Tag: cultural musings

Can Fools Create Wise Computers?

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Some scientists are worried that we might soon create super-intelligent computers that are much smarter than we are ( http://theweek.com/article/index/269989/rise-of-the-machines ).

Well, heck, there already are plush toys, frying pans, and lawn chairs that are smarter than some people we know.

Before we get down to serious worries about the Terminator coming after us, shouldn’t we first ask whether it’s even possible for fools and twaddlers to create truly super-intelligent computers? Do we really have to fret about what one scientist quoted in the article above called “a future in which computers are no longer obedient tools but a dominant species with no interest in the survival of the human race”? But that makes them sound like our elected officials.

Granted, computers don’t have far to go, to outperform us in work, the arts, and politics. But is the human civilization that gives us Obama, Fifty Shades of Grey, the Kardashians, and Windows 8 really going to generate computers that can give us anything better?

God has been warning us for thousands of years about the evils and dangers of worshiping anything we make with our own hands. And for thousands of years we have refused to listen.

I think we might be headed for another trip to the woodshed.

Are You a Science Fundamentalist?

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A liberal friend of mine has bestowed on me the concept of “scientific fundamentalism.” He didn’t mean to. He was criticizing “former Catholics turned fundamentalist” who make like they have all the answers.

Well, we all do that from time to time, don’t we? “After all,” I said, “you’re 100%, rock-solid sure about Darwinism, the Big Bang, Global Warming, and all that stuff.” He replied that you can’t compare the Bible’s moral teachings–he does not consider the Bible factual–with the clarity of scientific discovery.

ROFL. They program their computers and then they discover what they themselves put into them. How do you truly discover anything without observing it? But no one has ever observed Evolution, and no one ever will. As for Global Warming–without lies, cheating, and bullying, it wouldn’t last another day.

So what is a science fundamentalist? It’s someone who accepts unquestioningly whatever “scientists” or “Science” says about anything under the sun–usually while subjecting the Word of God to the most intense scrutiny. All he needs to hear are magic words–like, “the science is settled,” or “the consensus among scientists is…”–and his brain shuts down.

Meanwhile

As I write this, the police are performing military-style drills on the street outside. As much as I enjoy bagpipe music, it disturbs me to hear police officers shouting in unison and loudly marching in step.

Does anyone else find this at all disturbing? I mean, the police force is an agency of the civilian government, not a military organization. Or has that definition been changed while my attention was directed elsewhere?

 

How to Cross over the Chasm

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I’m doing some of the final editing for The Glass Bridge (Book #7 of the Bell Mountain series), knowing it will still be some months before it’s in print, and wondering what else will have gone wrong with America by then.

We are at the mercy of rulers and opinion-shapers who actively and purposely ruin our prosperity, undermine our national security, corrupt our morals, make a shambles of the rule of law, and debauch our culture. God has permitted this as punishment for our sins–especially the sins of pride and ingratitude. These leaders are the scourge in His hands.

Government by the criminally insane is a very bad business.

Lest we kid ourselves into thinking God will just let us out from under this without some gesture of good faith on our part, turn to that colossal rusting junkyard we call history. Those broken, unsalvageable heaps piled up to the sky were once civilizations.

But whoa–this is getting awfully heavy, isn’t it? Not at all in the spirit of the book I’m editing.

In the book, the glass bridge stands for a perilous passage that can only be crossed, if crossed at all, by faith. Not faith in our own cleverness; not faith in the works of our hands or the inventions of our minds; not faith in who we are, or who we think we are: but faith only in the wisdom, the righteousness, the sovereign power, and the divine love of the only living God.

This is the faith that’ll get us across the glass bridge.

This, and no other.

What We Can Learn from Bad Movies

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There are many sites on the Internet listing “the 50 worst movies of all time,” according to this or that viewer poll, this or that critic. Even allowing for much variation, there are still a few films that make everybody’s list: legendary clunkers like Heaven’s Gate, Gigli, Plan 9 from Outer Space, Speed 2 (set on board a cruise ship going six knots per hour), etc. I am always shocked to discover how many of these I have actually seen.

