Wir sind bettler. Hoc est verum.

There are many stories in the world. Stories on all types of topics ranging from your sappy romance between two saplings in love to the most violently scarey attack of the rabid bunny horror films. The truth of the matter is, between all these stories, only the good ones have happy endings. Now of course how good a story is ultimately depends on many factors such as: originality, depth, tone, twists, understandability, meaning, and of course its conclusion. My purposes here is not to discuss all the aspects of story, except for one: the conclusion. No matter how good all aspects of a story are, its ending holds the final trump card which dictates how good the story really is. I would also argue that for the ending of the story to be anything but happy, it isn’t a good story.

Let us first start out by defining the word Story. A story is simply the telling of a particular sequence of events, fiction or not, that communicates a certain message (known or unknown). Every story communicates something (even if not intended by the author). If a sequence of events can be communicated in a way that no meaning can be derived from it, then it isn’t a story. Likewise if one just blathers incoherent and meaningless words, it isn’t a story. All stories have structure. They all have a beginning, middle, and end. They all have a subject and, like I said before, a meaning.

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So there was this news post about how Apple is notorious for trying to keep end users out of their products, and how their newest attempt is to change out all the screws on their products to screws that require a custom screwdriver (which presumably only they have). And yes, they are doing this to consumers who bring their products in for repair, without telling the consumer they are doing it.

I then had a friend ask an employee at Apple about this and from what my friend said, the employee’s attitude was simply that Apple owns our devices and we are not free to do what we want with them, even if we choose to void the warranty to do so. Now of course this isn’t an official Apple statement, and it may not really reflect Apples true position, but considering how they act, one wonders.

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Many people believe in Santa, most of them are under the age of 10. They believe in Santa because their parents told them Santa is real. This cycle has continued for generations, the parent teaches the child, the child their children and so on. So, why would I dare tread on such holy ground? The reason I dare is because I believe the issue, although small, when compounded becomes quite large.

As I see it the issue resolves around a few different planets of thought. Is it ok to lie to someone to increase their happiness? Everyone is doing it and turning out ok, why can’t I? What is the Christian parent’s number one job towards their children? And is culture neutral and its traditions harmless?

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As many of you know the New Atheists (as they are called) not only believe that God doesn’t exist, they believe that religion is evil and ought to be extinguished. They love to especially attack Christianity, because it is so bold as to blatantly tell its opponents that they are wrong. There are many things I can say on the subject, but I would like to address just one small flaw in their thinking.

Many of them, such as Sam Harris, have a distorted logic in how they argue against the existence of God. I will simplify their arguments here for times sake and just point out one of the huge flaws of it. See if you can spot the flaw before I demonstrate it. Remember they are assuming God exists for the sake of their arguments.

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To understand the destructive, dreary, and dismal side of Government jobs we must first condescend to the origins of Government. Why do we have Government in the first place and why does this Government have jobs? The answer is extremely complex; allow me to state it simply. Government is nothing more than the people working together for the common good, and it is nothing less than the common good working for the people. It is the will of the people, created by the people, to rule the people by people. Laws define it and it defines the laws. It is circular, it is organic, and it is a machine.

We the people create the Government and in return the Government creates us. After we gifted some of our freedom, our humanity, our responsibility, and our creativity to it, it thanked us by redefining humanity and the boundaries in which we can act it out.  It is necessary and it is tyrannical. It saves lives while destroying them, and it abolishes freedom to protect freedom. It is the giving of lesser things, to protect the greater things. It is a necessary evil, to control and protect humans, but it was not always so.

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I am going to deviate from my typical topics to address a more political, cultural topic, so bear with me.

As many of you know, in California the people voted to keep the definition of marriage (what it has always been) as between only a man and a woman; the courts (one judge in particular) has overturned it.

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So I have been thinking and this is my theory about what level’s of male maturity there are out there. My theory is that males (and probably females too) have experience certain life events, in order to mature into the next stage of maturity. Now this doesn’t mean that every male who hits that stage is going to be as mature as he possibly could, it just means that his potential to mature has increased.

Let me explain it this way. Let’s say that maturity is a scale from 0-100, 100 being as mature as one could ever get, and 0 being an infant. So when a man get’s married lets say he now has unlocked the potential to mature to 80 on the scale, although he may only be scoring 50. Does this mean he will hit 80? Nope, it just means that before getting married, he couldn’t hit 80 if he wanted to.
You see the assumption is that I believe maturity is partially based on how accurately one sees the world especially themselves. The more you “mature” in life, the more you are aware of yourself, others, and the world, and the more realistic (how close to reality) your view becomes. I think there are probably 5 major maturity stages, although many smaller ones within these larger stages. Let me call them: Childhood, Adolescents, Underdeveloped Adult, Adult, and Well Developed Adult. If we use the 0-100 scale this would mean that one hits Childhood after a score of 20, Adolescents after 40, Adult after 60 and Mature Adult after 80. This even scale is just for simplicity, I would argue that certain stages actually are longer than others, but that would make this all too complicated. Note that I do not have infancy on the chart, infancy is basically a 0 level of maturity, when one moves from infancy to childhood they enter the number scale, again this is mainly for simplicity sake and keeping the scale nice round numbers.

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The following is my attempt to help people think a little more clearly on the issues around marriage, and how it should be understood.

What is marriage?

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Have you ever thought about beauty? I mean really sat down and thought about what it is, where it comes from, and why it matters? I never really did until recently, so you are let of the hook, but now let us reason together.

You most likely have heard it said: “beauty is in the eye of the beholder”, a sentiment that I ultimately reject. Now I do not rule out people’s preferences, but what it ultimately boils down to is, the intrinsic beauty of something, is not dependent on what people feel or think about it.

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I was recently challenged in regards to my beliefs as a Christian. Now I think those challenges are worthy of a response, which I will get to in another blog. However, it should be noted that Christianity isn’t the only worldview out there making claims. The Atheists cannot just sit back and sling arrows at Christianity and think they are immune from challenges themselves. In fact for Atheism to be true, it must not only show Christianity to be false (every religion as well), but it must also then put up its own evidence for its philosophy of reality. Both Atheism and Religion make claims on reality, and they both cannot be right, perhaps wrong, but not both right at the same time in the same way.

It seems that Christianity is usually the blunt of jokes, criticisms, questions, and attacks, so that the Christian is usually just on the defensive. However, like I said before this shouldn’t be the case. The Evolutionist / Atheists believes some things about reality, and must be able to defend his or her view. It is not enough to say Christianity is wrong thus I am right, there must actually be evidence put forth on the Atheists side to explain the difficult questions in life. So I will start out with some of my own challenges to Atheism / Evolution which require their response, and then later I will respond to the challenges that were made to me. Please note that there are issues in life that must be explained and the view that explains it the best and simplest is probably the most accurate view of reality.

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