This morning Wendy and I were discussing scams. Specifically we were discussing what sort of heuristics you could use to determine whether or not something was a scam rather than a legitimate offer. This is one of those bizarre situations where it is fairly easy for a objective person to determine what is a scam or isn't given a short description but it is fairly challenging to write a simple heuristic to make that same decision.
The example we saw was a snippet of a newspaper ad from many, many years ago. It was advertising a writer's group that would test you to see if you had substantial latent writing talent and invite you to learn by correspondence if you passed the test. The idea was that they had a staff of professional writers would would mentor you and provide feedback and advice on your assignments. All for a very modest fee, of course. It turns out that they passed everybody who wrote their 'exam' and were happy to ship completely generic advice to you that was not at all generated by the actual assignments completed.
More recently I had two different friends fall prey to two other scams. The first is a 'modelling agency' which finds people at fairs and shows, tells them they stand out in a crowd and should be a model and then fleeces them for tons of money for 'portfolio fees' and whatever else they can get. Needless to say the fleeceee never does any modelling. The second is pretty much a straightforward pyramid scheme selling phone/tv/internet services where the fleeceee pays a substantial fee to join the system and then has to both sell and recruit like mad to try to make their money back.
So how can we differentiate these from real opportunities? As far as schooling goes I suggested the 'They might turn me down' method, whereby if the school will take absolutely anybody then you must be suspicious that the only thing they care about is your money, rather than the quality of the applicant. This works for universities and 'writer's groups' but fails for most colleges and many other real programs. The only thing I was able to come up with that actually worked is 'I personally would hire someone who had that institution's name on their resume'. If someone gets a degree in Medical Biophysics from the University of Toronto, I know it is something. If they get a writer's certificate from the New York Newspaper Writer's group I would totally ignore it. You could easily determine the worth of a learning opportunity by contacting recruiters in the industry in question and asking their opinions of an institution before enrolling.
As far as modelling agencies and pyramid scheme sales jobs go, the heuristic is actually extremely simple. If you are looking at a job offer where the job pays you, it is probably legit. If you are looking at a job offer where you pay the job, IT IS NOT LEGIT. There is always good old reliable "If it seems too good to be true, it probably is" which certainly sorts out all kinds of different problems but is remarkably unspecific. Perhaps the best possible solution is to make use of the fact that people make bad decisions individually but that large groups of people make much better decisions. If an offer concerns you, ask the 10 smartest, most objective people you know. If they mostly think it is a scam, it is. If they don't, it isn't.
Tuesday, February 9, 2010
Monday, February 8, 2010
Mature Discussions on Matters of Commerce
Or, as we like to call it in WOW, trade chat.
The theory of trade chat in WOW is that people will make posts offering goods or services and others can respond to those posts. In theory this is a place where people can come to conduct in game business, whether that be acquiring goods to make better gear or just trying to play the margins and fleece the rubes. The reality of trade chat though is that there are posts here and there pertaining to the topic of commerce but they are largely drowned out by the offtopic roar. There are somewhat offtopic discussions like people trying to recruit for guilds or for dungeon runs and then there are *really* offtopic discussions like debating who is going to win the super bowl and whether or not Chuck Norris could beat up Mr T.
Today the main topic in trade chat was penis length.
Before we go any further there are two Big things you have to know about me. Firstly I have opinions. Lots of them. Some of my most dearly held opinions concern the human body and ways in which we treat it. Specifically I heartily dislike the demonization of genitalia and the way in which they are often thought of as obscene and taboo. We have penises and vaginas, they aren't evil, and there is nothing wrong with discussing them. Secondly I have no fear of expressing those opinions in public. In fact you might even suggest that I enjoy the loud, uninhibited free exchange of ideas in a confrontational format. Given these two things, it should be surprising to no one that I waded on in and began telling people how things are.
As regularly happens among people who discuss genitalia in public, the debate turned to whether or not size matters. Most of the conversation revolved around making crude (sometimes funny, usually boring) jokes and trying to combine the topics of Chuck Norris and penises, but here and there some actual debate took place. The main thing that interested me was one particular poster - Puritan - who objected strenuously to this debate taking place in trade chat. He cried out
"There are minors in this channel you know! I am going to open a ticket with Game Master to get you guys to stop."
Wow, really? People under 18 playing video games? Who would have suspected that? Thing is, kids are taught about sexual organs and their functions at a very early age now. They know about them, and if they are attending school then we aren't going to teach them any new words. We might teach them a lot about how people treat sexuality in a social context, but that is useful information to have.
