NaClhv

Theology, philosophy, math, science, and random other things
                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                  

How to think about the future

This post is a consolidation of a whole series of posts into one post. It's fairly long. Click on the following entries in the table of contents below to jump directly there: The future is completely unpredictable No, really, the future is COMPLETELY unpredictable The future will be like the past, and therefore "predictable" The […]
2015-11-30
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How to think about the future (Conclusion)

Trying to predict the future is a good way to put your foot in your mouth. It's hard enough to just think about the future, let alone predict it. Even in this series of posts, all I have done is provide some rules of thumb: the future is impossible to predict. The future will be […]
2015-11-16
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On becoming a good person

I don't care much about the recent terrorist attacks in Paris. I mean, it's hard to care, given some perspective. It happened half a world away. The death count at the moment stands at 136, according to Wikipedia. That's nothing. The world's mortality rate is about 0.8% per year - or about 100 persons per […]
2015-11-02
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How to think about the future (Part 2)

In the last post, I demonstrated that even if Marty McFly went back in time for just one second, just his gravitational influence would irrevocably change the future. I then claimed that this is actually overkill: that even small changes at interstellar distances will affect things on Earth. Let's see about that. (Most of this […]
2015-10-19
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On martyrdom (Part 1)

We're going over the book of Acts in my Bible study group. We recently went over the stoning of Stephen in Acts 7, and did a related study looking at the concept of martyrdom. Here are some relevant quotes on that topic, from various persons: If a man has not discovered something that he will […]
2015-08-31
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Come visit my church

I attend a church called Tribe, in Berkeley, California. You can find our website at tribesites.org. I obviously think that my church is pretty great - I've been going there for about a decade now. I'd like to invite anyone who reads this post to come by for a Sunday service. Everyone is welcome, and […]
2015-08-24
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The principle of least awesomeness

"Now to him who is able to do immeasurably more than all we ask or imagine..." - Ephesians 3:20. I have this tool that guides my thinking, which I privately call the principle of least awesomeness. It simply says that God is at least as awesome as anything we can imagine. Straightforward idea, right? Let's […]
2015-07-27
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The lifetime of evil (part 2)

In the last post, I introduced the idea that an act - an evil act in particular - has a characteristic time-scale over which its consequences become clear. This time-scale can be determined from the mechanics of the act in question. I was initially inclined to call this the "half-life of evil", but that phrasing […]
2015-07-20
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The lifetime of evil (part 1)

The lifetime of an evil may be defined as: The time it takes for the negative consequences of an evil act to be made clearly manifest. Or, The time it takes for an evil practice, policy, or organization to be abolished. Or, The time it takes for the moral arc of the universe to bend, […]

History, moral progress, and moral perfection (part 2)

In the last post of this series, we examined the nature of social progress, and where that leaves us in the course of history. The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice. In the future, it will continue to bend towards perfection - and away from our current state. The […]
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