Monday, April 26, Evening:

I have seen three spiders this day.

The first one evoked fear. As I lay on the pool table in the Kat, staring at the spider, I point it out. Someone is immediately afraid. Soon rumours of a giant spider spread through the room. And when those on the other end of this game of telephone see the culprit, they scoff. It is a small spider: not worthy of this fear.

The second spider saw anger. I was sitting by the front door waiting for Missina, when someone pointed it out. As it climbed down the wall, a shoe flew past my head. It missed, and the Spider fell off the wall. I couldn’t see where it landed.

The third spider was beautiful. As I was walking down the hall, it glided down it’s invisible support, about a foot from my face. I stopped, just to consider the beauty in it. It was a perfect picture: legs out stretched, floating peacefully down. As it lowered past my face, I bent over to see it closer. Startled, it climbed back up speedily. It stopped again, right at the level of my head. It was a beautiful spider.

This has been on my mind for weeks. It's wrecked a few worship services for me. It's even gotten me misinterpreting things because of what's on my mind. It's powerful, and I think that's why. The question is: why should it not be ok for Christians to kill themselves.

I know, this is quite near sacred ground, something you just don't talk about. I think that's why I had my ish in the first place: I've never heard anyone teach about this, not even mention it in passing. I mean, you get the occasional, "Suicide is the unforgivable sin," but I don't buy it. Why is it any different then other sin, especially if your motivation is wanting to be with God, primarily to worship Him. All right, well, before I get on to much of a tangent, here was my argument.

Everyone wants Christ to come back. We sing songs about it, we preach about it, we hold on to it as our last hope. This is the same as dieing. This is what happens when we die. Why don't we pray for our deaths? Why not just bring it about? This is what was bothering me. If the return of Christ was strictly gain, then why not just kill yourself. I had no answer.

I then had to assume that it wasn't good to be looking forward to the day of Christ's return. In searching for a reason behind this, all I could come up with was weak. I said that we shouldn’t with for Christ to come back, because then unsaved people that live today will be going to hell. Ok, I knew this was bad as it came out of my mouth, but it's al I had. I mean, clearly God has the sovereignty to know who would and would not accept him. No one will say, "if only I had more time." It bothered me though. Every time I heard a worship song, or a message that involved Christ coming back, and our looking forward to that, it would floor me. It seemed like God was throwing in my face. He was making me deal with this. It kept coming up again and again.

It wasn't until I was praying about it at fredomize tonight when I came to some realisation. Why are we here at all? I give him glory, to serve him, to spread the gospel. We're not here to live, die, and go to heaven. It we were there would be no problem with skipping the first step. Check out Philippians 1.

20I eagerly expect and hope that I will in no way be ashamed, but will have sufficient courage so that now as always Christ will be exalted in my body, whether by life or by death. 21For to me, to live is Christ and to die is gain. 22If I am to go on living in the body, this will mean fruitful labor for me. Yet what shall I choose? I do not know! 23I am torn between the two: I desire to depart and be with Christ, which is better by far; 24but it is more necessary for you that I remain in the body. 25Convinced of this, I know that I will remain, and I will continue with all of you for your progress and joy in the faith, 26so that through my being with you again your joy in Christ Jesus will overflow on account of me.

Why does Paul not want to die? because God will be using him if he does not. It's a matter of doing what God wants. In the end, this is almost an encouraging thought. If God had no plan for us, we'd be dead.

Maybe if I keep trying you'll actualy send me an e-mail. I'm not looking for a philosophical work here; rant, just say hi, anything really. My inbox has been filled with nothing but spam for a while, I wanna hear from someone real.

I don't think I've ever told you how much you mean to me. And you still haven't sent me that e-mail.

Forgive me if the coherence level is down on this one. I haven't slept in enough hours to make a difference. Shannon was making fun of my paper for it. Anyway, I was inspired to write this yesterday, while I was reading Missina's xanga, but I figured I was supposed to be writing a paper, so I didn't do it. Umm, sorry, the tired thing, I'll just get on with it.

It's a simply song, simple. For me, it is forever attached to the darkest, and yet least dark night of my life. God had been working on me for a while. Several times, I was close to giving into him, but I was stubborn. Hey, I even quit smoking cigarettes. It seemed to me that God was everywhere for that last few weeks. Haha, I know this one was a miracle: he had me entranced my Christian Indy rap. He did show me miracles though, and I most certainly believed they were form him. But I was resisting. I suppose you might ask why. I'd love to give you the answer I've given in a hundred testimonies. Tell you that I cared to much about my life, I didn't want to give up drugs. And, though those things might be true, it's not the whole story. I don't know why I resisted so hard. To this day all I can think is that it was a spiritual battle, a hard one. And I suppose if it was I played for both teams, or maybe both teams played me, either way.

It all came to a climax one November’s eve, only a couple days after Halloween. It was a fight: a brawl; Fists were flying. I think of Israel. Fighting the Angel of God, winning at times. Until God, letting go of a little bit of his restraint, broke the rib of this man. I spouse this is how I felt. I was fighting all night, until it was over. I collapsed. I gave in. God won. I was sleeping in minutes. I woke to sun streaming into the lone window in the basement I was sleeping in. I was overjoyed. I cannot describe the feeling of that moment, so I suppose I will not try. The first thing that came to my mind, the only thing I could think of, was this song. So I sang it, to God, and from the deepest part of me.

