When farmers want to help nature out by adding chemical fertilizers, they end up killing the microbes that originally provided the plants nutrients. This starts a vicious cycle where the farmer needs to add more and more chemical fertilizers to gain the same harvest.

Not all the chemical fertilizer we put in the fields are taken up by the plants. Every time it rains or the crops are irrigated some of that fertilizer is washed down river. Algae thrive quickly on the fertilizer drawing out the oxygen from the water -so much oxygen that other aquatic life dies. As the farmer adds more chemical fertilizer to his fields, more aquatic life dies. The bounty for the modern agrobusiness is scarcity for the fisherman.

By turning stones into bread, we are walking the path of madmen. In our effort to be super-human and not depend on the frailty of nature, we are participating in practices that will be our own undoing. The stones that we eat now will starve us in the end, and turn our society into ravaging madmen.

Jesus countered Satan's temptation with the word of God: “Man does not live by bread alone, but by every word that proceeds from the mouth of God.” If we look to the word of God, we find that he instructs us to care for creation. He gives us an example of servant leadership. If we follow Christ's example, we will find that God has provided for us more than we need. God does not give us stones when we ask for bread.

Evolution of Original Sin

2010-02-17T11:10:00.000-08:00

Image found at toonpool.com

One of the challenges of considering an evolutionary genesis is dealing with the doctrine of original sin. The traditional teaching on original sin is that once mankind sinned the whole world changed; that all of creation became infected and/or subjected to sin. The idea that mankind evolved over million of years due to natural forces that we see at work today in nature does not seem to be compatible with teachings of original sin. So, that would lead to questions of either the Bible is wrong or evolution is wrong. However, I don't believe either one is wrong, but I wonder if our interpretation of original sin doesn't need to be modified some what.

The author of Genesis 1 paints a peaceful picture of creation. One that is good and obeying the will of God. Life does not seem to go contrary to the will of God until Adam and Eve eat of the fruit of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. But there is one exception of the tempting serpent that is not quite fully explained. How does a good creation get inhabited by the devil?

We might first assume that the serpent was physical manifestation invented by the devil, similar to how the Holy Spirit is in the form of a dove, and therefore conclude that evil didn't affect the physical world until after Adam and Eve ate of the fruit. But Genesis makes clear that the serpent is a part of God's creation that embodies the devil.

The serpent is described in Genesis 3 as “more crafty than any of the wild animals the Lord God had made”. And God addresses the serpent as cursed “above all the livestock and all the wild animals” which puts the serpent in the same created order as all the animals. But the serpent is also acting the part of the devil tempting Eve to eat the forbidden fruit. This connection between the animal serpent and the devil is reinforced by the apostle Paul in Romans 16:20 when he says “The God of peace will soon crush Satan under your feet,” an allusion to God's curse on the serpent. The idea that God's creation can embody the devil is reinforced in the New Testament. When Jesus cast the demons out of a possessed man he gave permission for them to go into pigs, which promptly drowned themselves.

So if animals can embody the devil, does that mean that they can also sin? In other words, just because animals are under the control of evil does that mean that they are sinning? Could evil be in the world, but sin not be in the world? And is sin or the ability to sin a characteristic of humanness?

The Old Testament makes clear that there are several different kinds of sin -wrongs done out of ignorance, wrongs done on purpose, and wrongs done through lack of action. Wrongs done on purpose and wrongs done through lack of action are sins as a result of the choices that one makes. Even though a sin of ignorance is done unintentionally, it is still something that is chosen. The sin of ignorance becomes a sin of choice as we learn from consequences we experience that we have done wrong . So sin is a wrong choice.

Humans aren't the only ones who can make choices. Scientists John Conway and Simon Kochen have shown that all matter has the ability to choose. http://users.tpg.com.au/raeda/website/theorem.htm
But does nature know which choices are wrong or right? If the sin remains a sin of ignorance then the perpetrator cannot be culpable. The whole point of the story of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil is that humans became culpable when they acquired the knowledge of which choices were wrong and which were right. Prior to the consumption of the fruit, the only knowledge of a possible wrong choice was the revelation that they weren't to eat the fruit. Once Adam and Eve ate the fruit their ability to know of what choices were wrong or right expanded. Humans acquired the ability to reason what their hearts felt and have it inform their actions.

Once the ability to reason is acquired as a human characteristic, it is not possible to undo it without somehow annulling what it means to be human. The ability to choose right from wrong does not predispose a person to choose one avenue over the other. An ignorant yet innocent person might make a choice wrong due to his ignorance. The consequences of those actions would enlighten the individual about the 'wrongness' of that behavior. Once aware, the individual would experience guilt. The shame felt would create a negative feedback loop that reinforced the poor choices that caused the guilt to begin with, leading the individual to sin by choice.

The term 'original sin' would refer to the original guilt conferred on humanity through an action that brought about the ability for reason to predicate action. The influence of guilt over the course of human history is not negligible and has helped to shape us into who we are and our relationship with the rest of creation. What was once a diversity of humanoid species is now a single species. Ecosystems have been shaped by human activity. Other species have been either cultivated or extinguished based on human selection. Civilization has developed in large part to human desire for justice.

The beauty of the gospel is that Jesus frees us from our guilt original to Adam and Eve or inherited along the way through our own action or that of our ancestors. The good news is that not only are we free from guilt but that we are (can be) empowered by the Holy Spirit to make right choices. The catch is that we have to repent and surrender our lives to loving the Lord our God (Father) with all our hearts, minds, souls, and strength. And loving our neighbors as our selves. The wonderful mystery is that in giving up our lives for God, we experience life more abundantly, both now and later. Death cannot control us anymore.

Determining the Truth of Mystical Experience

2010-02-02T20:03:00.000-08:00

How do we know what is true, particularly when it comes to mystical experience? Below is my reasoning criteria for determining truth.

1. We know something is true first because we experience it. We know gravity because we fall down. We know a flower because we experience the characteristics of a flower.

2. We know something is true secondly because of logical and thematic consistency. We observe that everything falls down. We are able to extend our experience of gravity to a universal truth because of the consistency with which two masses attract each other. We know a flower is a flower and not bee for example because of characteristic consistencies between other examples of the same type; flowers belong to plants, all flowers are used for pollination, each flower has petals, stamens, pistils. Something that is a true flower is something that has all the characteristics of what a flower is defined to be.

3. Truth builds on truth. We understand the general concept of force because of understanding the experience of acceleration of gravity. We understand that truth of the pollinator because we understand the truth of the flower.

4. Therefore there is truth in mystical experience because it is experience. (see #1)

5. The truth of mystical experience is true because of how it reflects logical and thematic consistency with other sources of truth including other experience. (see #2) Mystical experience that is consistent with Biblical truths is considered to be Christian mysticism. The consistency to other truths imparts the value of truth onto/into the experience. Mystical experience that is not consistent with outside truth may be considered suspect if not false. St Peter had the mystical experience of a sheet of animals lowered down out of heaven and commanded to kill and eat. The truth of the mystical experience was not that there are sheets of animals floating around in the sky. The truth was in the fact that God made all things good.

6. Mystical experience illuminates new truth by building on other truth. (see #3) If a person starts with the truth that God is love. And then experiences the love of God, then they come to the truth that God loves them. This experience combined with the truth that all persons are equal can then be used to understand the truth that God loves others as well.

7. There is a lot of consistency between religions which would lend credence to valuing those commonalities as true. This is the same basis by which we validate scientific truths.

8. Any mystical experience that demonstrated logical and thematic consistency with common truth might also be considered true. (see #2)

9. There may be a third way of evaluating the truth of a mystical experience and that would be based on its predictive ability. This is also the way scientific truths are validated. But not all mystical experiences are of this nature.

Seeing evolution in Genesis 2

2010-01-28T19:30:00.000-08:00

Many people have objected to Evolution base on a literal interpretation of Genesis 1. In recent years, theologians have emphasized the poetic nature of Genesis 1 suggesting that using Genesis 1 as a scientific record is inappropriate. While this attitude is not an explicit acceptance of evolutionary theory, it does implicitly give room for the possibility of an evolutionary means for God to create the world.