I ended up calling out Puritan on the basis that
1. The game has a profanity filter he can turn on if he wants to.
2. The game allows him to permanently ignore people he does not want to hear from again.
3. He can leave trade chat any time he wants and come back if he chooses.
4. Penises are not evil, filthy or degrading.
He came back at me with the argument that trade chat is for trade, and hence we were in the wrong, only discussion about trade should take place. The thing is though, this is a public channel. Anyone can join, anyone can leave, anyone can post. If you don't like trade chat, go make your own channel (trivial to do within the game) and invite others who want to discuss only commerce to join you. You will rapidly discover that this is not going to work, primarily because the thing you actually want is an audience, and what the audience wants is Chuck Norris jokes and to talk about penises. Occasionally they are going to respond to the commercial messages but mostly they are there to spout off and be entertained. Even if you could remove all the offtopic junk you wouldn't want to because the channel would be desolate. Everyone would move over to the "When Chuck Norris crosses the street the cars have to look both ways" channel, and that channel would be infested with primarily offtopic chatter and occasional commercial content.
There is a reason that Prime Time is filled with hot new TV shows and occasional advertising and 4 AM is the time for infomercials. If you want people to buy your stuff you need to get them to listen in the first place. The best way to do this is to have the newest episode of 24 with occasional commercials, not a channel of 100% ads.
In a post awhile ago I talked about the reaction of some of my relatives to my posts, particularly the ones with controversial/sexual topics. I wonder what my Grandmother thinks of this one...
The theory of trade chat in WOW is that people will make posts offering goods or services and others can respond to those posts. In theory this is a place where people can come to conduct in game business, whether that be acquiring goods to make better gear or just trying to play the margins and fleece the rubes. The reality of trade chat though is that there are posts here and there pertaining to the topic of commerce but they are largely drowned out by the offtopic roar. There are somewhat offtopic discussions like people trying to recruit for guilds or for dungeon runs and then there are *really* offtopic discussions like debating who is going to win the super bowl and whether or not Chuck Norris could beat up Mr T.
Today the main topic in trade chat was penis length.
Before we go any further there are two Big things you have to know about me. Firstly I have opinions. Lots of them. Some of my most dearly held opinions concern the human body and ways in which we treat it. Specifically I heartily dislike the demonization of genitalia and the way in which they are often thought of as obscene and taboo. We have penises and vaginas, they aren't evil, and there is nothing wrong with discussing them. Secondly I have no fear of expressing those opinions in public. In fact you might even suggest that I enjoy the loud, uninhibited free exchange of ideas in a confrontational format. Given these two things, it should be surprising to no one that I waded on in and began telling people how things are.
As regularly happens among people who discuss genitalia in public, the debate turned to whether or not size matters. Most of the conversation revolved around making crude (sometimes funny, usually boring) jokes and trying to combine the topics of Chuck Norris and penises, but here and there some actual debate took place. The main thing that interested me was one particular poster - Puritan - who objected strenuously to this debate taking place in trade chat. He cried out
"There are minors in this channel you know! I am going to open a ticket with Game Master to get you guys to stop."
Wow, really? People under 18 playing video games? Who would have suspected that? Thing is, kids are taught about sexual organs and their functions at a very early age now. They know about them, and if they are attending school then we aren't going to teach them any new words. We might teach them a lot about how people treat sexuality in a social context, but that is useful information to have.
I ended up calling out Puritan on the basis that
1. The game has a profanity filter he can turn on if he wants to.
2. The game allows him to permanently ignore people he does not want to hear from again.
3. He can leave trade chat any time he wants and come back if he chooses.
4. Penises are not evil, filthy or degrading.
He came back at me with the argument that trade chat is for trade, and hence we were in the wrong, only discussion about trade should take place. The thing is though, this is a public channel. Anyone can join, anyone can leave, anyone can post. If you don't like trade chat, go make your own channel (trivial to do within the game) and invite others who want to discuss only commerce to join you. You will rapidly discover that this is not going to work, primarily because the thing you actually want is an audience, and what the audience wants is Chuck Norris jokes and to talk about penises. Occasionally they are going to respond to the commercial messages but mostly they are there to spout off and be entertained. Even if you could remove all the offtopic junk you wouldn't want to because the channel would be desolate. Everyone would move over to the "When Chuck Norris crosses the street the cars have to look both ways" channel, and that channel would be infested with primarily offtopic chatter and occasional commercial content.
There is a reason that Prime Time is filled with hot new TV shows and occasional advertising and 4 AM is the time for infomercials. If you want people to buy your stuff you need to get them to listen in the first place. The best way to do this is to have the newest episode of 24 with occasional commercials, not a channel of 100% ads.
