(no subject)

[which_chick]

Yesterday's news: Yield curve inverts. CNN Money has the story here.

Also, I played The Bible Game last night. It contains distressingly tiny amounts of actual Bible knowledge and is mostly composed of non-Bible challenge activities. The challenges are video-game-ish and I suck at them (example challenge: Outline blocks on Tower of Babel to make them crumble, kind of a tetris effect.) compared to the computer generated characters. The game show format is remarkable for the sole singular feature I found amusing as (forgive me) hell: The Wrath of God. Think Whammy in Wheel of Fortune, only you get a rain of frogs, a swarm of locusts, masses of flies, and so forth. Playing the game show (called "Do Unto Others") is like being a pharoah, almost. You see a lot of The Wrath of God in this game, to the point where I just started to laugh at the rains of frogs. I mean, they're totally random and there's nothing you can do about them. You didn't deserve them. I can understand dying in DDR if I fuck up enough. I can understand dying in, say, Quake II if I fail to account for the snipers. I can understand getting eaten by the ghosts in Pacman. However, my mental concept of video games does not allow for random fucking rains of frogs. It doesn't make narrative sense. Anyway, given the frequency with which this game employs The Wrath of God, it was clearly designed by someone who'd read his Jonathan Edwards.

Comments

[fooliv.livejournal.com]

Omniscience, predestination, free will - choose two.

Generally, I'm inclined to drop omniscience, if only because it makes God-the-person optional. If you drop predestination, you've essentially opted for a nonrational universe, because you've denied causation at a metaphysical level. If you drop free will, you've legislated identity out of existence.

I'd much rather demote God to notational demiurge and/or evolutionary goal & preferred end-state than to believe in a mad universe or to deny my own existence. But I don't insist on the interpretation as any sort of doctrine.

Does keep me out of church on Christmas morning, though it makes it hard to explain to the family.

[which-chick.livejournal.com]

Fortunately, my family celebrates Christmas in a reasonably secular way, so my lack o' belief isn't much of a problem. I don't know for sure where the brothers, their wives, the step-beings and their assorted set, or other associated members of the family stand on the "is there a God" question. Some of 'em might be deists, but the simple fact that I don't know where a lot of them stand on the God question says to me that we've escaped hardcore steel-cage deathmatch levels of religious involvement. Them as believe keep pretty quiet about the rest of us burning in everlasting torment and them as don't believe don't run around shouting that there is no God. Mostly, we unwrap presents, reflect on how big the kids are getting, discuss how well/poorly the pies/cookies/turkey went this year, and try to avoid having big huge stomp-out-of-the-room-and-slam-the-door scenes.