history of emo/dat and new development

I have a large quantity of thought and theory give to a simple casual/logical relationship between emotion and data/logic. Here is a short history of my thoughts evolution.

Origin

It began with the existence of two concepts: emotion and data. I perceived both. I wanted to know which to follow. Emotions are cool, but undependable. Using logic all the time is prudent, but seems unfulfilled. So I wondered if I could fix my emotional concepts and stuff and work with that instead of data.

One: emotion superior

Emotion was the only fulfilling thing, so I created this theory to defend myself:

1 Emotion can be independent of data (with character) and it 'matters' more, so it's superior to data.

But the waywardness of emotion soon unnerved me, and the theory had to change.

Two: Large data

I still didn't understand emotion very well (and still don't), I clung fast to data, and desired to reduce the human phenomenon of emotion into scientifically describable definition:

2 Emotion is just a lot of data.

Emotion is the way humans deal with large quantities of data, its simplification and averaging. Instead of thinking "My dad died, so he won't provide food, he can't guide me in life, I have to move to a different school, I liked who he was and wanted his world influence to continue, etc. " (if anyone has questions about this last point, just post a comment and I'll explain). Instead of all this data, we simplify and feel sad, using emotional words like, "I miss my dad, I loved him."

3: Change large data

I made a 5 mn speech about it and resulting feedback brought up the question: why don't people feel big emotion say, when they're married, all the time? You have a huge realm of data together with your spouse, but you don't feel on fire all the time your with that person, right? (this is a healthy marriage). But you do feel something when that person is threatened, right? So I altered the theory:

3 Emotion is change, or threat of change, to large amounts of data.

4: Assorted

I jumped back and forth, still, questioning emotion superiority of emo over dat based on theology, etc, emo as cohesiveness/efficiency of a system. Generally, thought, I settled on emo as sum of data or change.

5: review of data

Most recently I have come upon a solution to the problem that caused '3' change in data.

5 Emotion is a large amount of data reviewed in the mind.

So a man goes on fire when his wife is threatened not because it threatens change in the situation, necessarily, but it reminds him of a huge part of his life he might lose in a few minutes.

Well, there's still a problem, I guess, with sadness. 'Change in data' works very well for sadness, where one experiences the emo of sad when your of the world changes, or you lose somebody, or something like that. Granted one reviews all current data related to the thing lost. So the type of emotion may determine the condition of the data...

We are moving quite deeply into undeveloped theory area, I'll be back later with more.

be still

Okay, one more post from being sad about a friend leaving.

There's this song on KTIS and there's just one little line "Be still and know I'm here. You are not alone."

That resonated really well with me. When I think about my future wife, I have this emotional picture of comforting her with things like "Be calm, be still, be at peace. I am here, I am with you. I am the one who loves you dearly, the one who would die for you..." and Christ would add "I am the one who has died for you."

AWESOME!

God feels this way about us!

I don't know if any of you guys can relate, but when I apply how I feel about women to Gods relationship to me, its amazing. I don't know where you are with God, whether applying fleshly pleasures into the game would hurt you or not, (personally I don't think I'm that strong yet.)

But all the noble, protection, provision feelings are amazing when I think that the God of the universe feels this way about me!

I used to think that women had it lucky because they were designed to be loved, and would be better suited to enjoy Gods love, but now I see women don't have it the best after all. We men know what amazing stuff is going on on Gods side too! (well, women can figure it out, they're smart, but they're not hardwired for it)

WAHOO!

beautiful sorrow

Okay, again depressed from friend leaving. (I always get my best theories when I'm sad).

I kind of like being sad. You appreciate the things around you, and you can feel self-pity without feeling guilty. OK, that's not the best way to think about it. Grief is also epic, and it denotes change.

So, I kind of like grief, and I'm thinking, 'bummer, we can't be sad in heaven.".

Well...maybe. Sadness could also be us changing right? And if we're learning more and more about God, then we change, right? So we continually learn how bad we've been (even though we're perfect now) and God jumps in and says 'forgiven!' and we get this sorrow mixed with incredible thankfulness joy.

I thinks that's beautiful, don't you?

I would enjoy dying with grief and gratitude, keeling over in wonderful pain before the cross as I am purified once again.

Maranatha Lord Jesus!

Come quickly I'm getting impatient!

heaven is not static

I was greatly depressed recently over a friend leaving permanently. Bummer. I was running through mood swings and imagination, lost in thought and quite sad.

I tried to console myself with heaven, but a constant state of joy seemed to be ruined by a constant existence of loss of other people.

But then I thought, why does heaven have to be static? In fact it isn't. Every day we will learn more and more about God. And it won't be like 'oh, he's bigger now', it will be like entirely new facets and dimensions of logic that will boggle our mind and make us entirely forget about human relationships.

I am reminded of the song "Once you feel the weight of glory, all your pains will fade to memory."

So no matter what mayhem and unimaginable sorrow you're going though right now, trust that things will change. Not only is it very likely to change in a month, or even a week, but even if you carry it the rest of your life, you'll die sometime, and then Gods glory will be too much to ignore.

boring 'grace, love, peace' church lingo

4 years ago and back, I really didn't have an appreciation for all the church lingo like peace and love. I was like "you fluffy head-in-the-clouds people! I want logical stuff!". And so I started doing stuff like this blog, thinking about and writing down logical stuff related to God.