In a post awhile ago I talked about the reaction of some of my relatives to my posts, particularly the ones with controversial/sexual topics. I wonder what my Grandmother thinks of this one...
Sunday, February 7, 2010
An Angry God - Reloaded
I have been reading Numbers and Deuteronomy in the Bible these past few days and wow, the God depicted there is a jerk. The thing that is blowing my mind though is not that God is a jerk to the non-Israelites, but rather that he is a jerk to *everybody*.
If you take the Bible as literally true you would be forced to conclude that it is a very bad thing to be an enemy of the Israelites in the days of the Exodus, but it is probably even worse to be an Israelite. If you are not an Israelite you can believe whatever you like and do all kinds of strange things but unless you actually get in the way of the Israelites and their conquests God has nothing to say about you. If you are an Israelite though and you break God's commandments (this includes all of the hundreds of rules in the Bible, not just the best known ten) you will be destroyed. Your crops will wither, your courage will falter, you will run in terror from nothing and your enemies will kill you. As an Israelite you don't have the choice of another life, because unlike everybody else you *must* obey God or he will personally see to it that you are ground to dust. The heathens appear to have drastically more freedom and fewer consequences for sinning that the Israelites themselves.
It doesn't start and end with a lack of freedom though. Any time the Israelites express doubt in God or in their future God becomes angry at them and smites them. He sends plague after plague at the Israelites for their faults, and in most cases it is noted how many people he killed. It must be a hard thing for morale when some of your people go and protest against the current leadership and God sends a plague among you and twenty four thousand people die. It isn't limited to plagues though, God sends poisonous serpents among the people, causes the earth to open up and swallow them and curses them to wander the desert for forty years for their transgressions. Time and time again the Bible records how many thousands died to this new atrocity inflicted by the vengeful God. Being a Israelite may mean that you are the chosen of God, but the benefits of being chosen seem very poor indeed.
I was wondering how exactly the Bible was going to be filled out considering just how much there is left to go. I am less than 1/4 of the way through the Old Testament and yet I have already seen the majority of the Bible stories I am familiar with. I wondered how the rest would be filled... until I got to Deuteronomy. It seems that the way to fill the space in these many, many pages is repetition. Tell the same story as the chapter before but with slightly different wording and a few new things thrown in and you can fill up space admirably.
If you take the Bible as literally true you would be forced to conclude that it is a very bad thing to be an enemy of the Israelites in the days of the Exodus, but it is probably even worse to be an Israelite. If you are not an Israelite you can believe whatever you like and do all kinds of strange things but unless you actually get in the way of the Israelites and their conquests God has nothing to say about you. If you are an Israelite though and you break God's commandments (this includes all of the hundreds of rules in the Bible, not just the best known ten) you will be destroyed. Your crops will wither, your courage will falter, you will run in terror from nothing and your enemies will kill you. As an Israelite you don't have the choice of another life, because unlike everybody else you *must* obey God or he will personally see to it that you are ground to dust. The heathens appear to have drastically more freedom and fewer consequences for sinning that the Israelites themselves.
It doesn't start and end with a lack of freedom though. Any time the Israelites express doubt in God or in their future God becomes angry at them and smites them. He sends plague after plague at the Israelites for their faults, and in most cases it is noted how many people he killed. It must be a hard thing for morale when some of your people go and protest against the current leadership and God sends a plague among you and twenty four thousand people die. It isn't limited to plagues though, God sends poisonous serpents among the people, causes the earth to open up and swallow them and curses them to wander the desert for forty years for their transgressions. Time and time again the Bible records how many thousands died to this new atrocity inflicted by the vengeful God. Being a Israelite may mean that you are the chosen of God, but the benefits of being chosen seem very poor indeed.
I was wondering how exactly the Bible was going to be filled out considering just how much there is left to go. I am less than 1/4 of the way through the Old Testament and yet I have already seen the majority of the Bible stories I am familiar with. I wondered how the rest would be filled... until I got to Deuteronomy. It seems that the way to fill the space in these many, many pages is repetition. Tell the same story as the chapter before but with slightly different wording and a few new things thrown in and you can fill up space admirably.
Saturday, February 6, 2010
Guys, I've solved it!
Yesterday my father brought me a new book.