But each and every terrible movie raises the same question: What ever made them think that this was going to be good?

Think about it. A movie isn’t slapped together in an afternoon. It takes days and days of work; and at the end of the day, the director and the staff have to watch the rushes to see how the last bunch of filming turned out. For the most part, it costs a lot of money to make a movie: so supposedly the people who are making it know what they’re doing.

So how is it that you have investors who want a return on their money (and if they were in the habit of just throwing money away on silliness, they would soon not be rich investors anymore), writers who are paid good money for writing, a director whose career could end if he makes a bad enough movie, individuals who are paid good money to act in the film, and all of the work that all of these people do subject to day-by-day review and oversight–and with all that, you still wind up with Exorcist II: The Heretic? How could anybody look at the rushes for The Fifth Element and not realize they were creating the ugliest movie you ever saw?

Is it any wonder that equally fallible (or even criminally mischievous) persons, lacking the capacity for immediate oversight enjoyed by movie-makers, come up with a disaster like Obamacare? Is not Global Warming the Heaven’s Gate of science?

Policy-makers don’t have daily rushes to look at–although, when all is said and done, they are very able to ignore lots and lots of negative feedback.

If America’s immigration policy were a movie in progress, what do you think the rushes would look like? If Ed Wood could look at the dailies for Plan 9 from Outer Space and say “It’s good, print it,” is it any wonder that the leaders who have turned our southern border into a giant vacuum cleaner sucking in millions of illegal aliens, and all sorts of diseases, can look at what they have done and say, “It’s good”?

The only difference is, bad movies hurt those who produce bad movies; while those who produce bad policy walk away unscathed while the rest of us suffer.

A Lesson from ‘The X Files’

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Back in the day, Chris Carter’s The X Files was one of the most successful series on TV, and certainly one of the most honored. It won all kinds of awards. And now that you can watch old TV shows on your computer, Patty and I have been watching X Files episodes.

If you want to know why Christianity is in trouble in America, check out our pop culture.

Last night we watched a 1999 episode called Millenium, a crossover with another series produced by Carter and canceled for the 1999 TV season. Anyhow, in this entry, the bad guys are resurrecting dead FBI agents who committed suicide because they wanted to be resurrected. Yeah, it’s complicated.

In a brainstorming session, Agent Mulder (David Duchovny) figures there must be a lot of necromancy going on. Necromancy is the art of raising the dead and getting them to do your  bidding. Mulder describes it as an ancient feature “of the Judeo-Christian tradition.” Uh, not exactly… Necromancy is mentioned in the Bible. There shall not be found among you anyone… that useth divination… or a witch… or a necromancer. For all that do these things are an abomination unto the Lord…  (Deuteronomy 18:10-12) It is not part of any Judeo-Christian tradition.

Besides which, all this Scripture-spouting necromancer can really do is make the corpses into zombies.

But my point is, here is a popular TV show, an icon of our popular culture at the time, making use of Christianity, or rather abusing it, for the producer’s own ends. It went on then and it still goes on today. Our “entertainment” industry hardly ever touches on Christian faith except to mock it, distort it, or condemn it.

The X Files frequently touched on Christian themes, Chris Carter sucking it into a mish-mosh of New Age twaddle, UFOlogy, and pagan superstition. It lent “gravitas” to the show’s mythology. I should add that The X Files would have been totally ridiculous if not for the consistently superb quality of the filming, the acting, the background music, and the locations.

For whatever the reason, we Americans have for a long time been using our popular culture to undermine our faith.

If you answer by saying, “Oh, it’s just entertainment! It doesn’t really mean anything,” I think I would have to answer, “But everything means something.”

Study our “entertainment” closely and see if you don’t agree with me.