Guess what? Once I had a large background of thought associated with God and how he relates to humans, these terms came to life for me. I have a really cool emotional association with (in order that they came alive) power, peace, faith, love, and I'm working on grace.

Anyway, for those dissatisfied with boring Christianity, there is hope! You may not find meaning in these words via huge logic and philosophy theories, but I bet however you process it, you find some amazing stuff!

existence of ethical concepts

I'd like to argue that good and evil aren't these ethereal concepts that we invent to help ure work smoother, a 'boogie monster' to keep kids in line, or a 'place in our heads' to escape the real world. That would be a bummer.

No, we derive ethics from facts, from concrete things, i.e the existence of God. If you want to shortcut some awesome stuff, you say, "he likes things done a certain way, and he deserves to be obeyed". But really, we do law ethics because we respect other humans as also created by God, which makes humans equal, and damaging Gods handiwork would dishonor him (not to mention get him angry).

But then there's general niceness too. We do that because compared to God, we and all our possessions are very small, so it really doesn't matter what happens to us or them. Making people happy and strating that we trust God points them towards the supplier of all cool things. People say this function all the time in words like "I love you because God loves me."

(this section I wrote 5 minutes before everything else)

Some people say that people who think about good and evil are just deranged, there isn't such a thing, and this adverse mutation will die off pretty quick. What about all the good things religion has brought us in the form of humanitarian things? Crusades, inquisition, slavery, you say. Yeah, yeah. If I were knuts I could go raze a village in the name of pacifist llamas, and then we'd know that pacifist llamas are really bad people, even though most of the time all they do is chew plants.

I have another idea! But its for a different post again...

a difference between humans and animals

for Christians in general, we hold that humans are unique, and we pounce on all evidence for our case, trying to counteract the widely-held (as least people say its widely-held) assumption that evolution is now a fact. Here's an argument (I never come up with evidence of my own) for human uniqueness.

Has a monkey every tried to because it was tired of life? Animals never struggle with big issues like the meaning of life. We can attribute this to our higher developed brains, I suppose, but that's sort of wishy-washy. I mean, suppose a rat could solve a rubix cube, organize labor-union rallies, and sing opera, what about smarts gives it ideas about good and evil?

Okay, I've got some other ideas, but they have to go under a different heading...

sets of 2 little paradigm

I decided to resurrect a paradigm that I developed about a year ago (prior to blogging)

It organizes 4 Christian things that come in sets of two.

Really, the first three are all the same. The only correlates communion with the larger dual concept which I have broken down into three other things.

Past Ongoing/future

Justification/Salv Sanctification Needs of Man

Atonement/Just Adoption Work of God in us

Justice/guilt Relationship to God Justice functions

Body of Christ Blood of Christ Communion

God had a plan when he made the universe, so I bet he had a plan when he designed our salvation too.

model of the trinity

me and my bro were talking recently and came up with a paradigm to describe the trinity.

God the father is god, the center of it all, indescribably using any dimensional constraints (because he's infinite). The holy spirit is the infinitely powerful manifestation/arm of God in the spiritual realm. Jesus Christ the son of man is God manifested in physical form, and when he was on earth he was also fully filled with the holy spirit.

There's no saying we're right, but it makes sense. I bet God doesn't mind when his children wonder and attempt to understand his amazing properties.

By the way, this paradigm of the trinity takes the spiritual realm as another set of dimensions. Angels would be in those dimensions, but God the father would be greater than even those parameters. Say, perhaps, angels share our time dimension (maybe), but have their own dimensions of space and material. Who knows?

Mind you this isn't like alternate reality time-warp stuff. This is like string-theory extra dimensions, like a fourth dimension of space, like scientifically describable if we could interact with the spiritual dimensions.

glorious solution to problem of evil

My original defense for the problem of evil came from Romans 9:19-24, something like "Who are you, oh man, to talk back to God?" where God do whatever he wants with us little people.

This is entirely true, but its rather depressing and only half the story.

I started wondering about the main fault with argument against God using the problem of evil. It concerns the contradiction of evil with three of Gods qualities, omnipotence (all powerful), omniscient (all-knowing), and omni-benevolent (he is good to everyone). And it came to me that the theory, within omni-benevolence, assumes that humans are faultless and so God is required to save us 'innocent' people. Yeah right! We deserve some punishment!

But it gets even better. God is not only just, he's also benevolent. But how on earth does he bring people trouble and stay good? Well, just like humans aren't guiltless, we aren't perfect either, we need to be made better (edified), so he sends trials out way. Its like surgery without anesthetic. It's painful, but after it's done you thank the surgeon with all your heart.

Don't you want to be made better, better able to love God, a better person? Of course, even if its painful! This makes it possible for us to thank God for our trials, with tears of pain and joy. In order to change somebody, you have to tear down the stuff that needs to be changed. That is trials.