The Big Questions - Steven E. Landsburg
It is a book written by a economist/mathematician about all kinds of interesting philosophical topics from religion to morality to the limits of human knowledge. Trade agreements, costs, distribution of wealth and taxation were topics on which the book makes some good points but like many economists he makes the fundamental error of presuming people are perfect economic units maximizing their own happiness. People are not perfect economic units and they make terrible decisions; any model that does not account for that is a waste of space. Additionally when he tries to branch out to philosophical arguments he often gets caught up in the mathematics of the situation while totally failing to account for the psychology. He tackles several classic philosophical problems, one of which follows below:
A train is speeding out of control down a track. On the track ahead of it 5 people are tied up, unable to escape. There is a switch that you can hit to send the train down an alternate track on which 1 person is tied up. Should you hit that switch?
Most people answer yes. Some people think it is okay to hit the switch and some people think you have an obligation to hit it, but the overwhelming majority feel that hitting the switch is the best choice.
A train is speeding out of control down a track. On the track ahead of it 5 people are tied up, unable to escape. There is a very large person standing near the track and you are confident that if you push that person onto the track it will stop the train, saving the 5 people. Should you push that person onto the tracks?
Most people answer no. The author of the book answers yes, and in fact is completely shocked that *anyone* would answer no. His view on the matter is that it is simply a matter of numbers, saving 5 people is more important that saving 1, QED. This is a classic example of someone trained to believe in people as perfect economic units, and not so much a salesman. I can tell you from personal experience that being a salesman instead of a academic gives you a *drastically* different (more accurate) idea of how people actually behave.
Firstly, the world is always full of uncertainty. In the examples above people are told that shoving the man will 100% stop the train and that the train will 100% not stop on its own, but in real life people doubt. They don't know what is going on, they aren't sure how things will be, and their grasp of the physics of the world around them, particularly when a split second decision is required, is not very good. Thus people are naturally cautious when performing a violent, dangerous act to effect a future good. Everyone is sure that pushing that man onto the tracks is really, really bad and the only way to make up for it is being completely certain that it will stop the train. Given that in the real world the train may stop on its own, someone else might be near a switch that will divert it and the man might not stop it anyway it is extremely reasonable to not interfere. In the first example though you are not adding any additional harm to the situation if there is something you don't know about going on. Barring something very strange happening there is no reason to think you made things worse.
The second issue here is that there is no accounting made for personal guilt. This should not be news, but people care more about their own suffering than someone else's. Pushing a man onto the tracks will cause tremendous personal guilt, particularly if it doesn't work! Also, it is a known fact that people are tremendously more willing to inflict pain, suffering and death on others as long as they are physically removed from the situation. Hitting a switch to drop a bomb is hugely different than beating someone to death with a rock even if the net result is one death. People intuitively know this and know that their personal guilt from shoving someone to their death would be far greater than their personal guilt from hitting a switch to divert a train. This may not be the 'correct' way to reason from an abstract, moral point of view but it is exactly how people think.
I don't take umbrage with the conclusion that in a world of perfect information we should choose 1 death over 5. If somehow these situations were clear and certain it is the correct moral choice. However, the assumption that people will actually make choices like moral logicians in a world of perfect knowledge is completely irrational. When you ask people questions they respond by thinking about them in terms of the world they live in and what they know. When you forget that you are setting yourself up for some really rude surprises.
Check this out:
The Big Questions - Steven E. Landsburg
It is a book written by a economist/mathematician about all kinds of interesting philosophical topics from religion to morality to the limits of human knowledge. Trade agreements, costs, distribution of wealth and taxation were topics on which the book makes some good points but like many economists he makes the fundamental error of presuming people are perfect economic units maximizing their own happiness. People are not perfect economic units and they make terrible decisions; any model that does not account for that is a waste of space. Additionally when he tries to branch out to philosophical arguments he often gets caught up in the mathematics of the situation while totally failing to account for the psychology. He tackles several classic philosophical problems, one of which follows below:
A train is speeding out of control down a track. On the track ahead of it 5 people are tied up, unable to escape. There is a switch that you can hit to send the train down an alternate track on which 1 person is tied up. Should you hit that switch?
Most people answer yes. Some people think it is okay to hit the switch and some people think you have an obligation to hit it, but the overwhelming majority feel that hitting the switch is the best choice.
A train is speeding out of control down a track. On the track ahead of it 5 people are tied up, unable to escape. There is a very large person standing near the track and you are confident that if you push that person onto the track it will stop the train, saving the 5 people. Should you push that person onto the tracks?
