Unity or Uniformity?

Coffee Pastor
Irenaeus, in his quest to achieve unity in doctrine, helped define such a doctrine and then did his best to purge his communities of those who disagreed.

Read that last sentence again. In order to achieve unity…Irenaeus wanted to kick a bunch of people out.

Is that unity, or uniformity?

“Is that unity or uniformity you’re after?”: A good question to ask when any church or clergyman appears to be trying to squash dissent.

My Answers to the “New Tkool 100 Question List” Part I: 1-25

I got this from Phylomortis.com, an RPG Maker site (it was down when I clicked that link, but maybe you’ll have better luck).

Apparently it’s cool to answer these “100 questions” lists in Japan and put them on your webpage, and since I’m a Japanese citizen[/lie] I thought I might try this myself. I don’t have a normal website, so this blog will have to do.

General

Q1
What is your username?

Abyssal_Leviathin

Q2
What is your birthday, gender, and blood type?

11-20-87, Male, Blood type? C-… oh wait that’s my GPA….

Q3
What do you like?

Boobs…er… I like Science, Religion, Video games, Anime, Electronic Music, Politics

Q4
What do you hate?

Bush, Atheism, The “GOP,” Libertarianism, creationism, conservatism, any ism that I don’t belong to myself.

Q5
Where do you work?

Work? Why work when you can collect welfare? Okay, okay, I’m working as a security guard at a DirecTV customer support center. Happy?

Q6
What kind of PC do you use?

The same Dell I’ve been using since 2002 or so with a minor upgrade or two.

Q7
If you could describe yourself in one word, what would it be?

Flemvifferwiffle!

Q8
Other than RPG Making, what are your hobbies?

Surveys, cliché jokes, internet forums, paleontology, debating, politicsing etc.

Q9
Do you have a special talent?

I know random things about dinosaurs. Did you know that the only reason T. rex isn’t known as Dynamosaurus imperiosus is because, despite both names being published to describe the same animal, in the same issue of the same scientific journal the article naming the animal T. rex had a lower page number?

Q10
What is the subject matter of your website?

It’s a blog, and I talk about whatever I feel like talking about. Weird dreams I had, scientific debates, religious insights, updates on my RPG Maker projects. It’s all here.

Characters

Q11
Are there lots of playable characters in your RPGs?

Yeah definitely. Characters are probably my favorite thing about fiction in general, so it’s something I like to concentrate on.

Q12
What is the male/female party member ratio in your RPGs?

I try to keep it even, but because most of my plots happen in a military or political environment, the gender ratio tends to skew to the masculine side of things.

Q13
How do you decide your characters’ names?

Usually the names mean something relevant to the character.

For instance,

One angry character I named Choler, an old English word for anger.

Miyuki is a Japanese name meaning “Snow,” and my character Miyuki is from a small town with a very cold climate

Meena is Hindi for “Blue” and the character has blue hair.

I could go on, but I won’t waste your time.

Q14
When creating characters, to what do you pay attention?

Everything, or at least I try to.

Q15
Do you use original character sets?

If I can’t find one that fits my vision of the character.

Q16
Do you use original face sets?

No, I use edits of facesets made by Roco. But hey, at least I bother to put some customization in there.

Q17
Do you pay attention to your characters’ style of speech?

Not as much as I should.

Q18
What type of personality do you prefer in your characters?

I dunno, but I have a habit of making guilt-ridden angsty characters.

Q19
Do you make characters similar to yourself?

Not consciously, but Choler has a lot of my faults, albeit very exaggeratedly. Theron has my appreciation for nature and animal rights, and Eliana has my leftist political leanings.

Q20
What is your favorite quote from a character in your RPG?

“Ichor, not blood, flows through my veins.” –Anchein of Belial

Anchein is being subtly blasphemous here. Ichor is what Greek gods had for blood. He’s saying “I AM God!”

Q21
When you want a certain character set and you can’t find it, what do you do?

Edit one that I found online or make one that’s completely custom.

Q22
What kind of character sets do you want, but can’t find?

Sprites of guys with medium length hair. Most sprites either have very short hair, or long Sephiroth-ish hair. There’s not much that fits in between.

Q23
How do you decide what type of equipment and skills you character can use?

Actually those things often form the basis of my creating the character, rather than me being something I add to their development.

Q24
Do you give your NPCs distinct personalities?

If they’re important for some reason.

Q25
Do you have characters in your towns that say “This is the town of XX”?