I have attempted to harmonize the history of evolution with Genesis 1 in the following blog posts: http://thoughtloose.blogspot.com/2008/05/in-beginning-there-was-evolution.html http://thoughtloose.blogspot.com/2008/06/good-but-perfect.html and http://thoughtloose.blogspot.com/2008/06/egg-came-first.html This is only a rough draft. I have attempted to learn what I can to make the synthesis both accurate scientifically and theologically sound. However, I am still in the learning process, and science is still in the learning process, so I have had to make some assumptions which may not be accurate.

I would like to move further on in scripture and give Genesis 2 its evolutionary frame work. I would like to change the traditional name of the first man from his traditional Hebrew rendering of Adam to his Latin name of Homo. While there is very interesting linguistic constructs in Hebrew for using the name Adam, English does not convey any of those meanings and the reader is much more likely to connect Homo, the Latin name for man or Adam, to the biological name for the category of species of which human belong.

I may have jumped the story ahead too far when I described God creating mankind in chapter 1. Genesis 2 has a much more detailed account of how mankind was created than Genesis 1. Therefore, it might be better to wait and put the detailed information in the second chapter.

In reading Genesis 2, I have tried to imagine the evolutionary circumstances under which such descriptions might be true. There are several characteristics mentioned: first there is a barren wasteland that is self watered (Gen 2:5); mankind seems have originated from the barren land (Gen 2:7); man is then either transported to Eden (Gen 2:15) or the barren land is transformed into Eden (Gen 2:8,9) which is a diverse forest, and out of which the major rivers of the then known world are derived (Gen 2:10-14). Adam is a vegetarian, eating predominantly from trees (Gen 1:30, 2:16). He's lonely (Gen 2:18), and he has linguistic abilities (Gen 2:19). Eve is created out of Adam (Gen 2:21-23). And they wear no clothes (Gen 2:25).

Geologically speaking a self watering landscape is called a fen. A fen is change in the elevation of the landscape where the water table is higher on one side causing water seepage down to the lower elevation.

Most land is not barren unless it is a desert. The description of Eden is one of lots of water. Even in prehistoric times we have record of lots of vegetation covering the earth. It does not make sense that humans would have been created where there was no food. However, the barrenness described could have been a temporary phenomenon which aided in the development of humans from their biological cousins.

Specieation is often associated with catastrophic events. Significant environmental changes can separate population groups allowing distinguishing variations to create new species over time. Catastrophic events also play the role of redefining 'survival of the fittest' because they change what food sources and nesting sites are available.

A large volcanic eruption like that of Mt. St. Helens would temporarily create a barren landscape. Large volcanic boulders thrown from the eruption and piled up would provide multiple “caves” as a new source of shelter. And the new caldera could be a water reservoir which could feed a fen like landscape. The first vegetation to return to the region would be trees, because tree roots would not have been damaged by the catastrophe and they would be well watered from the caldera.

(There is evidence that the volcanic eruption of Toba, might have had an evolutionary effect on human development.)

I can even imagine that a volcanic explosion could isolate the land by creating a water causeway between it and the nearest land mass. Or perhaps the four rivers described in Genesis created four sides, cutting it off from the mainland. Such isolation would discourage or prevent predators from living there, making it a peaceful habitat for hominids to multiply rapidly, and giving the impression that all animals were also herbivores.

Early hominids would have been well adapted to getting fruit from the trees. An island would have few competitors for all the fruit. If there had been a recent disaster, animals that might have formerly eaten the fruit in that particular habitat may still be population recovering from the devastation. With good shelter, plenty of food, and few if any predators, any hominid population would have multiplied. There would be a fair bit of diversity inherent in a population explosion.

All animals communicate with each other, both within a species and between species. The ability to communicate aids social interaction, which in turn promotes longevity and reproductive success within the group. If there is a situation where similar groups are competing for the same resources, the group with improved linguistic abilities would out compete the others.

The development of linguistic abilities creates a positive feedback loop because of how it influences mate selection. Birds choose their partners based on how closely the potential mate's song is like that of the hen's father. Farmers know that if they want to develop certain genetic traits in the offspring they will mate the mother to the son or the father to the daughter. So the idea that Eve came from Adam is a confirmation of how genetic traits are developed. Eve would have been the offspring of the daughter of Adam and Adam himself. She would have had much of the same genetic make up as Adam himself, right down to “bone of my bones, and flesh of my flesh”.

In order for Adam to have fathered Eve, they would have had to have lived in an environment of few predators. If Adam and Eve were like pygmies and became sexually mature at 12yrs, Adam would have had to live at least thirty six years before he would have been able to have fathered Cain, Abel, or Seth. Our closest biological relative, chimps, live on average forty years in the wild. So the idea that mankind could have evolved within just a couple of generations is quite plausible.

Thoughts on the Nature of God

2010-01-19T20:51:00.000-08:00

I had a couple of thoughts today about the nature of God. One was about the changing nature of God, and the other was about God's omniscience. I was inspired by thoughts I thought I read Richard Beck's blog a week or so ago, but now I can find the relevant post. Anyway, I was reading about how one view of God's sovereignty and man's free will has to do with how God is in the process of creating the world therefore he doesn't know the end of the story because he is in the process of making that story. Thus, God's lack of knowledge about the future give mankind freewill.

These thoughts resonated with me for several reasons. First, because I take an evolutionary view of how God created the world. In fact, from everything I read, God is still evolving new species. So for that reason and other Biblical references, I interpret the seventh day of rest as being prophetic.

Second, I have recognized that there are limits to grace and these limits often are centered around time. An example, is when a person dies and experiences judgment.

But this kind of thinking stretches me in terms of considering God's omniscience. While God is infinite in a multitude of ways, if limit our conception of infinity to a number line, it is much easier to visualize. There are two ways of at infinity. There is an infinity that stretches indefinitely backwards as well as forwards with no end in either direction. And there is an infinity that has a starting point, but stretches either forward or backwards indefinitely with no end.

I have always considered God to be outside of time because he created time. In other words, I have considered time to be a subset of numbers totally within the bounds of an infinity that had no ends. I figured that at the Big Band time began, and at a some point it would stop and God would continue. I suppose that it might be possible to consider time to be infinite and God would just be time plus some infinite quality that was not time but which bounded time, a sort of untime existence.

I had imagined that heaven was an untime experience, but that may not have been a good assumption. There is no particular reason why time would have to stop. And as I've thought about it more there is a very good reasons why the edge of time might also be a limit of God.

We understand God to be in three persons: the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. The Father is considered to be the creator. The Son is God incarnate as Jesus. And the Holy Spirit is God in spiritual form. Even though Jesus was not born until around 3 BC, he is understood to have been apart of the creation of the world and to have existed before it began. Jesus is the very physical embodiment of God in a human form yet with the full Spirit of God within him.

Jesus embodies God in all the qualities of a physical existence. Jesus existence creates a physical existence by being a definition of that existence. Time is part of our physical existence. If God were to extend beyond time, God would extend beyond himself which seems to be a contradiction.

There is so much change in the world. There are seasons, inventions, evolving species, politics, societies. Life is forever changing. Things that don't change die.

Since God is a god of life. And death is considered to be a result of sin. It seems to me that since change brings life, and lack of change brings death, one of the qualities of God is change. I know that there are plenty of verses that talk about the unchanging nature of God. However, it seems to me that what is unchangeable is his love for us. I will agree that there is one caveat: not all change is good change or at least it doesn't appear to us as good change.

Living the Good Life without Money

2010-01-11T12:06:00.000-08:00

Having a good life has the following characteristics: Good Food, Good Health, Good Relationships, Safety and Connectedness, Meaningful Work, Freedom to Play, and Intellectual Challenges. While money can translate meaningful work into good food, good health, safety and connectedness, it is not always necessary, and generally plays a smaller role in having the good life than most people imagine.

In each aspect of the good life, we may choose to use money to buy what we need, but money is not necessary for us to experience the fullness of the good life. For example, for play we may choose to take a walk in the woods. While there, we discover ripe food. We do the meaningful work of harvesting it and preparing it for consumption. Eating food from its natural state with very little to no preservatives, additives, or heat is much healthier than other options. Taking a walk is healthy. Taking a walk with someone is even better. Learning to identify plants and animals while you walk provides intellectual challenges. None of these things particularly required money. And yet we probably spent money in order to enjoy these things.