Most people answer no. The author of the book answers yes, and in fact is completely shocked that *anyone* would answer no. His view on the matter is that it is simply a matter of numbers, saving 5 people is more important that saving 1, QED. This is a classic example of someone trained to believe in people as perfect economic units, and not so much a salesman. I can tell you from personal experience that being a salesman instead of a academic gives you a *drastically* different (more accurate) idea of how people actually behave.
Firstly, the world is always full of uncertainty. In the examples above people are told that shoving the man will 100% stop the train and that the train will 100% not stop on its own, but in real life people doubt. They don't know what is going on, they aren't sure how things will be, and their grasp of the physics of the world around them, particularly when a split second decision is required, is not very good. Thus people are naturally cautious when performing a violent, dangerous act to effect a future good. Everyone is sure that pushing that man onto the tracks is really, really bad and the only way to make up for it is being completely certain that it will stop the train. Given that in the real world the train may stop on its own, someone else might be near a switch that will divert it and the man might not stop it anyway it is extremely reasonable to not interfere. In the first example though you are not adding any additional harm to the situation if there is something you don't know about going on. Barring something very strange happening there is no reason to think you made things worse.
The second issue here is that there is no accounting made for personal guilt. This should not be news, but people care more about their own suffering than someone else's. Pushing a man onto the tracks will cause tremendous personal guilt, particularly if it doesn't work! Also, it is a known fact that people are tremendously more willing to inflict pain, suffering and death on others as long as they are physically removed from the situation. Hitting a switch to drop a bomb is hugely different than beating someone to death with a rock even if the net result is one death. People intuitively know this and know that their personal guilt from shoving someone to their death would be far greater than their personal guilt from hitting a switch to divert a train. This may not be the 'correct' way to reason from an abstract, moral point of view but it is exactly how people think.
I don't take umbrage with the conclusion that in a world of perfect information we should choose 1 death over 5. If somehow these situations were clear and certain it is the correct moral choice. However, the assumption that people will actually make choices like moral logicians in a world of perfect knowledge is completely irrational. When you ask people questions they respond by thinking about them in terms of the world they live in and what they know. When you forget that you are setting yourself up for some really rude surprises.
Check this out:
Thursday, February 4, 2010
The Final Boss
The Final Boss of WOW is out and his name is Arthas the Lich King. We saw him commit hideous crimes against his own soldiers in Dragonblight, we saw him destroy legions of fighting men in Icecrown, and many of us remember back when the Scourge invaded the rest of Azeroth and the world was turned upside down for 4 days. Now it is our opportunity to corner him in his lair and take him down.
On the very first day Arthas become available to fight a guild defeated him. The fight is certainly very challenging as many, many guilds tried and failed. Now we go to the WOW forums for comments and find that the world has ended. People are signing up in droves to complain that an iconic figure in the lore of the world has been destroyed in no time. They are screaming from the rooftops that Blizzard has ruined everything and that the final boss should have taken weeks, no *months* to defeat. How can any of us continue on playing knowing that someone else beat the game first?
When you go and lift a 80 kilo weight and feel good about it there is doubtless someone else lifting a 160 kilo weight. Of course the guy lifting that 160 kilo weight probably trains for hours a day and devotes much of his life and energy to becoming incredibly strong while you hit the gym for 3 hours a week. He probably makes it a priority. This is something that I find really quite interesting about competition that manifests itself very obviously in WOW; people look down on anyone with a different level of involvement than themselves. This is not unique to video games at all, but the unbridled anger and vitriol that gets spewed about is not generally seen in other venues because the anonymity of the internet is not so readily available.
When someone is more involved in a chosen sport or activity they are regularly looked down upon as having no life, being too competitive and not being willing to just have fun. When someone is less involved in that same activity they are just casual, not committed and are weak. In most fields of endeavour these feelings must be squelched to a large extent to keep from violating social norms. People will slander others in this way in private with people they know are in the same strata of commitment as themselves but will largely keep it there.
In WOW that sure isn't true. Because the game itself is so intertwined with the internet the people who play it find the temptation to log on and scream out their frustrations over the tubes irresistible. They scream that the game is too easy because someone else beat it (never mind that those who beat it play 40 hours a week) and then they turn around and insult those who accomplished the feat calling them basement dwelling no-lifers. Of course next week they will be screaming that the Final Boss is far too hard and the game is catering to those same no-lifers because no normal person could hope to defeat it. The hardcore players will then post that they beat the Final Boss too easily and that the game is being dumbed down for the casuals.
