continued from previous post As cultures desire capital, they face competition mowing their laurels out from under them and must seek the golden fleece of innovation. As those selfsame cultures seek to find new margins and tools whereby to secure their capital, they will push closer and closer to the walls of taboo and the outmoded, irrelevant rules of religious proscription. And thus we come to a cave in Afghanistan: Do we act to safeguard our mores from the reaper of innovation and its attendant capitalism, McDonald’s, Lexuses, and Britney Spears? Do we forego capitalism, Westernization, globalization and attack its symbols and its home?

I may be pro-Separation between church and state, and I may have reconciled, to some degree, my difficulty with God (but not religion). But I think George Bush’s war on stem-cell research is cutting us off (no pun intended) from the greatest source of analgesic research ever known. It would be like stopping the genome project halfway through. http://salon.com/tech/feature/2004/03/25/stem_cells/index.html

Purpose and Atheism or Purposelessness and Christianity, an Exploration By: Steven G. Harms Introduction: “…if one does not believe in God, where does one’s purpose come from? Where does meaning come from?” Essentially, and if I may be so gauche as to meta-analyze my friend and co-worker, Mice is asking The Great Existential Question. In this, he joins a long legacy of philosophers both atheist and Christian. I provide a quote and a ‘mindset’ that wrestled with a different formulation of the quote in parentheses. “Without God, what is the purpose of my existence?“1 (Ancient Greek, Roman virtue ethics) “Without God, what is the basis for moral behavior” (Sartre) “Under the all-watchful eye of a non-interventionist God, how shall I comport myself?

This is a slightly modified version of an email I sent to my parents and sister. All of them are a good deal more religious than yours truly, but here s my take on the film and the ministry of Christ I do not plan on seeing The Passion. The movie, I have been told, and feel free to correct me, starts with the betrayal and for the remaining balance of the film, aside from a few brief flashbacks, is the corporeal scourging of Jesus. Jesus’ physical torture is not the message of Christianity. Christianity was a religion of the underclass, of the oppressed, of the beaten down.

I was walking out of Raskin Bobbins this evening with a cup of ice cream and i noticed this woman having an epileptic fit to the Broadway score of Les Misérables… …upon closer inspection the music turned out to be a church gospel chorus… …and she was not having an epileptic fit, it was her bodily demonstration of the moving capabilities of the holy spirit… I thought it would be cheap to pull out the cameraphone on that one.

Check out this footage! Mark goes to visit the Scientology street fair with a camera and this is how the congregation greets him.

From my time teaching at Devbootcamp one of my “famous” lectures was the “JavaScript is like Jesus” lecture. This is a simplification, and I would have called the lecture “What Aristotle and the Arian Heresy teach us about thinking about JavaScript,” but terseness was never my strong suit (you are reading my blog after all).

Nevertheless, if one of these simplifications managed to help my flock remember and appreciate some of the subtleties of JavaScript, then all the better. I’ll now share the “JavaScript is like Jesus” content.

Content Warning: this post is written without a religious point of view. It considers Christianity as a historical phenomenon (what happened historically) and Christian dogma as philosophy. If your beliefs forbid consideration of this faith from such a perspective, you might want to skip this post.

Let’s start with a simple demonstration:

> f = function() {}
< () {}
> o = {}
< Object {}
> Object.getPrototypeOf(x)
< () {}
> Object.getPrototypeOf(o)
< Object {}

Here we define f and o and then ask the Chrome V8 JavaScript engine to tell us what it considers f and o to be. Helpfully enough, Chrome tells us that f is a Function and o is an Object.

From a certain perspective, and certainly in common programing pedagogy, we learn that Functions are things-that-do-work and Objects are things that hold data like 1 or 3.14 or "Manhattan". Functions change data, but data is not runnable.

Consider this JavaScript expression: x.color = "Red";

“Is x an Object or a Function? What is the essential nature of x?”

The battle of wits has begun! More after the jump.

I’ve always found it interesting to speculate on what kernels of truth underlie some of humanity’s most-ancient and culture-crossing myths: e.g. the flood, the lost idealized garden, the couple that re-starts life from seeds. Could the flood have been the effects of an ice age ending and raising the sea level to swallow old settlements? Was the garden a primitive grasp of climate change triggering desertification to turn a grassland into an arid waste? Further afield, could life have been seeded from an ark of cells? In the age of alchemy, many writers saw these ancient stories as symbolic manuals for helping man understand and thus perfect himself.

One story whose truth, I speculate, might be alchemical-allegorical in nature is the Lucifer myth. It might be a poetic story to explain hard science about neuroanatomy and psychology and how we might smelt away our lesser natures to become purer, more godly beings.

In the myth, Lucifer seeks to deceive and falsely supposes himself to be equal to the most High (Isaiah 14:14). That’s poetry. But it resonates with recent research done by Dr. Ian McGilchrist. Perhaps this is what the alchemically-influenced artist Michaelangelo understood when he chose to paint God-the-Father in the shape of a brain.