We might have needed money to buy good hiking shoes, a sweater to keep us warm, or a jacket to keep out the wind and rain. We might have needed money to buy a jackknife to help us in our harvesting, or buy a canteen to carry water to wash off the dirt, or matches to start a fire with which to cook or keep warm. We might have needed money to pay for the phone call to our friend so that we ended up walking the woods together. Or we might have needed money to buy a book from which we learned the names of plants.

But even in those things where we assume we need money, there is the possibility that it is not necessary. We can knit a sweater. Someone can give us a pair of boots. We can recycle a jug as a canteen. We can make arrangements with our friends when we do see them for future connecting times. We can borrow the book from the library, or learn from someone who has more experience.

Living a good life without money requires a focus on the qualities that make life valuable, creativity with the resources we already have, imagination for exploring new options, and generosity with what we already have. The creativity and imagination necessary to have the good life are forms of play and give us intellectual challenges and meaningful work which are in themselves qualities of the good life.

Generosity creates connectivity and safety in ways that money cannot. Generosity is necessary for having good relationships. And generosity promotes reciprocity, especially if it’s done in relationships, but only if it’s done without the expectation of return. Giving with expectations is merely system of barter, and is usually disappointing because there is often a lack of communication on what is expected. The lack of communication tends to feel like manipulation which most people resist with a lack of reciprocity.

True generosity though creates a positive feedback loop of continuing reciprocity where future payback is generally greater than initial cost of generosity. This increase in the return allows for even greater future generosity. Reciprocity brings us things we need for which we don’t have to pay money for. So that the more we are generous, the less likely we will need money to purchase what we need or want.

We do not need money to be generous. There may be things that we have we consider to be trash that others might treasure. Or things that we are not currently using that we can lend. Even if we do not have much stuff or money with which we can be generous, we all have time and energy. We can spend our time and energy helping someone in their time of need. If we submit to what they want, rather than what we feel like we want to give, our generosity can be received much more readily, and is more likely to be reciprocated. The one exception is when the recipient feels like they are entitled to what we are giving them.

The positive feedback loop of generosity means that over time there are fewer and fewer things we need to pay for. The more we look for opportunities to bless someone else, the more we can live into the good life. Generosity will provide us meaningful work and intellectual challenges. Our safety and play will be a result of the many good relationships and connections we have generated through our generosity. And if we apply these same principles to nature, nature will be generous with us. We will have plenty of healthy food and get plenty of good exercise which will keep us healthy. The key to having the good life without money is generosity.

This Little Light of Mine

2009-12-26T15:08:00.000-08:00

Nate and I have made Christmas caroling part of our tradition for quite a few years now. There are many different methods and places for caroling: shopping malls, churches, nursing homes, friends’ homes. But we have chosen to make neighborhood house to house caroling our venue.

Caroling in the neighborhood is sort of like trick-or-treating; we walk down the block, ringing the doorbell of house after house, singing a verse of a song at place. Before approaching any home, we assess it for decorations and interior lights. It is disheartening to sing to a closed door of dark home, and try and save our larynx for something that looks more hopeful. We examine the tracks in the snow to see who has come and gone, and ask ourselves if it looks like anyone is home before launching into song.

Over the years we have gotten a variety of reactions, from aversion that propels people to scurry away and close the door, to being applauded and bequeathed with can goods, cookies, or chocolates. It is always a good experience to see the pleasure on people’s faces as they hear the good news of Christmas in song. This year we had an unexpected reception that in my mind could only be described as a God moment.

We were a smaller caroling group this year and had gone as far into the neighborhood as our oldest member was comfortable. We turned back and headed home singing at a few more homes along the way. Most of our efforts were appreciated or not behind closed doors. I think we were about three quarters of the way back when we heard shouts behind us. Two teenage girls wanted to know if we were going to carol at their house.

Well, of course! Who could turn down the request for an encore? So we all turned around and trudged back through the snow to several houses past where we had turned around. I was impressed that the girls had come out so far in their PJs to fetch us. I was bundled up well in several layers and had to unzip a bit and let out some steam as they invited us into their home to sing ‘Jingle Bells’.

Their mom had made hot cocoa for us to drink, but had to leave for work before we had made it back to their home. While we drank and chatted, Steve Joe did a wonderful job of asking getting to know you questions. We then sang ‘Joy to the World’ before leaving with a final request of ‘Deck the Halls’.

I was touched that strangers would pursue us, open their homes to us, and bless us with such hospitality. The experience reminded me of the gentile Magi who brought kingly gifts to a Jewish peasant. They had the spirit of Christmas even if they didn’t know whom they were celebrating.

We had attempted to seek the lost and bring light to a dark world with song. In the end, after our own strength had failed us, the lost had found us and together we had shared a special moment of Christmas joy.

Solar Powered Train

2009-12-20T17:28:00.000-08:00

One of the problems with our trans-portation system is that all of it relies on fossil fuels in one way or another. As green as a person might want to live, unless they want to pick their food off the vine or out of a tree, there is going to be some green house gas emissions with everything they purchase. But this does not have to be the case. We have the technology today to transport goods and people without emitting one pound of CO_2.

Solar cell technology has advanced considerably over the years. We now have solar cells that can convert 40% of the incident light energy into electricity. But how much electricity is that? In ideal conditions the insolation of the sun at the Earth's surface is approximately 1,000 watts per square meter for a surface perpendicular to the Sun's rays at sea level on a clear day. According to Wikipedia the average insolation for the Earth is approximately 250 watts per square meter. So on average at peak efficiency we can get 100W/m² with a maximum of 400W/m².

You might not think that the power of a light bulb per square meter could reduce green house gas emissions unless you considered trains. Trains are some of our most efficient means of transportation. They run on dedicated tracks with very little friction and unevenness. They can run at constant speeds for miles upon miles and carry tones of material loaded in a long string of freight cars that pose little additional air resistance other than what was generated by the leading locomotive. When trains were initially invented, the locomotive was driven by a coal powered steam engine, but with advances, steam gave way to a more efficient hybrid system. Diesel engines provide power for electric motors which drive the train, much like hybrid cars do today.

Instead of a diesel engine to provide power for the electrical motors that drive a train I would like to use solar cells and batteries. Solar cells could be easily added to existing boxcars. A typical 60’ boxcar has an external roof area of 66.25 m². With high efficiency solar cells it could theoretically create an average of 6.625kW per boxcar with a peak output of 26.5kW per boxcar. Locomotives generate 560kW of electricity so there would need to be a minimum of eighty-five boxcars to provide enough electricity to drive the train on average solar insolation.

Many trains run 135 cars or longer. Of course not all of the cars on a train are boxcars or have the ability to have a solar cell roof. But then trains do not run continuously. There could be times when the train was stationary where the solar cells would generate electricity to be used in situations when the train had to travel at night or when there was heavy cloud cover. Or the stored electricity could be used to drive a train that didn’t have enough solar collectors to provide all its power needs. And there is the potential of covering the sides of a train with solar cells too, providing an extra source of power.

Rail systems have been over-shadowed by the automobile for the past century due to the ease and convenience of the car, but they have a potential to make a great come back in the future as energy efficiency and carbon emissions become more of an issue. Per pound rail is one of the most cost efficient modes of transportation. But the design of trains is old technology. If trains were to take advantage of new technology in materials, aerodynamics, and electrical power generation, the rail system could make the automobile a thing of the past and bring in a new era of planet conscience transportation at reasonable costs.

What time is it, Mr Fox?

2009-12-13T17:44:00.000-08:00

I've been thinking about a clock that when you looked at it you could tell what day of the year it was as well as the time. Since our calendar is sort of arbitrary anyway in terms of how it broke up the year, I figured I had the freedom to divide the year how made sense to me.

The green circle represents a typical analog clock. The blue and purple rings represents the days of the month and the months of the year. There is a slight exception, at the top and bottom, left and right of the purple ring are four days which I would have as holidays. The 'daily' hand would move around the circle, one day per segment -a total of thirty days. When the 'daily' hand reached the twelve, the 'monthly' hand would move to the next section. When the 'monthly' hand moved to a holiday, the 'daily' hand would stay at the twelve until the 'monthly' hand had moved on to a monthly segment.