A reality check: Like in most things in life, if you actually want to be the best, the first, the brightest and the guy who makes the front page you have to be the most committed. If you prioritize other things in life then bully for you, but blowing your stack because you can't be the best player in the world on a couple hours a week is simply foolishness. If you prioritize WOW and are amazing at it, fine and well, but suggesting that all the time and effort you and your team puts in to being great is nothing and that everyone can do it trivially is asinine. Just like ultimate frisbee, knitting, lifting weights or climbing mountains there are going to be people more and less committed than yourself. Spending your time putting others down only makes you look insecure; demanding that the game be solely designed for someone of your exact committment level makes you seem selfish and irrational.
On the very first day Arthas become available to fight a guild defeated him. The fight is certainly very challenging as many, many guilds tried and failed. Now we go to the WOW forums for comments and find that the world has ended. People are signing up in droves to complain that an iconic figure in the lore of the world has been destroyed in no time. They are screaming from the rooftops that Blizzard has ruined everything and that the final boss should have taken weeks, no *months* to defeat. How can any of us continue on playing knowing that someone else beat the game first?
When you go and lift a 80 kilo weight and feel good about it there is doubtless someone else lifting a 160 kilo weight. Of course the guy lifting that 160 kilo weight probably trains for hours a day and devotes much of his life and energy to becoming incredibly strong while you hit the gym for 3 hours a week. He probably makes it a priority. This is something that I find really quite interesting about competition that manifests itself very obviously in WOW; people look down on anyone with a different level of involvement than themselves. This is not unique to video games at all, but the unbridled anger and vitriol that gets spewed about is not generally seen in other venues because the anonymity of the internet is not so readily available.
When someone is more involved in a chosen sport or activity they are regularly looked down upon as having no life, being too competitive and not being willing to just have fun. When someone is less involved in that same activity they are just casual, not committed and are weak. In most fields of endeavour these feelings must be squelched to a large extent to keep from violating social norms. People will slander others in this way in private with people they know are in the same strata of commitment as themselves but will largely keep it there.
In WOW that sure isn't true. Because the game itself is so intertwined with the internet the people who play it find the temptation to log on and scream out their frustrations over the tubes irresistible. They scream that the game is too easy because someone else beat it (never mind that those who beat it play 40 hours a week) and then they turn around and insult those who accomplished the feat calling them basement dwelling no-lifers. Of course next week they will be screaming that the Final Boss is far too hard and the game is catering to those same no-lifers because no normal person could hope to defeat it. The hardcore players will then post that they beat the Final Boss too easily and that the game is being dumbed down for the casuals.
A reality check: Like in most things in life, if you actually want to be the best, the first, the brightest and the guy who makes the front page you have to be the most committed. If you prioritize other things in life then bully for you, but blowing your stack because you can't be the best player in the world on a couple hours a week is simply foolishness. If you prioritize WOW and are amazing at it, fine and well, but suggesting that all the time and effort you and your team puts in to being great is nothing and that everyone can do it trivially is asinine. Just like ultimate frisbee, knitting, lifting weights or climbing mountains there are going to be people more and less committed than yourself. Spending your time putting others down only makes you look insecure; demanding that the game be solely designed for someone of your exact committment level makes you seem selfish and irrational.
Wednesday, February 3, 2010
A Grand Plan - A Nap
I have guests around over the next couple of days so my posts and Bible reading will likely be somewhat sporadic, so expect my usual volume and excessive wordiness to resume at the end of the week.
Yesterday I got a unexpected reaction to my last post. Wendy read it, gave me a very strange look and asked, "You do know that the Bible was written by many different people over many different time periods, right? It wasn't laid down all at once in some kind of revelation."
Yup, I know that.
The reason this confusion was there is that my intentions when I started my 'Read the Bible and blog about it' weren't clear either to myself or anyone else. Now that I have begun though the way I need to go about this has become more clear. I know a fair bit about how religious groups operate and what they say to people and I know what atheists preach. What I didn't know until very recently was what exactly was in the Bible. This project then is about reading the Bible and trying to react to the things I see in it without paying attention to all the knowledge I already have stuffed into my brain about what to expect. I hope to read it with an open mind and share that experience. I don't want to just regurgitate the objections that atheist scholars have already shared with me and I don't want to read the Bible trying to find justification for religion. The goal is to simply read the Bible, understand what is literally written there and try to understand it. Once I have done that I will take time to actively compare it to the religions it has spawned and consider the objections to it I have already read.
The way naps have evolved in my household has greatly amused me. It used to be that Elli would take a nap each day for 2 hours or so. Last year this was my opportunity to get my games, hobbies and such in while also trying to get some work done. Lately though she has been uninterested in napping so we began to enforce quiet time. At first she would play quietly in her room and we would retreat to our bedroom (also the computer room) to play video games together or nap ourselves. Now though Elli wants to have the run of the condo aside from our bedroom during quiet time and we found it hard to deny her this since we certainly weren't using the rest of the space.
