Philosophy and Faith

The cinematography was well done, the dialogue was competently written, the subject matter was timely, the actors had some skill, and the soundtrack was, unsurprisingly, solid.

However, the writer’s room seemed to believe that it was of prime importance that our main protagonist retained the common sense of a raisin. Either that, or nobody on the production staff thought that giving a copy of the script to an intern at a local attorney’s office for review was a worthwhile endeavor. I wanted to like this movie, but it’s tough to cheer for a main character who makes bad choices the whole way through.

If you haven’t seen it already…spoiler warning.

Our story starts with a protagonist who’s down on his luck after a messy divorce, and ends up getting paid a lot of money to drive a box truck across the country, no-questions-asked. Now…as far as I’m concerned, that was the first problem: if you’re getting paid a lot of money to not-ask questions, you either commit to not asking questions or you walk away up front. Nobody pays triple market value for a bloke to drive a U-Haul full of sweaters. Assume you’re carrying something illegal, don’t get pulled over, and let it be someone else’s problem. “But doesn’t that defeat the whole purpose of the story?” It could…but the other way to do it would have been to have the “what did I do” gnaw at him after he had cash-in-hand and he worked with law enforcement from the ground up. Either way, it’s established early on that our protagonist isn’t the brightest bulb in the chandelier.

Seven minutes in, he finds out he’s a participant in human trafficking (again, he gets no sympathy from me or the title of “unwitting protagonist”…he accepted money and asked no questions). He doesn’t contact law enforcement at that point, when it would have been smart…no, he keeps driving with them, because…he still wants to get paid, I guess…so, he gets to where he’s going and hands them over, clearly not to anybody these young women know. Transaction complete. Congratulations, he’s officially a human trafficker. Our protagonist is actually a human trafficker. We could have had a movie where he went rogue and it was all Liam Neeson from Taken, but no…we had to have a protagonist who is literally a human trafficker.

Cowboy comes in and seems upset about the fact that there’s trafficking going on…mutual distrust is understandable, but….there’s no fish-or-cut-bait situation happening? Cowboy is accusing protagonist of being a human trafficker, but if it’s a one-and-done deal, why take on the guilt now? Oh, he’s got a daughter, and that comes up any time there’s a need for emotional gravity…that’s literally all she’s used for in the whole movie is to be an emotional anchor. We know nothing about her, except that she’s missed by her dad and says cute things on the phone.

Protagonist meets local sheriff, and at this point, protagonist is abundantly aware of what’s going on…now, it was so bleeding obvious from the get-go that the sheriff was in on it. I had no idea how protagonist missed it, or failed to even suspect it…but if protagonist isn’t going to call county police, at least make a statement down at the station. Moreover, protagonist forgot his Miranda Rights. Anything he says can – and will – be used against him in a court of law. He’s guilty of human trafficking and has an envelope full of money and a phone with call logs, and the keys to the truck. He’s guilty and carrying enough evidence for a conviction…and then he flat out confesses his crime. Now, if the sheriff was all-the-way upstanding, he’d probably have rightfully arrested protagonist. Even if the sheriff saw protagonist as an unwitting pawn and let him go free, protagonist still has an envelope full of money that needed to go back to the sellers. If the sheriff considered the money ‘evidence’ (or just good old fashioned civil asset forfeiture), protagonist has nothing to bring back to the seller. He puts his daughter in jeopardy in the most pointless way possible: putting himself in a position to not-have the money.

Protagonist then goes to the hotel, and pays $100 for an hour with the girl he dropped off…yes, that’s right, he pays the pimps. And…he takes his hour to let her relax, I guess? It’s really unclear what his plan is at this point, probably because he doesn’t have one and is making it up as he goes. He’s up against an organized set of human traffickers with very little information and no experience, and it shows. Our victim is the only one with a lick of sense; she has no trust in protagonist to hold to his word and sees right through his complete absence of a plan.

Cowboy comes back and shows the slightest level of wisdom, which is great….but in their discussion, it’s revealed that protagonist has managed to grow a conscience in a single afternoon? I didn’t believe it either, but memories-of-daughter come to ensure my concerns are quelled.

Blah blah blah, protagonist and cowboy decide to storm the castle, just the two of them. Now, let’s unpack the list of reasons this was stupid. The first reason, isn’t that the traffickers have guns. Both sides have guns, and cowboy has a cool hat so we can assume he’s better than they are. The real concern isn’t the guns, it’s the hostages. To the traffickers, the girls are replaceable. They can shoot indiscriminately or use the girls as human shields and they aren’t worried about collateral damage. To protagonist and cowboy, however, there’s a problem if anybody dies. Let’s take violence out of it for a bit. Let’s assume a recon visit, no weapons, no damage, no threats…not that protagonist and cowboy can bank on any of that, but let’s try it for a minute…anything they find is inadmissible in court if they’re going to attempt to bring the traffickers up on criminal charges. They’re going to undermine themselves because nobody passed a civics class. 