Incredible Beliefs

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In communicating with liberals–yes, I actually do that–I am often astounded by the fantastic things which they believe. And those are the nice liberals with whom you can carry on a conversation. There are many more of the other kind.

They sneer at us for believing Adam and Eve really existed. But check out some of their beliefs, which I have collected from real persons. At least, I think they’re real.

“John Kerry was a genuine war hero.”

“Creating gigantic government bureaucracies will protect us from Global Warming.” Not to mention believing in Global Warming in the first place.

“Hillary Clinton is a genius.” “Al Gore is a genius.” “Barack Obama is a genius.” What the heck, they’re all Mensa candidates.

“Communism would be a big success if we gave it half a chance.”

“Rachel Maddow is an oracle of truth.”

“A strong government can create Income Equality throughout the city/state/country/planet/galaxy…”

And so on. You wouldn’t think it possible that anyone capable of fogging a mirror could actually believe any of the above; but then you probably haven’t calculated for the effect of a modern education. It’s amazing, what unionized teachers can do to the human mind! Soon they will be able to erase it altogether.

I’m On the Radio Tomorrow

I’ll be on Mike Fagan’s talk show out of Spokane, Washington, at 9 a.m. Pacific Time (12 noon Eastern), RIGHT Spokane Perspective,on the American Christian Network. To listen on your computer, go to http://www.acn.cc and click on the Liberty Bell at the top of the page.

These gigs always make me nervous because I never know what the questions are going to be until I’m asked them. I’m almost afraid to tune in and see how I did.

The Fallacy of Cheap Labor

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It’s Labor Day, and our country’s southern border, for all practical purposes, has ceased to exist. Remember the Amnesty-Open Borders crowd when the savages from ISIS start blowing up Americans after easily sauntering across our nonexistent border.

Supposedly the national Chamber of Commerce wants open borders and amnesty so business can have an unlimited supply of really cheap labor. Depress the cost of labor, so the theory goes, and maximize your profits.

Let us apply some common sense.

Who can buy more goods and services: people with a lot of money, or people with hardly any money?

Henry Ford, 100 years ago, made sure to pay his employees enough so that they could afford to buy Ford cars. The idea caught on, and soon America had a thriving middle class, with entrepreneurs hustling to meet the burgeoning demand for all kinds of goods and services.

But what are these new peons going to buy with their skimpy paychecks? Hot tubs? Vacations? Nice cars? Visits to classy restaurants? What is the point of manufacturing cars, for instance, if the labor force can’t afford to buy them?

Oh! But it’s all going to be done by robots soon! Well, if that’s the case, you won’t need any labor force at all, will you?

Wealth is created by innovation and hard work. Only college students, their professors, and left-wing politicians and noozies don’t know that. But if the hard work is not to be sufficiently rewarded, why should anybody bother to do it?

Greed, I suppose, drowns out common sense. Or, as the Bible puts it, The prosperity of fools shall destroy them (Proverbs 1:32).

Michael Crichton’s Dark Night of the Soul

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I’ve just finished reading Michael Crichton’s The Lost World, his sequel to Jurassic Park.

Listen to this, written by a man who spent his entire adult life intimately involved with what we call Science.

“I wouldn’t take any of it too seriously. It’s just theories. Human beings can’t help making them, but the fact is that theories are just fantasies. And they change. Back when America was a new country, people believed in something called phlogiston. You know what that is? No? Well, it doesn’t matter because it wasn’t real anyway. They also believed that four humors controlled behavior. And they believed that the earth was only a few thousand years old. Now we believe the earth is four billion years old, and we believe in photons and electrons, and we think human behavior is controlled by things like ego and self-esteem. We think those beliefs are more scientific, and better…

“They’re still just fantasies. They’re not real. Have you ever seen a self-esteem? Can you bring me one on a plate? How about a photon? Can you bring me one of those?…

“And you never will, because those things don’t exist. No matter how seriously people take them. A hundred years from now, people will look back at us and laugh. They’ll say, ‘You know what people used to believe? They believed in photons and electrons. Can you imagine anything so silly?’ They’ll have a good laugh, because by then there will be newer and better fantasies.”