Now we have reached the point that when naptime comes it is Mama and Daddy who retreat to their room and close the door to have a lie down for awhile while Elli runs around the place doing things. I might be a little ticked off at this if naps weren't so wonderful. A decade ago I would have laughed at the idea of a nap - I have too much to do! But these days the opportunity to let the 3 year old run around on her own and stop the endless tide of "Daddy, Daddy, Daddy, look at this look at this Daddy watch me!" and have a little rest is just nirvana. I don't know the exact date when Elli's naptime became Mama/Daddy's naptime but we sure are there now.
Yesterday I got a unexpected reaction to my last post. Wendy read it, gave me a very strange look and asked, "You do know that the Bible was written by many different people over many different time periods, right? It wasn't laid down all at once in some kind of revelation."
Yup, I know that.
The reason this confusion was there is that my intentions when I started my 'Read the Bible and blog about it' weren't clear either to myself or anyone else. Now that I have begun though the way I need to go about this has become more clear. I know a fair bit about how religious groups operate and what they say to people and I know what atheists preach. What I didn't know until very recently was what exactly was in the Bible. This project then is about reading the Bible and trying to react to the things I see in it without paying attention to all the knowledge I already have stuffed into my brain about what to expect. I hope to read it with an open mind and share that experience. I don't want to just regurgitate the objections that atheist scholars have already shared with me and I don't want to read the Bible trying to find justification for religion. The goal is to simply read the Bible, understand what is literally written there and try to understand it. Once I have done that I will take time to actively compare it to the religions it has spawned and consider the objections to it I have already read.
The way naps have evolved in my household has greatly amused me. It used to be that Elli would take a nap each day for 2 hours or so. Last year this was my opportunity to get my games, hobbies and such in while also trying to get some work done. Lately though she has been uninterested in napping so we began to enforce quiet time. At first she would play quietly in her room and we would retreat to our bedroom (also the computer room) to play video games together or nap ourselves. Now though Elli wants to have the run of the condo aside from our bedroom during quiet time and we found it hard to deny her this since we certainly weren't using the rest of the space.
Now we have reached the point that when naptime comes it is Mama and Daddy who retreat to their room and close the door to have a lie down for awhile while Elli runs around the place doing things. I might be a little ticked off at this if naps weren't so wonderful. A decade ago I would have laughed at the idea of a nap - I have too much to do! But these days the opportunity to let the 3 year old run around on her own and stop the endless tide of "Daddy, Daddy, Daddy, look at this look at this Daddy watch me!" and have a little rest is just nirvana. I don't know the exact date when Elli's naptime became Mama/Daddy's naptime but we sure are there now.
Monday, February 1, 2010
Divine Transformation
When I started writing my blog I gave "Warning warning, Danger danger" notes at the top of my posts to denote religious content. Given that I have begun to write every second post on a religious topic I think that those sorts of warnings are unnecessary and distracting while serving no real purpose. Some people have even suggested that it may be insulting to the reader to assume they need such warnings, though I am not sure that I buy that. Regardless my intent going forward is to remove all warning labels and even to push further into controversial territory. I hope to drop the walls a little bit more and let my thoughts pour onto the screen.
Over the weekend and today I have been reading Leviticus and Numbers chapters in the Bible. The stark differences between Genesis and the following chapters is really starting to become more clear now; God has changed from a Omnipotent Creator to a Tough Guy over these pages. It feels very much like the Exodus, Leviticus and Numbers chapters would make more sense if the deity in them was not the same deity as the beginning of the Bible. The God of these chapters is jealous, cruel and extremely interested in the minutia of running a civilization. He feels much more like a human emperor that is unbelievably powerful yet still distinctly personal.
The God of Exodus, Leviticus and Numbers (ELN) is very concerned with unclean things. He is very worried about men not cutting off their foreskins, women bleeding during menstruation and animals being without blemish. There are immense quantities of instructions about dealing with unclean animals, insects and food and yet no real acknowledgement given of the premise that God created all of these things as they are. It is as if God - ELN was written up as a personal God of the Israelites who was incredibly interested in how they ran their everyday lives and was happy to massacre their enemies for them without thought given at all to the creation myth. The jarring difference between the two Gods pictured here makes it seem like the stories were written separately by people who had dramatically different views on the nature of the singular deity but were stitched together later regardless of the inconsistencies.