So this makes the story of tribulations glorious. God is wooing and purifying his bride, us, the church. He is making us better for himself to enjoy, and we delight in being made better! It's amazing!

Maranatha! (come lord Jesus)

stress of amazing God, life trajectory

Recently I have been highly animated, stressed out, and on fire for God. I wonder how, biophysically, humans can contain such a heightened level of experience. I may attribute it to some disease like mono (I'm tired a lot of the time), or something, but who knows?

So the questions is: what does everyday on-fire life look like? William Carey worked 14 hour days and is considered the father of modern missions. But he died relatively young, had a psychotic wife, and couldn't raise his children.

So how do I handle it?

And what on earth am I supposed to do for the advancement of Gods kingdom? This blog is kind of nice, but its only useful if people start seeing it. I could go from city to city speaking, like the Rebelution, which so far seems best.

But I have a good life trajectory set for civil engineering. Should I drop that and go philosophy? I suppose I'd only be dropping a couple years of my life, and gaining about 30-odd good ones.

But its such a hard decision! I pray that God would give me guidance.

May my struggles help you figure out what God has in store for you.

"proof" that the world is logical

I was in a bout of depression recently, struggling with the validity of scientific proofs (because there are huge scientific supports for the existence of God in antinomies) in relation to logic. And the ral question came "is the world logical?" or does it operate under other laws, or no laws at all, are we (am I) the only entity in the universe, etc.

First of all, one has to make the assumption that the universe is made up of objects, and that the objects can interact with each other. This is so basic an assumption, that I will fear the day we question it. From there I built upon Descartes, who says that other things exist because the world we perceive is larger than we can imagine, and often surprises us. Descartes then provides an argument for God, that we have an idea of God (and infinitely good), which cannot have come from anything less than something infinitely good (i.e. we cannot construct the idea of God from some combination of our perceptions of other objects in the universe.)

Unfortunately, this assumes that relationships (data transfer, collisions, whatever) between objects are consistent and can be used to determine the re of an object. I struggled for awhile, considering objects floating around in the universe, until I remembered that I was an object. From there we can see that data flow to me is consistent (following some pattern) and logical, so chances are (unless I am some special being in respect to data flow), that all relationships between objects follow logical orders. This provides a crutch for all logical arguments after it.

Actually, I have just thought now, our innate rules of logic probably stem from the sorts of patterns we perceive in the information flowing to us.

Anyway, the great collapse of reason has been averted (until I can bring myself to question objects and relationships).

Whoops! I just used logic to prove that the world is logical!

Basis for law of any sort

I have been suspended between opinions about law for a long time. Previously I have held that laws should only protect people, and should allow drugs, abortions, and other things that do not attack other people, even though they go against Gods law. However, I remembered recently that even laws like murder must be based on Gods law. In a world without God, why should we not kill people? If you prefer that other people like you, and if you would like human civilization to survive, of course you shouldn't kill. But what if you don't care?

God provides a higher law than simple preferences (like not being run out of town on a rail), and provides the answer for certain: killing is wrong. In fact, right and wrong are defined by God, by a respect for Gods power and intentions.

Now, even with this strong thought about God law, I am only up in the air rather than decided. But perhaps this will help you in your search for answers about true law.

application of logical facts

Often times I think we know things in our heads, and if we were reminded of them would act on them. The problem is that most of these logical facts that we know, are not embedded into our automatic/subconscious reactions. Given the speed of normal conversation and social networking, opportunities come and go very fast, and applying logic and knowledge kill the chance to respond. Here is where emotional stories and practice drills can come in handy. I am one who treats behavior and character modifications with cold calculation, so this is what I would recommend.

Does that make sense?

absolute truth

I have debated with people for long hours about absolute truth to no avail. So, here, instead of a new argument, is an illustration that made it clearer to me.

You and I are sitting across from each other at a diner table. A glass cup sits on the counter. I cover it with a napkin, so that there is only a large bump on the table. We begin to discuss the existence of the cup. We say things like

"I believe there's a cup because there simply has to be something under that napkin."

"I don't think so because for all we know, there's a monkey underneath, or space time might be bent so that there's nothing under the napkin."

"There's a bump there whether you like it or not."

"It all depends on what you prefer. Because whatever it is won't touch us (or we can't tell its touching us), we can imagine whatever we like to suit ourselves. So, a glass may suit you, I prefer to believe the easier option, that the glass doesn't exist. And it won't ever matter what we choose."

"We're forced to decide what's underneath, because that bump is sitting right there in front of our eyes."

"I don't see a bump. What's all the big fuss? Stop ruining my dinner time."

"Are you blind? What's wrong with you....

The discussion goes nowhere. But all throughout the conversation, the glass has remained under the napkin, unmoved. Sometime the napkin will be removed, and we'll see it.

Its certainly not a perfect analogy, but lets try to make it real.

In the real world the glass is a time . It holds the bench seats up from collapsing us into oblivion. The napkin is draped over our heads, and hangs right in front of our eyes. We can see the general form of the glass from the shape of the napkin, how incredibly glassy it is, but we have no idea about anything deeper than the surface.

Whether we believe the glass exists or not, and no matter how much discussion we've had on the subject, we'll know the truth sometime.