Crichton never came around to belief in God, so where did his rejection of Science leave him? Pretty much in limbo. He died before he could find truth. That’s what makes it tragic. But at least he had the integrity, and the courage, to admit that those things he believed in, up to that point in his life, were fantasies.

I write fantasies. But mine, with God’s help, are only parables–a roundabout way of approaching truth from a new direction, in hope that this will enable us to see it afresh.

The Left turned against Michael Crichton and rejoiced when he died.

To that extent, he served the Lord in spite of himself.

American Atheism, Vintage 1960

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You can learn a lot about a society by studying the artifacts of its popular culture.

Last night we watched a classic Twilight Zone episode that suggested that maybe the good old days weren’t so good: “Long Live Walter Jameson,” broadcast in 1960 (when I was 11 years old). Before I tell you anything more about it, first consider that The Twilight Zone was a very popular TV show and definitely within the pop culture mainstream; and consider these closing words by Rod Serling.

“Last stop on a long journey, as yet another human being returns to the vast nothingness that is the beginning and into the dust that is always the end.”

Is that a comment indicative of a healthy Christian culture?

“Long Live Walter Jameson” was written by Charles Beaumont, considered a great writer of TV fantasies. Beaumont’s scripts, especially some of the ones he wrote for Twilight Zone, reveal an obsession with death and dying. He died at the age of 38 from early-onset Alzheimer’s Disease, after five or six years of suffering a progressive loss of his faculties. I think he knew his body was trying to tell him something. No wonder he was obsessed with death and dying. It was happening to him.

The story is about a man who is immortal. He has lived over 2,000 years so far, and he wants to die. I found it to be, for all its artistic excellence, as dark a story as has ever been aired on American TV.

And in 1960, no less! An era I remember as being good. I can still say I think it was better than the era that we’re stuck in now–but here was overt atheism coming into Christian families’ living rooms, and who complained?

Were we that far down the pipe in 1960? Based on my examination of popular culture, I suspect that Christianity in Britain was in deep trouble 100 years ago; and that, by the 1980s, it was taken for granted that English people didn’t believe in God. That’s what comes across to me from their old TV scripts.

But is Christianity that much better off in America? When did the toxin begin to seep into our culture, to the point where a popular, mainstream TV show could take an atheist stance in 1960, and remain popular?

Pray for our nation. Pray hard.

Team Sports… for Your 5-Year-Old?

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A famous Conservative Commentator–whose name I choose not to mention, because she thinks she’s doing good and I don’t want to hurt her feelings–has her son enrolled in team lacrosse: league, uniforms, coaches, field officials, sponsors, parents cheering on the sidelines, the works.

The kid is five years old.

Somehow I find it impossible to believe a child that young ever said, “Mommy, you know what I’ve always wanted to do? Play lacrosse!” That idea came out of Mommy’s head. Talking about it on the radio, she said the little tyke was feeling pressure on account of other kids roughing him up on the field, so she counseled him to tough it out, and rough them back.

The child is five years old.

Is it really so terrible for a little child’s development to sit on the floor playing with building blocks, while Mommy does the ironing and the two of them talk to each other back and forth? Is it really so old hat to play in the sandbox with another little kid or two?

Five years old, and she’s got him all togged up for lacrosse?

I don’t know about you, but something about this really creeps me out. Maybe it’s just too much regimentation, too much conformity, too much status and role-playing way too soon in life. The child will get more than enough of that later on.

Someday they’ll come up with some kind of uniformed, sponsored sport that neonates can play, some kind of proto-soccer that doesn’t require standing up or walking. Get ’em into competition really early!

And, above all things, get ’em used to being spoon-fed by authority figures.

And then, Ms. Big-Time Conservative Commentator, watch the fun as you try to persuade your children that their teachers and their college professors and their government are not right all the time, and should not always be listened to… Just try.