I also find amusing the way that details of the events at the time were recorded. Numbers 7:78 records the specific sacrifices brought by Ahira son of Enan including the sheckel value of each of the gold or silver items he brought. Needless to say Ahira son of Enan never appears in the Bible again. A few pages later the people cry out for meat (possibly because they have to sacrifice enormous quantities of livestock constantly) so God brings quails in from the sea and stacks them two cubits deep all around the Israelites. The Israelites eat the quail, which enrages God so he strikes them with 'a very great plague' and they name that place for all the people they have to bury there. You might think that God providing sustenance in such a magical way, becoming enraged at the eating of said sustenance and then plaguing the people would be a big deal, but the space devoted to that whole event was the same as the space devoted to chronicling the sacrifice of Ahira son of Enan.
If you disobey this God he might:
Curse you with childlessness
Curse your family with childlessness
Curse your servants, slaves, household, clan, friends or nation with childlessness
Strike you blind
Turn you into a pillar of salt
Cover you in boils
Cast you out of your nation
Instantly slay you
Cause others to slay you
Rain fire on your city to destroy you
Summon plagues to randomly kill people
Bring swarms of insects to eat your crops
Slay your livestock
But one thing he won't do is curse you to eternal torment. In this part of the Bible hell is not a thing at all, once you are dead you are quite done. I am very curious to see how much eternal torment/reward shows up in the Bible because it is such a central feature of religions these days. In the Old Testament it just isn't there... although God is more than happy to inflict hideous torments on people he stops at the grave. That is, unless you count the fact that he will curse your family up to the fourth generation for things you have done. You may have passed beyond his jurisdiction, but your offspring have not, and inheritance is of critical importance to the God of ELN.
Over the weekend and today I have been reading Leviticus and Numbers chapters in the Bible. The stark differences between Genesis and the following chapters is really starting to become more clear now; God has changed from a Omnipotent Creator to a Tough Guy over these pages. It feels very much like the Exodus, Leviticus and Numbers chapters would make more sense if the deity in them was not the same deity as the beginning of the Bible. The God of these chapters is jealous, cruel and extremely interested in the minutia of running a civilization. He feels much more like a human emperor that is unbelievably powerful yet still distinctly personal.
The God of Exodus, Leviticus and Numbers (ELN) is very concerned with unclean things. He is very worried about men not cutting off their foreskins, women bleeding during menstruation and animals being without blemish. There are immense quantities of instructions about dealing with unclean animals, insects and food and yet no real acknowledgement given of the premise that God created all of these things as they are. It is as if God - ELN was written up as a personal God of the Israelites who was incredibly interested in how they ran their everyday lives and was happy to massacre their enemies for them without thought given at all to the creation myth. The jarring difference between the two Gods pictured here makes it seem like the stories were written separately by people who had dramatically different views on the nature of the singular deity but were stitched together later regardless of the inconsistencies.
I also find amusing the way that details of the events at the time were recorded. Numbers 7:78 records the specific sacrifices brought by Ahira son of Enan including the sheckel value of each of the gold or silver items he brought. Needless to say Ahira son of Enan never appears in the Bible again. A few pages later the people cry out for meat (possibly because they have to sacrifice enormous quantities of livestock constantly) so God brings quails in from the sea and stacks them two cubits deep all around the Israelites. The Israelites eat the quail, which enrages God so he strikes them with 'a very great plague' and they name that place for all the people they have to bury there. You might think that God providing sustenance in such a magical way, becoming enraged at the eating of said sustenance and then plaguing the people would be a big deal, but the space devoted to that whole event was the same as the space devoted to chronicling the sacrifice of Ahira son of Enan.
If you disobey this God he might:
Curse you with childlessness
Curse your family with childlessness
Curse your servants, slaves, household, clan, friends or nation with childlessness
Strike you blind
Turn you into a pillar of salt
Cover you in boils
Cast you out of your nation
Instantly slay you
Cause others to slay you
Rain fire on your city to destroy you
Summon plagues to randomly kill people
Bring swarms of insects to eat your crops
Slay your livestock
But one thing he won't do is curse you to eternal torment. In this part of the Bible hell is not a thing at all, once you are dead you are quite done. I am very curious to see how much eternal torment/reward shows up in the Bible because it is such a central feature of religions these days. In the Old Testament it just isn't there... although God is more than happy to inflict hideous torments on people he stops at the grave. That is, unless you count the fact that he will curse your family up to the fourth generation for things you have done. You may have passed beyond his jurisdiction, but your offspring have not, and inheritance is of critical importance to the God of ELN.
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