It wouldn’t be an RPG if I didn’t.

Fundies Say the Darndest Things

Fundies Say the Darnedest Things

A website that collects user submitted quotes from religious whackjobs, mostly fundamentalist Christians. Many of these quotes show a level of ignorance and/or hatred beyond my comprehension.

Some of them, however, are fairly tame statements of Christian belief and/or political conservativism. Which make it obvious it’s obvious that most of the contributors are bitter atheist liberals. Still, it’s quote collection is good for a laugh or two if you’re bored.

I’d reccommend avoiding it if you’re afraid of the movement to turn this country into a militant right-wing Christian theocracy, though. Sometimes hiding from the truth makes life more bearable.

Also, I’d avoid the forums as well, unless you’re a foaming-at-the-mouth militant atheist. I tried to be an active poster there for a while, but some of the members are so vitriolically anti-religious that it was hard for even a rather liberal Christian like myself to do something so simple as have a conversation with these people.

The sane members get lost amongst the din of the whackjobs, IMHO. I had joined FSTDT to get away from fundies, not to swap one flavor for another. Still, the site itself is worth checking out.

Choose the Right Side

C. S. Lewis
“Now is our chance to choose the right side. God is holding back to give us that chance. It won’t last forever. We must take it or leave it.”

Men Make their own History

Karl Marx
Men make their own history, but they do not make it just as they please; they do not make it under circumstances chosen by themselves, but under circumstances directly encountered, given and transmitted from the past.

The Survival Value of Friendship

If you’ve been regular reader of this blog, you may have noticed that I used to have some pages dedicated to collecting quotes that I liked on various subjects, like religion, politics, science, or whatever. You may also notice that those pages are absent now, as I’ve deleted them.

I have decided to just post quotes as normal blog entries instead of using pages, which is something else regulars would have noticed. In my zeal to create the original quote pages, though, I added a few to the list that didn’t exactly deserve to be there for one reason or another. Normally I’ve been reposting quotes here because I like them, but this one… not so much.

C. S. Lewis
“Friendship is unnecessary, like philosophy, like art… It has no survival value; rather it is one of those things that give value to survival.”

Where the hell did Lewis come up with that one? Friendship has no survival value?

I wonder how a soldier would feel about that! “Hey, Marine, would you rather be up against the enemy with a bunch of your comrades or all by yourself?” Wonder what he’d say?

Really, I find this quote to be kind of depressing. Considering how famous he is, I would expect Lewis to at least demonstrate basic intellectual competence. And yet he goes off and says something stupid like that.

What makes this worse, is if he’s making the argument I think he is: “since friendship has no survival value it couldn’t originate through evolution, and since people have features that couldn’t have originated through evolution, then they must have been specially created.” Give me a friggin’ break.

I hope I’m just being paranoid. That could very well be the case, that little quote is short and apparently only part of a passage, as the ellipsis indicates. But I’ve heard that argument before, so it wouldn’t surprise me if that’s what Lewis was driving at.

Anyway, taking that assumption and running with it, I’d like to respond to the idea. Friendship, a feeling of fondness aimed at another person. A simplistic definition, but would you agree that that’s the gist of the idea? Okay, now think about a stranger, you don’t know them, you don’t have any fondness for them, but you also have no reason to dislike them either.

Abyssal wonders…
Would you be more likely to share food with in a time of famine with your friend or some stranger, who for all you know could be waiting to kill you in your sleep?

Still have that image? Good. Now, imagine your best friend standing next to Stranger. Who would you be more likely to share food with in a time of famine, your friend, who you share a bond of friendship with, or, some stranger, who for all you know could be waiting to kill you in your sleep?

Who are you more likely to risk your life for to help if he’s being attacked? On the flip side, do you think Stranger is more likely than your friend to offer you shelter if your house burnt down?

Seeing that when it comes down to the brass tacks, having friends can affect your ability to acquire the basic necessities; food, safety, water, shelter, and all the rest. Now when you reflect on this, can it really be sanely asserted that friendship offers “no survival value,” and that there would be no evolutionary advantage given?

More info can be found at Wikipedia’s article on altruism.

Question About Blogging

I’ve been blogging for more than a year now, and I’ve started looking back on the whole experience. I like to think I’ve improved a little bit, but that’s part of the problem.

Sprinkled about my blogs older pages are posts that um, kinda suck, are useless or have become so dated as to be pointless (e.g. posts telling that I’ve changed my banner when I’ve since changed it again).