Not shown is a 'grace' day that would show up during any time of the year, and twice during leap years. The idea is that the grace day would keep the holidays pegged at the solstices and equinoxes. When a grace day flag showed up then the monthly and daily hands would not move until the clock showing the time had made two revolutions.

The one draw back is that there is no record of which day of the week it is, but maybe that can be included somehow. I'll have to think about it. I've also wondered if it wouldn't be better to show military time instead of the traditional twelve hours.

Fasting for Thanksgiving

2009-11-24T19:07:00.000-08:00

As you sit down to eat your Thanksgiving meal I would like you to consider these quotes from a speech given by the Prime Minister of Great Britain Gordon Brown on October 19, 2009:

http://www.g-can.net/documents/2009%20M10%20191009%20Gordon%20Brown%20on%20Climate%20Change.pdf

“In just 25 years the glaciers in the Himalayas, which provide water for three-quarters of a billion people could disappear entirely.”

“In a recent report of the Global Humanitarian Forum led by Kofi Annan suggests that 325 million people are already seriously affected by drought, disease, floods, loss of livestock, low agricultural yields and decline of fish stocks. A further 500 million are at extreme risk, and every year the effects of climate change are already killing 300,000 people, the numbers killed by Indian Ocean tsunami, and the toll could rise by 500,000 each year by 2030.”

“98% of those dying or seriously affected live in the poorest countries, and yet their countries account for only 8% of global emissions. This is the great injustice of climate change: those being hit first and hardest by climate change are those who have done the least to cause it.”

After reading the prime minister’s speech I looked up these facts: The USA has accounted for at least 25% of the global warming emissions for at least the past ten years and that our emissions have risen over the same period by about 19%. I also found out that according to 2003 statistics, per capita the US emits almost twice as much as any other country, and over six times as much as the world average. You can see where I found my statistics at the following sites:

http://www.thehcf.org/emaila5.html

http://www.nationmaster.com/red/pie/env_co2_emi-environment-co2-emissions

http://www.environmentmaryland.org/reports/global-warming/global-warming-program-reports/too-much-pollution-state-and-national-trends-in-global-warming-emissions-from-1990-to-2007

Two of the consequences of global warming are increased desertification and increases of pests such as locusts. When I read the damning evidence of how much the USA has contributed to the deaths of so many of the world’s poor, I thought of 2 Chronicles 7: 13 “When I shut up the heavens so that there is no rain, or command locusts to devour the land or send a plague among my people, 14if my people, who are called by my name, will humble themselves and pray and seek my face and turn from their wicked ways, then will I hear from heaven and will forgive their sin and will heal their land.

This week we will be celebrating and being thankful for God’s goodness to us. I do not want to suggest that we shouldn’t be thankful, but that we should also mourn our sin. Our sin, more than anyone else in the world, is causing problems to the land of the earth. Our sin is causing the poor to suffer and die.

We need healing. Our land needs healing. Our planet needs healing.

To receive healing, we need to repent. We need to change our ways. Fasting instead of feasting is one way to demonstrate the depth of our repentance. Fasting is one way we can get our minds and bodies prepared to change our ways. Changing our ways is true fasting. Changing our ways are the only means that we are going to mitigate the consequences of global warming and allow the land to heal.

There has been a lot of talk about how global warming is a scam. Denial is difficult to break through. If there is a doubt as to whether global warming is true, fast. When we seek the Lord through fasting, he is faithful and will show us the truth. The consequences of global warming are too serious to ignore.

Living my Convictions

2009-11-23T07:14:00.000-08:00

The image was made by Lois Cordelia and can be viewed and purchased at http://loiscordelia.com/silh_shadrach.htm

For thirty years I’ve been aware of our limited oil supply. For twenty years I’ve been aware of global warming, and each year I learn more in depth of what its consequences will be. For the past ten years, I have been becoming aware of our poor agricultural practices, and better ways of farming. For the past five years I’ve become increasingly aware of the social consequences of my purchases. But this year, my head knowledge has started to go to my heart. This year I have started to repent, and I’m attempting to change and live a different life according to my convictions.

It is a real struggle. Probably the most difficult thing I have ever attempted. It requires a whole new way of thinking about things. Every action is now evaluated in light of new criteria. And as I scrutinize my situation, I find that my whole life is embedded in a system which misuses the planet and the people who live there. And my alternatives do not seem to let my conscience off the hook. Even those things that are marketed as organic or fair trade were transported and possibly produced with energy that contributes to global warming.

I do have some advantages over the average American. I do not have any debt. I live near public transportation. And I own an acre in an urban location, where there is the possibility that I can grow most of my own food. I’ve done a lot of research about the best ways to grow my food, and which wild things are good to eat. Given enough money, I could invest in energy systems that would provide a similar standard of living without the CO₂ footprint. But even given all that, there is so much in what I do and have that contradicts my convictions. And even before my heart felt stricken, I seemed to always be running out of time.

In some ways if I were single, my struggle would be simpler. If I decided I could live without a hot water tank, or electric lights, it would only be my decision. It wouldn’t affect anyone else. All my purchases would be my discretion. And what I fixed for dinner would only have to please me. I wouldn’t have children asking for rides, or wanting to live the way their friends do.

I recognize that change is hard, that it is a process and takes time, and that God gives us strength for the challenge and grace for our failures. I recognize that change is going to cost us something –maybe a lot of something- and I’m willing to pay the price. I also recognize that changes that go against the grain of society will not be popular. But I do not accept that these changes should not be made because they are impractical.

Sometimes living a godly life is impractical –like the situation Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego found themselves in on the plain of Dura. It was either bowing to a statue, or their lives. They could have rationalized bowing by saying that the statue didn’t mean anything to them, therefore whether or not they bowed didn’t really matter. They could have said that no one else who was bowing was really worshiping the statue either, that it was just a ritual you did to keep your job and your head. They could have rationalized bowing by saying that staying alive they would be able to do so much more good than being dead on account of a foolish statue. I’m sure there could be a hundred reasonable arguments to go along with the crowd and bow.

But Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego did the impractical and didn’t bow. They went against the grain of their society, even under great pressure from the most powerful ruler, even without the support of their fellow Jews, they refused to bow. They refused to bow not because they were certain that God would save them, but because doing so they felt doing so would be disobedient to their God. And in the end, God rewarded their faithfulness and their obedience became a great story faith and a witness to awesomeness and power of God.

My heart has become convicted that I am hurting the planet and people –and in many instances killing people, plants, and animals- by using fossil fuels my self or through purchasing items that have been made or transported using fossil fuels. My heart has become convicted that I am damaging the planet and promoting poverty and abuse by not purchasing either organic or fair trade. I feel that it is immoral for me to benefit at the expense of others, and that I am accountable for that damage.

My habits that cause death, destruction, and oppression will certainly not be convenient to change, nor will my changes be popular. They might not even be practical, but sometimes a life of faith is not very practical. I don’t expect that God will rescue me from life’s challenges. Job, Jeremiah, and Hosea lived through very difficult times. But I do expect that he will be with me –even in the fiery furnace.

Speaking out against Global Warming

2009-11-14T07:13:00.000-08:00

I have had an exhausting week, month, and year. I have been trying to promote awareness for global warming and the amount of push back I have gotten has been difficult to say the least. As I have been speaking out, I’ve also been trying to change my life so that I am not contributing to global warming. Even though I have been concerned and have been making changes over a period of time, to eliminate contributions to global warming has been very difficult, since every part of the American way of life seems to use fossil fuels in one way or another.

There are a lot of things about my environment I can’t afford to change right now. There isn’t room or money for me to add more insulation to my house. Even though we have a geothermal heatpump, I don’t have the money to generate the electricity needed with renewable/non-polluting resources. We are exploring different options for hot water that would pollute less, but if we do that, it will stretch the budget. We will have to go without something else, so we can afford it. And right now there are not a lot of extras in our lives to cut back on.

We live a fairly frugal and environmentally conscious life. I hang my clothes to dry –in the basement if I have to. I eat nearly vegetarian. I pick most of my fruits and vegetables off the quick sale rack. I grow some of our food. I compost our food waste. I recycle anything I can. I wear second hand clothing. I don’t iron unless it’s absolutely necessary. And I use environmentally friendly cleaning products, and recycled paper products.