I love you lord,
And I lift my voice
To worship you.
Oh my soul, Rejoice.
Take joy, my King,
In what you hear.
May is be a sweet, sweet sound,
In your ear.

Send me an e-mail. Something interesting that I can reply to.

This is from Saturday night:

Someone rescue me.

Where is God?

Every time I see him, he’s gone as fast as He came.

I try to learn, try to understand, try to justify Him.

He is just, but I cannot justify.

I do not know where He has gone.

I do not know why He has left.

When will it be over?

When will He come back?

Why does my new life feel like death?

Where is God?

Someone rescue me.

Today, God told me one rather specific thing: suck it up. I know who God is. I know He loves me, He cares for me. If I feel like shit, it's not His fault. I can't blame it on Him. And get this: there really is some joy to be found in Christ. Wow, I know, you'd never know it looking at me. I just simply never know it. But honestly, there is. I've experienced it before, and then some today.

I suppose I can't guarantee myself this feeling will last, I can almost guarantee it will not, but the point is that when it does not, it will not be God who is doing something wrong.

This made me laugh. I though I'd share.

Ok, well, my last post was philosophy, and this one will be… more philosophy. This isn’t really meant as an air tight philosophy, so much as ideas I've been playing with, but bare with me if you will. I was watching The Matrix: Revolutions the other day, and thinking about the main idea they toss around: that if you could see the motivation behind all choices, you could know the future.

I suppose I tend to agree. "Free will," as it's normal called, is seeming more and more to be an empty term to me. It's either some random variance in our decision process, or is based on something. If it's random, then why refer to it in reference to moral accountability, since we are not responsible for a random factor. If it's based on something, then we must look to that thing, and not “free will.”

Anyway, the question I was pondering was: why can we almost never see clearly enough to know the future. Haha, in The Matrix, all sorts purport to understand at least enough to see relatively well. My thought is that God is the reason for this. The mystery of him, the unknown, prevents us from perceiving his influence on things. From a more Calvinistic point of view (which I seem to be falling into more and more these days) that influence is grace. All good action we produce comes from God directly, not our own natures. This would fit perfectly with the sense of being free in moral actions, since we certainly cannot understand God's influence on us. So, we think our decisions free, because we cannot understand them. There is a factor we cannot grasp.

Until next time. You have no free will:

R v B
R > A
B > E
~A
:. E

Ok, well I haven't slept for coming up on 21 hours, so I'm hoping this makes as much sense when I read it later. It's mostly philosophy, so read at your own risk. Here is my conclusion: we can't know anything for certain... or, well, we probably can't know anything for certain, I'm not certain. It came up when I was sitting in the lounge and Tim came in, rather exited looking. I inquired, and he presented this argument, more'r less.

Testimony - even our own - must be relied on. All our knowledge, from what happened five minutes ago, to the great discoveries of science, would be useless without it. We have no reason to believe anything unless we assume the testimony of others and ourselves reliable. And yet on what basis do we do so? Is this testimony certain, I mean 100%, without a doubt, certain. I don't think it is.

Take even your own experience as an example. You and a friend are running along, and you both see something in your peripheral vision. Neither of you say anything about it until your around a corner. When you stop to take a rest, you mention the oddly placed banana that was sitting on the side of the path. Your partner looks at you rather odd, stating clearly that he saw naught but a small yellow bird. Now, one of you is wrong. One of you is giving false testimony to the past, and has no reason other then this discrepancy to believe it is wrong. This could go onto a huge scale as well. Everything you perceive could be a misperception (like The Matrix). It is similar in science. You can test something a million times, but there is no guarantee that the one million and first time it won't be different, you simply think it probable.

So what does this have to do with simple pieces on knowledge, like "I think, therefore I am," Descartes seemed to use it go get around the no-knowledge-for-certain thing. I would contend that you cannot think of all it takes to come to this conclusion in one instant. I think- instant gone. The space of an instant is infinitely small. I'm not going to argue time here, but the 10th chapter of Augustine’s confessions is a good place to start if your interested. Suffice to say, however, the point of an instant can be divided an infinite amount of times. It is very small. Because of this you will always be relying on your memory, your testimony of the past, to think anything.

So what does one do? You can know nothing certainly, or, well, you can probably know nothing certainly, since even this conclusion is subject to my memory of my premises. So, everything is only probable, less probably, or improbable, not certainly true or certainly false. Crazy, eh? Haha, I'm sure Brian would like this one.

Anyway, I'm sure that bored many of you, but I liked it. I've been arguing against this point for years. No one ever had this as their argument though, or at least I never stopped being annoying long enough for them to say it. Haha, I always gave the traditional Christian cocky-apologist answer.

"You can't know anything for sure!"

"Oh ya! Well, how do you know that, if you can't know anything for sure?"

People don't know what to answer to this. Tim did, and though it disproved our response to the argument, it still didn't make the argument true. You see, what I'm doing in asking this question is logical fallacy: Ad Hominum, to quo que. Just because this person isn't acting as if their point is true (their acting as though they can know that they can't know anything), does not mean their point is false.

Anyway, I have more on my mind, but it will go in another post.

~ ~ Aron