I was kind of wondering what I should do about that. I’ve been wondering if I should delete them so that my average post quality is a bit higher. Sounds good, but it almost feels like cheating or something, I don’t know.

I might also get overzealous an delete something someone might actually be interested in. It should also be mentioned that even some of my crappiest posts still attract a good deal of hits from search engines.

Do any of you guys have an opinion about this? Delete some older posts and hope it makes my blog more readable or keep them and soak up whatever stragglers they attract in?

Perspectives on Theistic Evolution

Perspectives on Theistic Evolution. This is another website about theistic evolution. I haven’t read very far into it, although it looks like there isn’t a whole lot of content there.

That’s too bad, the theistic evolutionist perspective is sadly underrepresented in discussions on origins. Oh well, here’s to hoping it gains some ground in the future.

Do We Really “Own” Our Bodies?

C. S. Lewis
“Much of the modern resistance to chastity comes from men’s belief that they “own” their bodies — those vast and perilous estates, pulsating with the energy that made the worlds, in which they find themselves without their consent and from which they are ejected at the pleasure of Another!”

Entries That Didn’t Quite Make the Cut

I mentioned some time ago that I had a sizable backlog of incompleted drafts. Well, some of these entries were never meant to be. This is my official notice of cancellation.

I’m going to give the title of the entry, and either summarize what I was trying to accomplish with the entry or make my point in as few words as possible. Alternatively I may keep a few select quotes. OK, here we go:

2007 in Review (Third Installment)
I was originally gonna list every search query that landed a visitor here like I did the blog’s other statistics on some other posts, but decided against it due to the amount of traffic I received from people looking for a certain illegal, unethical brand of p$rn$$$$phy due to the Abyssal vs. the Pe%%%%%le entry.

A Comparative Entomology of Michigan and West Virginia
One thing I noticed when I moved down here to WV was that the insect life was quite a bit different than in my birth state of Michigan.

I was planning to write a detailed comparison or something, I don’t really know what I was thinking. Anyway, if I ever write about insects, it will be as a contribution to Wikipedia.

E.T. Versus Nessie!
For some reason I haven’t gotten to write about the paranormal nearly as much as I wanted to with this blog. “ET versus Nessie!” was a weak attempt at rectifying this. Sadly, it was never meant to be.

The post can be summed up in one sentence: I believe that the evidence for UFOs is a lot more convincing than the evidence for Nessie. And I’ll leave it at that.

But, well, just for the heck of it, I’ll post a link I included in the article. It’s a cool little page detailing some of the many Loch Ness related hoaxes that have come forward as evidence for Nessie. Nifty.

A Failure of Mine as a Fantasy Author
I don’t really write fantasy. I was referring to my RPG Maker project. Truth is, I don’t even remember what I was so dissatified with. Oops. All I do know was it was something minor and not worth writing about. So I’m not going to.

Jack Chick’s Straw Man Portrayal of Human Evolution
Jack Chick made a tract that very unfavorably misrepresented the case for human evolution. Needless to say, like most of Chick’s work, it was a steaming pile of bullshit.

I intended to write a rebuttal, but since human evolution isn’t much of a topic of interest for me, I put it off. Here we are, months later and it still hasn’t been posted. I figure that nows as good a time as any to finally cancel it for good.

Well, that’s it for this round of canceled entries. See ya ’round.

Theistic Evolution – One Christian’s Perspective

Theistic Evolution – One Christian’s Perspective. A personal website by a guy named Carl Drews who adheres to theistic evolutionism. I’ll warn you in advance that he’s not an inerrantist, though.

Not a whole lot of content, but what’s there is good. His essay on what constitutes a biblical kind is an interesting Christian take on the stupidity that is baraminology.

Tom Tomorrow Archive

Tom Tomorrow Archive, a storehouse of hilarious comics penned by the finest liberal cartoonist around. It’s moved since the last time I’ve been there, and I haven’t taken the time to see if any content has been lost, but regardless, it’s worth a look.

Online KJV

KJV and Apocrypha. An online KJV and the Apocrypha that were originally included with it. It’s searchable and everything! Useful for anyone with any sort of interest in Christianity. Hosted by the University of Virginia.

My Latest Amazon Haul

Worth the Risk

C. S. Lewis
“Of course God knew what would happen if they used their freedom the wrong way: apparently He thought it worth the risk.”