Even so, I have found there are other ways I can reduce my impact on global warming. But it requires sacrifice. I have been adjusting my life in order to wake up with the sun so that I use less electricity at night. I am taking bucket baths instead of showers, because I have very little self-control about time spent under the water. And I am choosing to restrict my travel to places I can get to with walking or by bike.

Restricting my travel is a big sacrifice. It limits my choices of entertainment, friend/family connecting time, groceries, and other purchases. Because of how restrictive it is, I have chosen some exceptions to my anti-drive policy, but I would really like to get to a place where I didn’t drive any more, at least any more fossil fuel propelled vehicles. And my commitment will be challenged even more as the weather becomes more inclement.

I’m hoping that maybe I can get a wind up/solar powered lamp for Christmas and then I can use even fewer lights at night. It would be nice to get a solar battery charger that would work for my computer, but I think that would be too rich for Santa. I think I could also improve in the area of entertainment –choosing things to do that don’t require electricity or driving long distances. That will require quite a bit of research and creativity to find things that my husband would like to do too.

Making changes to my life is challenging. It requires a new way of thinking. It requires breaking old habits and making new ones. It requires persistence to continue to go against the grain of society. It requires putting up with family members that think I’m going too extreme and aren’t afraid to let me know in a variety of ways.

But the issue of global warming can’t be solved by me alone. It requires everyone. And no matter how small my carbon footprint is, if other people don’t reduce theirs, it won’t really change the situation. If I want to reduce global warming, I really need to convince others to reduce their carbon footprints too. I need to speak not only with actions, but words as well.

Speaking out against global warming in this country is not a popular thing to do. I have been criticized by family and friends, some close, others not so close. I have been described as fanatical, deluded, divisive, and arrogant. Even my faith has been questioned because of my stance. And I have been accused of having some particular political agenda.

I am not particularly in favor of big government. I would rather see people care about each other and there not be a need for government. I believe that global warming is one of the gravest injustices of the world. It is the means by which the poor lose their homes, their livelihoods, and possibly their lives all for the sake of the convenience of the wealthy. The poor cannot escape the consequences of global warming; the wealthy can. But I recognize that if people, out of the goodness of their hearts, can’t rectify such an injustice, then there will come a day when the government will or risk anarchy.

I am a Christian and I believe that my faith has noble values that care about the poor. It hurts and angers me that there is such reticence to change with respect to global warming in the Christian community. It hurts that even in my own local church community (which I consider more progressive than most) that global warming is only a concern of a few, and is not considered as important as consumerism. It hurts that issues of global warming are sidelined or ignored for issues of being missional or communal.

I don’t want to suggest that being missional, communal, or preaching about the forgiveness of sins isn’t important. But I do want to suggest that NOT being concerned about global warming is hypocritical with respect to everything else that is taught. It does not work to give a token of relief to the poor, if by the way we are living we are taking away the poor’s life, livelihood, and living quarters. It does not work to speak of God’s grace, but ignore how we treat the least of these through our use of fossil fuels. It does not work to say that we care about God’s creation when we drive long miles to sit in an air-conditioned room with the lights on when sun is pouring through the windows.

When I make such intimations, then I am criticized for being judgmental, or shaming others. I am accused of having an arrogant attitude that communicates that others are ignorant or disobedient. Or that I am not trusting that God will move people’s hearts and trying to take more responsibility than I should. It could be that I could be more gracious about how I witness about global warming. But I get the feeling that people would rather I not say anything at all. They would rather I live my own quiet low carbon emitting life myself and not bother others about an issue, that in their minds is controversial, unproven, political, and not as important as saving souls.

I believe that if we don’t address global warming, we will lose a lot more souls than we will save otherwise.

The Servanthood of Homemaking

2009-11-05T20:13:00.000-08:00

I don’t know if there are more difficult jobs, but I have spent the past twenty three years being a homemaker, and for the most part, it has been a thankless job. I’m not saying that my husband and children don’t ever thank me, but that the appreciation is sporadic and not in proportion to the sacrifice I have made. And on top of rarely getting recognition, it is a job for which I don’t get paid. My value as a homemaker isn’t in how much I earn, but in how little I spend.

Homemaking is a job that has required long hours and countless interruptions. I begin my day with putting away dishes and starting a load of laundry and end my day with countless little tasks like turning out lights and putting away clean socks and underwear before crawling beneath the sheets. Whatever task I do will be interrupted with a phone call, a question from a child or spouse, or some other task that suddenly became more urgent. Usually, I am trying to complete more than one task at a time. I am always trying to make the most of the minutes in the washing machine, the seconds in the microwave, or the hours my child is in school. Errands are well planned, multi-stops events, where I try and get the most done for the least amount of driving. There are never enough hours in a day to get everything done. And whenever I take a break in my home, there is always one more thing to do staring me in the face, nagging me to put it on my ‘to do’ list.

Homemaking is a thousand jobs in one. It’s housecleaning, cooking, and shopping. It’s babysitting, tutoring, and taxi service. It’s home repair, interior decorating, and yard work. It’s part secretary, part nurse, and part psychologist. It’s creativity, frugality, and persistence. It is self-discipline, self sacrifice, and grace.

To succeed at homemaking, I have to have self-discipline. I spend a good portion of my job in the kitchen, but I have to have the discipline about when and how much I eat. I have to discipline myself about when I go to bed and when I get up. And even though I have few commitments for my time, I need to have discipline to manage my time so that as many things get done as is possible.

To succeed at homemaking, I have to put my needs and wants second. I have to fit my desires into the nooks and crannies – in between or after the demands of diapers, bottles, meals, dishes, bills, errands, and domestic disputes have been dealt with. There are times where the need for frugality has required that I live without –without spending on myself except for the necessities like soap and deodorant.

But probably the most important aspect about homemaking is grace. The kind of grace that places quality of life over standard of living. The kind of grace that makes a special effort to fix vegetables in a new or different way so that they will be more likable to finicky eaters. The kind of grace that will not spend money on the desired new toy so that money can be put away for college, but will spend extra time at garage sales to find an equivalent one that has lost its fancy wrapper. The kind of grace that listens first to the spouse’s terrible day and offers comfort, even though little son had thrown a tantrum in the grocery store, or teenage daughter had gone into hysterics over a reminder to do her chores. Or the kind of grace that says ‘no you can’t’ because it is not good for you, or because you haven’t lived up to your responsibilities, even though your child is certain that all his or her classmates ‘can’ and that none of their parents demand such responsibility from them.

There are many varied forms that grace appears in homemaking, and many instances throughout the day when it can be administered. With love, each lowly task becomes a ministry of grace. But without love (the kind of love that begets grace), a house is not a home -just a place to get some sleep, or worse, a prison. Grace is that quality that transforms the servanthood of homemaking from slavery into divine ministrations, from a mere chore of getting someone’s foot wet into a sacrament.

Having the job of homemaking has given me the opportunity to live into God’s grace. I bring to him all my many limitations, my failures, my fears, my wounds. He reminds me of his love, his power, and his plan to work every thing out for good. And as I live in his strength for each day, each hour, and every stressful minute, I give what I have for my family’s many needs, and God multiplies my inadequate efforts such that we all have more than enough. In the end, it’s not my good works that get the praise, but God’s abounding grace. And that’s the way it should be.

Black Walnut Project

2009-10-28T18:26:00.000-07:00

I started a black walnut project a couple of weeks ago. I was so enthused that I had found a free source of black walnuts. They littered the sidewalk and I imagined that someone might be thankful if I cleaned up some of the mess. I was excited to have the black walnuts because they are an indigenous food. I have recently become convicted of the need to eat indigenous food as a way to help support the ecosystem. And I remembered my grandmother complaining that all the squirrels got the black walnuts at her house. I felt like I was reclaiming my heritage by following in my grandmother’s footsteps.

I thought harvesting black walnuts would take me a couple of hours here, a couple of hours there, and I’d be done. I hoped to end up with a bag of black walnut meats, a bag of ground hard shells, and some bottles of black walnut dye/ink. I did some research on the internet and found that black walnut meat went for $15/lb, the shells were valued as a commodity for cleaning metal (in particular blasting barnacles off ships), and people were selling walnut ink for about $1/ounce. I started to dream that maybe I could end up with some dollars in my pocket as well.

I started out spending maybe an hour of collecting black walnuts, bringing home about four full grocery bags. I made a small dent in walnut debris, leaving plenty more another scavenger. Some of the walnuts I collected had already lost their hulls, some I was able to pull the hulls off of while I was collecting them, but others I had to do later at home. My original estimate on dehulling my four grocery bags of walnuts was a couple of hours. A couple of days later I finished.

Then came the challenge of cleaning and drying the walnuts. Again my couple of hours estimate turned into a couple of days. I tried air drying them, but with the cool rainy days, the shells quickly began to grow fuzz. I rinsed them off again and baked them on low temps in the oven. Even so, some of the walnuts have started to grow fuzz again as they sit in a paper bag waiting for me to get around to shelling them. I think that part of the mold problem has to do with the fact that I was not able to get all of the hull out of the crevasses of the shell.

Because I had to wait a few days before the sheller arrived, I thought I would boil up the hulls and save the dye/ink for a possible entrepreneurial product. I had read that black walnut dye is color fast and light fast, but I learned firsthand that it is indelible. All instructions with respect to harvesting and dehulling walnuts give the warning to wear rubber gloves. My mother had given me gardening gloves that had a rubber surface over the palms and finger tips. Unfortunately, that wasn’t enough protection. In order to get the hulls off, I had soaked the hulls-on walnuts in water. While pulling the walnuts out of the now dye stained water, some of the dye seeped through the fabric of the glove and stained several fingers and fingernails. Even after almost three weeks several of my fingernails have a distinctive brown hue.

Another reason I have for getting the dye out of the black walnut hulls is that the dye is a good de-worming medicine. It is so strong that it would kill the worms in my garden if I were to compost the hull straight away, and it would discourage growth of my vegetables. I didn’t want to throw the hulls into a landfill via my garbage can, but I didn’t want to wreck my garden either. I figured that if I could extract all the dye, then the hulls would be safe enough to compost. However, I am starting to have second thoughts. Extracting all the dye is taking a long time, and many, many changes of water. And since the dye is strong enough to degrade plastic, I have run out of containers as well.

I feel like the widow the second book of Kings who had to pay her husband’s debts but didn’t have any money. The prophet Elisha instructed her to get jars from all her neighbors and pour out the little oil that she had. The little oil filled all the jars and provided enough income to keep her sons from going into slavery. I have used all the glass jars in my house and have asked for glass jars from my friends. I think I will be able to fill all of those up as well.

Now whether I will be able to sell all my walnut dye/ink that is another matter, but I’m certainly acquiring lots of product. I’m not sure where to store it all. I think it will be a while before I’m ready to market the ink. I need to make sure the ink won’t go moldy. Or thicken up over time. I need to make sure it works well in my printer and doesn’t damage the cartridge –hmmm, if the ink degrades plastic… And I’d like to experiment to see if I can get the ink to become blacker….more research, more experiments….market research…logo design…company name…lots to do and think about.

I’m getting tired of changing the water. I must be on to the fifteenth change at least. I need the space on my stove and in my kitchen. I want to move on to cracking nuts. And I need to get other things done as well –like raking leaves. This seems to be the way with projects. They always take up more time than I anticipate and I have such a hard time getting any closure. I feel like I’m back to square one: scrubbing and drying walnuts so that they will keep better. I salvaged a potato bag, and I’m using an old toothbrush to get the rest of the hull out from all the little cracks. After I get them cleaner, I’ll dry them in the oven again and put them in the potato bag instead of a paper sack. Hopefully they won’t grow any fuzzy stuff this time, and they will keep until someday I can get around to cracking them.

A Utilitarian Argument for Faith in Christ

2009-10-22T17:00:00.000-07:00

If a person’s belief produced actions that are beneficial to society, then would that belief have value? Or is the only value of a belief, its validity? And if a belief is shown to be true, does it stop being a belief? Can a belief have value even if it is untrue? Could you go the other way and say that if a belief is shown to have value, then at least some part of the belief must be true?

For example, the golden rule, is a postulate about how people should treat each other. We believe that the golden rule is true or a noble way to live based on the success of those who live that way, or the amount of interpersonal success a person enjoys compare to the extent to which they follow the golden rule. We might be able to argue that evolution favors humans who can successfully live in community and that if all members of a community follow the golden rule that society will have less conflict and more babies, more children who make it to adulthood and have offspring themselves, thus empirically the golden rule is successful, therefore it is valued as true. But I’m not sure that we can deduce that the golden rule is a true belief based on accurate application of logic to other valid principles.

Many religions are the codifying of social behaviors in order to make their community more successful. And almost all of them contain some form of the golden rule. Most have deities associated with certain admirable spiritual qualities that they wish their adherents to emulate. There is a common belief among religions that failure to obey their religious practices will lead to degradation of society, moral chaos, and becoming conquered in war. Various religions offer personal rewards for compliance.

The general consistency between religions leads me to I believe that religious practice provided the society with some utility, and the longevity of the practice of religion implies a certain degree of success. If religion in general is successful, what common factor(s) make for success? And if we could identify successful beliefs could those beliefs be considered true? Some religions seem to be more successful than others. They have more adherents and are spread across a larger geographical area. Does that have anything to do with their beliefs either being more true or more of them being true than a less successful religion?

I find it very interesting that humans throughout known history have perceived spiritual qualities such as love, hate, beauty, mercy, and the like. I also find it interesting that the general population throughout history has deified and personified these spiritual qualities. It seems to say a lot about how humans operate: that we are relational and we understand symbols. We seem to understand spiritual qualities best through human behavior. And we seem to need to have something greater than ourselves to admire or worship.

Of all the religions that I know about, Christianity emphasizes forgiveness the most. I find that without forgiveness, Christianity makes no sense. Christianity has personified forgiveness in their deity of Jesus. And it is through deity power that Christians find forgiveness and are empowered to forgive. I’m not sure how a person would be able to extend forgiveness in the graciousness that is idealized in the Bible without the power of a deity. The beauty of forgiveness as expressed through the story of Jesus Christ is that justice is satisfied simultaneously as forgiveness is extended. The justice of God is not taking away life for life, but giving new superb life in exchange for the gift of forgiveness. Christ offers forgiveness for men taking away his life and more, and in exchange for giving up his life he receives a new life that is eternal, and is not subject to the kinds of suffering mortal life entails. That same gift of new life is promised to all of Christ’s followers who are willing to give up their lives.

I believe that to the extent a person lives a life of forgiveness, they are following Jesus, even if they do not mentally make the connection between the spiritual practice and deity of Jesus and his symbolic yet real act of forgiveness. And I believe that to the extent that a person practices a life of forgiveness, they receive the rewards of forgiveness, that is eternal life, whether or not they mentally understand the symbolic yet real forgiveness of Jesus Christ. But just like it is easier to do algebra if you learn how symbols and equations work, I think it is easier to practice forgiveness if you understand the symbols of forgiveness, that is Jesus Christ.

This I Believe and Why

2009-10-07T00:24:00.000-07:00

A friend of mine was asked these questions by an atheist: to outline (1)”which propositions of basic Christian theism” I affirm and (2) why I believe these propositions are true. Also, you ask (3) how my beliefs about God inform my sense of meaning and purpose in life and (4) what the Christian life means to me. The following are my propositions and their justifications.

I have been made with the capacity, understanding, and choice to love.

I believe this is true base on my experience. There seems to be times when there is a positive spiritual bond between myself and other things/persons. This spiritual bond seems to create an awareness of the needs of others or myself. I experience others caring for me in ways I cannot explain through a simple contractual equity. I care for others when there is no expectation of return benefit, or where the return benefit is not commensurate with the care expressed. This is something I can choose to do or not. I call this phenomenon in myself and others, love.

There is a higher power.

I believe this is true because of empirical observation. I know that I, as a human, am not the strongest power. There seems to be a life force that makes us alive over which we have no control. People survive the seemingly impossible, and people die with seemingly no explanation. We cannot instantly will ourselves to die. If we are sick, we cannot instantly will ourselves to get better. And yet, there are those who get well through spiritual means when medically there was no hope. These instances of miraculous healing have occurred throughout history and have witnesses. I do not claim that all ‘miraculous’ healing claims are true, but that some are, and that those that are provide evidence of a higher power.

I believe there is a higher power for other observable reasons as well, such as the serendipity confluence of events which works things out –sometimes before I was even aware of the potential problem, the awesomeness of creation, and my own limited ability to think, perceive beauty, power to create, and ability to love. I don’t know how it is that I am self aware or that I think, yet I know that I am and that I do. I don’t believe beauty is definable yet I know what is beautiful. I don’t believe that love is definable and yet I understand what is love.

I know I can think of and make reality things that don’t exist yet; that is an awesome power. I see things coming into being that didn’t exist before without my (or other human) interference. I infer that those things were thought of and somehow made by another force, a higher power. I infer that my existence was at some point a result of a higher power bringing into existence that which gives me life and sustains me.

The primary characteristic of God is love.

I believe this is true through inference and logic. I love what is beautiful. I love what I create. Because of my love for what is beautiful or what I create, I work to preserve it. If a higher power preserves life through a miraculous healing then it would be logical to assume that the higher power loved that life. If beauty is created by some higher power, then I would infer that the higher power also loved that which was beautiful, not only because it was beautiful, but because it was the product of the higher power’s creation. It would seem that the primary motivating force behind the actions of creation and preservation would be love. If love is the primary motivating force of the higher power then it may be logical to assume that love is the primary characteristic of the higher power.

I would like to call that higher power God.

I am accountable to my creator.

I believe this is true through inference from my personal experience of being a creator.

The relationship between the creator and the created object is interesting. What is created is an expression or extension of the creator, but does not define who the creator is. A creation is the possession of the creator unless he gives it away. The creator is free to destroy what he created as long as it is still his possession. Even if the creator gives his creation away, he is responsible for the consistent functioning of that creation. This is true even if what he creates is autonomous. What a creator makes affects others, so others hold him accountable for the impact of what he creates. He receives commendation for positive impact and criticism for negative impact. In our society, a creator can be fined or imprisoned if what he created hurts or destroys others and/or their property. Because a creator is accountable for his creation, his creation is accountable to him.

So by inference, if I am created, then I am accountable to my creator, even if I have the free will to choose to do things I was not created for. If I am created, then my creator is free to destroy me. And if I behave in a way that is harmful to others, my creator is obligated to either repair me so I don’t malfunction or to destroy me.

Love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your mind, with all your soul, and with all your strength.

I love my creations, by inference, I assume that whoever created me would love me. Reciprocating the love given would be an equitable, if not the most important, action a created being could do for their creator. Only a love that involves our whole being is good enough for one who created our whole being. A partial love is not much love at all.

Loving God is where belief becomes faith through action. Loving God is all about loving who God is: love, beauty, patience, kindness, mercy, justice, creativity, etc. Loving love is about expressing that characteristic, about making it a characteristic of ourselves. The more we live out the characteristics of God, the more we become an expression of God himself as his creation. The best love for God comes from making the most of who he created us to be.

Love your neighbor as yourself.

I believe in this directive because it is in just about every religion in one form or another. It is one of the few things humanity throughout time has consensus on. I believe in this directive because it is the basis for society. It is drawn from our own hardwired sense of equity, providing both justice and community. I believe in this directive because it is an extension of loving one’s creator since each created being is an expression of the creator himself. A person’s neighbor is the subject through which their love for their creator becomes action.

Love is stronger than hate.

I believe that love is stronger than hate because of my observations of how love and hate operate.

Hate is destructive. Hate perpetuates itself through injuring others. If a person received injury as a result of hate, but did not lash out at others, then the hate would not propagate past the original offender. When the offender dies, his hate dies with him.

Love on the other hand gives life. The love of the sun gives light so the plants can live. The love of the plants gives life to the insects and other herbivores, which in turn give life to carnivores. As each one gives to another, its own life is diminished, but there is more life over all.

What we see in the natural world we also see in the economic world. When we give of our time, our resources, and creativity, when there is trust, honesty, and equity, then the economic pie gets bigger. When there is greed, deceit, graft, and thievery, then the economic pie gets smaller.

Jesus is the embodiment of forgiveness.

This is the core proposition of basic Christian theism, without this there is no Christian belief. However, it is difficult to understand this proposition with having an understanding of the previously stated beliefs.

I believe that Jesus is the embodiment of forgiveness because I understand what love is. Love is caring for another’s well-being. Love is giving without the expectation of return. Love forgives. Love can be felt, but it is also a choice. My understanding of love is not a provable axiom, but commonly accepted assumptions.

Since I find myself with the ability to love and yet fail to do in every circumstance, I perceive a need to be forgiven. My lack of love, like hate, causes injury. Earthly justice provides for only an equitable counter injury, similar to an eye for an eye, and, in its own way, propagates the injury in a similar to how hate operates.

True forgiveness operates as if the injury had never occurred. It is the cancelation of all the debt. Instead of an eye injured in return for an injured eye, the original injured eye is healed back to normal functioning. Justice is served through restoration. It is through the life giving power of love that we have both forgiveness and justice.

The power of love to restore is not a human or earthly power. It is a higher power. It is the power of God; a God who has the power to create all that has been created; a God of love; a God of life.

The story of Jesus is about a man who experienced hate but returned love, who experience injury, even death, but who had the power of love to be raised to life. The story of Jesus is about true forgiveness that restores justice through life. The story of Jesus is about a creator who gives his creation the capacity to love, the choice to do so, and the power to be restored to loving relationship through the creator’s forgiveness. Jesus embodied the forgiveness of God.

The amazing thing is that this forgiveness of God is not just for those who killed Jesus, but has been extended to all who need forgiveness. For if he has the power to forgive one, he has the power to forgive all. And since God has the power of life, all who seek forgiveness from him are restored to life everlasting with him.

God empowers us to faith, hope, and love.

I believe that God gives us his power of life for love, acts of faith, and visions of hope. I believe this is a logical conclusion based on the previous arguments and observations. I believe it is through the power of God that the Christian life is different from all other religions. Christians receive grace freely and therefore are able to freely give grace. Christians visualize not just a life after death, but a life in the present that has victory over hate and its scepter of death. And Christians act on that vision through faith to bring the power of life and love into all the world.

How many doctors do we need?

2009-10-01T18:28:00.000-07:00

There should be no limit on the number of doctors, nurses, or persons with medical expertise.

It does not hurt a society if there are more health care workers, whether they are doctors, nurses, or technicians. The greater the supply, the lower the wages (up to a point); the lower the wages, the more affordable healthcare becomes. The wages of healthcare workers are also determined by the investment cost. If the government would like to lower the cost of healthcare then subsidizing medical training and expanding educational capacity for the healthcare field would increase the supply significantly while lowering the investment cost. Natural market forces, the demands of the healthcare field, and changing personal priorities would select out for the best workers and provide for a livable wage for those who stay in the field. The average retention rate given such conditions would probably be low, but that is more boon than a bane.

If a higher percentage of the general population had some training in the medical/health profession, there would likely be greater peer pressure for individuals to make healthy choices, and the odds that symptoms would be addressed sooner would also increase. Health issues often come up in casual conversation. Having friends who were concerned and somewhat knowledgeable about health issues would increase the chances that a serious health problem would get addressed sooner with the correct treatment. Insignificant issues would more likely be treated at home leaving the healthcare system to deal with those who really need their help. By decreasing the limitations on the number of persons with medical training we would decrease the cost of healthcare and at the same time decrease the demand for healthcare.

If a higher percentage of the general population had some training in the medical/health profession, there would be a reservoir of medical experience available if an epidemic or other major medical calamity were to occur. Society’s need for medical care is not always constant. There are times when natural disasters or epidemics spike society’s need for medical care. If a larger portion of society has medical training than is currently employed as a medical care worker, then that excess can quickly fill the gap when such events spike the need for medical care.

Increasing the supply of trained healthcare workers does not have to decrease the quality. If the medical workers have to pass standard exams, a certain minimum quality is guaranteed. A free market economy will reward the best medical workers. Limited demand with a greater supply will improve the quality by keeping only the best. Currently, it is difficult for a patient to compare their doctor with other doctors and the doctor’s availability has more to do with the kind of insurance he’s affiliated with and/or his medical network than the quality of his work.

The High Cost of Pain and Suffering

2009-09-24T07:22:00.000-07:00

We should not try and compensate people for their pain and suffering. While pain and suffering is real, we must recognize that all of life is filled with pain and suffering of one kind or another and money cannot alleviate either. Much of a person’s suffering has to do with how they deal with the pain in their lives. There are people who experience chronic pain and yet find joy in counting the blessings they do have. There are people who live very deprived lives and yet are happy. Conversely, there are people in the prime of their lives with good health, good jobs, and friends who are miserable. There are very wealthy people who are sad. Money cannot change the internal heart/mind processes that turn pain into misery. The responsibility for suffering is one the person experiencing the pain, not the person who initially caused the pain.

When money is awarded for pain and suffering, that money in particular becomes a symbol of that pain and suffering. The loss is objectified by assigning a monetary value that can be compared and contrasted with other people, situations, and things. Objectifying a loss minimizes its value and importance. Receipt of payment assumes that there can be a resolution to pain and suffering through the power of money. Money cannot replace a loved one, a missing body part, or a job. Money cannot take away chronic pain or resolve grief. To award money for pain and suffering is to compound the victim’s problems by placing unrealistic expectations of resolution upon the victim, by minimizing their loss, and by confusing the material with the immaterial.

Compensating people for their pain and suffering introduces ulterior motivations for receiving that compensation. When people are rewarded money that they haven’t earned it perpetuates the myth of a free lunch. People may choose to pursue compensation as a means of getting rich easily. Becoming wealthy because of someone’s pain and suffering, even if it is one’s own pain, is macabre ethics.

Some people may view such compensation as necessary for survival. However, if we are rewarding persons because their injuries have limited their working abilities, we are giving them the message that they are no longer valuable to society. Shame and helpless attitudes are more debilitating than any bodily injury. In such cases, what is needed is retraining, prosthetics, and/or mechanical or animal assistance to give the individual new skills and as much freedom as his disabilities allow. Having the offending party pay for specific things or rehab that will give new life to the victim gives the offending party responsibility for his actions while not diminishing the integrity of the victim.

Money is also a responsibility. Awarding people large sums of money gives them responsibilities they may or may not have the experience necessary to handle responsibly. If a person has health issues due to an injury, even if a person has appropriate experience, they may not have the time with which to manage such a responsibility. In such cases, the money will most likely benefit other people rather than the recipient.

Awarding large sums of money for pain and suffering does not penalize the individual offender but the community to which the offender belongs. If the offender has insurance, then the insurance pays the large sums of money. The insurance company will raise the rates for the offender, or drop the offender’s coverage, but the major cost of the payments is spread to all the other persons insured by that company, people who had no responsibility for the pain and suffering of the victim. If the offender does not have any insurance, then the offender will go into bankruptcy in order to pay or avoid paying such a high cost award. When a person goes into bankruptcy, all the other creditors of the offender are shortchanged. In order for the creditors to recoop their losses due to the bankruptcy of the offender, they need to charge higher prices to the rest of their customers or reduce their profits to their shareholders or both. In a difficult economic climate, this may put the creditors out of business.

Without the high cost of legal rewards for pain and suffering, the cost of business would be less for insurance companies, so hopefully the price of insurance would also be less both for the doctor and the patient. If there were no rewards for pain and suffering, then the courts would not be clogged with prospectors trying to mine the system for their own personal gain. This reduction would allow for a more efficient and effective judicial system. A more effective judicial system would in turn create a safer society. And a safer society would be a healthier one. A healthier society could theoretically have a less costly health care system because there was less demand.

Entering the healthcare debate

2009-09-20T19:54:00.000-07:00

Since it seems like the healthcare debate is on everyone's minds I thought I would post my thoughts as well. I started writing out my thoughts and found that they were longer than one post so here is thought number one:

Picture borrowed from http://www.healthnlifestylemagazine.com/2009/07/21/detox-diet-benefits/Magazines such as this one have useful information on the subject of this post.

An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.

Any healthcare system will be expensive if preventative healthcare is not a priority. If individuals don’t take care of themselves, there is little a doctor can do to compensate. And unfortunately, the poor decisions of one become a burden for the rest. When a person gets sick, not only are they not able to be a productive member of society, but those who care for that person are prevented from contributing. So the responsibility for an individual’s decisions about how to care for their bodies becomes a corporate concern.

It would be to the society’s advantage to reward and put pressure on people to take care of their bodies by eating right and exercising regularly. Good hygiene, followed by regular and adequate sleep should be a priority. We should not promoting antibiotic soaps, caffeinated drinks, or high calorie/low nutritional foods. We should not be promoting pills of any kind as cure-alls. We should promote active entertainment like dancing rather than passive entertainment like watching movies or television.

Any media that promotes unhealthy body images should be held accountable. Companies that make cigarettes should contribute to the medical bills of those who have cancers of the throat, mouth, and lungs. Fashion industries should underwrite the cost of surgeries of those whose toes need to be straightened or corns removed. The profits of those who produce alcohol should help pay for damaged caused by alcohol consumption. The same principle should apply to those who make junk food for those needing diabetes treatment, kidney dialysis, and heart bypasses. Movies, TV, romance novels, and the like that have sexual content, should contribute to STD treatment.

I feel it is quite appropriate for our government to hold businesses accountable for work related injuries. If a company makes their equipment safe, provides adequate instruction, and appropriate breaks with a certain level of community accountability, then the individual employee can be held more accountable for their behavior in using the equipment.

Businesses should be held accountable for their pollution that causes asthma, allergies, contaminated water, and loss of ozone. There should be no such thing as non-organic food. All food should be produced in such a way as it was completely safe to eat and did not damage the environment in any way.

I think it is good that public schools insist that every child is up to date with their vaccinations. I would hope that all private schools would make the same policy. Vaccinations help prevent the spread of life threatening diseases. And I would be in support of public assistance if the cost of vaccination is too high. The cost of preventing the disease is much less than caring for a sick person.

Eating Sustainably

2009-09-04T07:32:00.000-07:00

For a long time I have been reading about the faulty practices of our agricultural system. This summer I read a wonderful book entitled Gardening for the Future of the Earth by former Seeds of Change entrepreneur Howard-Yana Shapiro and John Harrisson. They covered sustainable practices for water conservation, soil building, natural pest management, and seed saving through techniques such as permaculture, biointensive, biodynamic, and kinship gardening. Much of what I read, I was familiar with, and I would highly recommend the book. It brings together a variety of sustainable practices in one place.

I followed reading Gardening for the Future of the Earth with Bringing Nature Home by Douglas Tallamy. In the course of reading Tallamy’s book I had an epiphany about sustainable gardening practices: sustainable agricultural practices must be based on indigenous plants. Tallamy gives some suggested plants for various regions of USA. Of his list of forty to fifty different native shrubs or trees that supported the greatest diversity of butterfly/moth species, I found 22 that I knew for sure were edible:

Sugar Maple

Shagbark Hickory

Persimmon

American Beech

Honey Locust

Butternut

Black Walnut

Wild Crabapple

Red Mulberry

White Oak (actually there are several types of oaks that are native to my region)

Sassafras

Serviceberry (Juneberry)

Chokeberry

Paw Paw

American Hazelnut

Black Currant

Gooseberry

Red Raspberry

Black raspberry

Blueberry

Cranberry

Of these, I have seen the produce of eight or nine species sold in grocery stores, and only the blueberry, red raspberry, and cranberry are sold in any great quantities. Real maple syrup is becoming more popular, but generally the artificially flavored products are what’s on the shelves. And indigenous produce tends to be more expensive. I found acorn flour once in a Korean grocery store, but I don’t know if it was made from indigenous oaks.

I have heard of people trying to eat only local and in season food in order to be environmentally conscience, but natives are thought of survivalist food for emergencies only –not something that should be a staple. The more we eat indigenous plants, the better we can protect native habitat because there is money to be made in keeping indigenous plants growing.

One of the biggest threats to indigenous species is habitat loss. We are taking land away from natives and ruining its productivity. We are replacing a naturally diverse native habitat with an agriculture that grows two or three imported species across vast acres, supported by tons of chemicals. Every year our agricultural system breaks up the earth exposing it to erosion from wind and rain. Every year the salinity content of the soil is increased through irrigation. Every year the good and the bad wash off the land into our streams, rivers and wetlands, ruining our aquatic environments as well.

Picture provided by http://kellishouse.blogspot.com/2008/10/glittery-acorns.html