Skip a bit, and we have ‘the interrogation’…where the trafficker and the cowboy have a rather polite conversation…based entirely on emotion and nothing that adheres to scrutiny. “you took my daughter 10 years ago”, “hate to disappoint, but I was still in high school 10 years ago”, “you’re all the same”…and that’s where cowboy loses me. It’s a personal vendetta, for which cowboy is holding trafficker personally responsible, except that this particular trafficker isn’t responsible for what happened to his daughter AND he admits that his daughter ran away, willingly…stupidly, but willingly. Now, this doesn’t absolve trafficker of his crimes, but it does undo most of the sympathy I have for the cowboy. If he’s not picky about which trafficker he takes down, why does he stay in a town where the law is in on it, and why has he had no success in the past ten years getting other law enforcement involved? He might have the moral high ground and some solid zingers, but at the end of the day, he comes across as being less competent due to his drive being primarily emotion based. It’s great that his feelings compelled him to action, but if we define ‘success’ in this context as ‘efficacy in achieving one’s goals’, trafficker has money, beautiful women, and law enforcement on his payroll. The cowboy has…a mountain of guilt and no success in resolving the trafficking that happens in his town. Absent our protagonist, it’s unclear how the status quo would have changed otherwise. 

Then we rescue victim and the hostage trade that everybody with a brain stem saw coming…props to our victim for staying ten toes to the ground and prioritizing the well being of her sister to the extent she does. The exchange is again, super emotionally charged, and…why didn’t trafficker shoot protagonist the minute he put his gun down? How did actual-law-enforcement show up at this point, but not before? How did the cops obtain a warrant for the other location we see the SWAT team going to, with no evidence? What judge signed off on that warrant? We see protagonist get arrested, but the role of law enforcement adds a metric ton of questions that are all answered in a ‘dip to black’.

We jump to ‘one year later’…what now?! We just handwaved away the attempted murder charges that were likely filed. The police officers were witnesses in that attempted murder. How did he avoid being accused of the death of cowboy? Protagonist could also easily be charged with assault with a deadly weapon, and child endangerment based solely on the testimony of the cops, and there’s still the problem regarding all of the evidence connecting him to the trafficking he was guilty of. How, exactly, did all of that get dropped?

And then, there’s the beautiful, romantic ending…that is all the way messed up as far as I’m concerned. The house he buys is cowboy’s old house, great…how did he get it, exactly? Cowboy met protagonist not three days before he died, there was no way it was left to him in a will. How’d protagonist buy it? With what money? What job did he get that he couldn’t get at the beginning of the movie that allows him to make that kind of money? I count ten people in the closing scene, none of whom are implied to be independently wealthy or have vocations with six figure incomes. The math simply doesn’t work.

Let’s talk about what happens after the arrest. Where did she and her sister go while protagonist was in jail, at least awaiting his arraignment even if we assume everything got acquitted? She’s wearing an engagement ring (again, with what money?), but doesn’t have a wedding band. She and her sister are illegal immigrants with no family in the states…so, we’re left to assume she is living at this house? Living with your fiancée is okay if the house is big enough and sufficiently secluded? Oh, and what’s the story with the sister, who’s still a minor at this point? She has zero agency in this outcome at all; did she ever want to go back with her family and her older sister and soon-to-be-brother-in-law said ‘no’? Did she go to school, and how did she deal with the learning deficiencies she clearly would have at this point?

The relationship itself strikes me as incredibly unhealthy. They went from ‘rescue’ to ‘ring’ in less than a year, their relationship started due to tragedy, its development took place completely off screen, and her family is not mentioned, present, or involved. A 10-12 year age gap isn’t terrible unless one of them is about 19, and there is no way she’s gone through the sort of therapy she needs to get to a healthy state after being trafficked, sexually assaulted, and nearly having her sister killed in front of her…If there was a textbook example of ‘stockholm syndrome’, this seems like it.

…But they look good together and she loves him and the lighting is all super warm and inviting and I’m sure there’s some sort of intended Biblical allegory in there somewhere, so we say “awwwwww”. No. Wrapping that sort of bow on the story undoes everything that came before it. What’s the message here? “As long as you’re rescued from being trafficked, you’ll be fine”? “Hopefully your rescuer is tall, dark, and handsome, so you can marry him”? “Committing crimes to end human trafficking gets you a pass on jail time”? 

I skimmed the movie for this review; I might actually-watch it again to add a few more points of contention…but for real, I couldn’t get with this movie because it only works when we limit the story to what’s shown on screen. Anything beyond that and it clearly gets incredibly messy, incredibly quickly.

A truck full of old computer parts is going to the scrapyard tomorrow morning…and I didn’t quite cry, but I definitely felt sad.

Not over everything, of course. A drawer full of ten-year-old access points most certainly wasn’t worth the space it was taking. An XP-era desktop who already lived a second life as a router had no future as anything but a doorstop. A computer chassis intended for a rack mount would have been great to hold onto if I had a rack to put it in, but it’s just taking up space right now. Over a dozen random routers and switches are finally freeing up their shelves. Defective hard disks, decade-old motherboards, a drawer full of unused power and RCA cables are all headed for the dump, and I couldn’t be happier.

It’s the other things that make me sad. More to the point, it’s what they represent.

I’m 35, and the odds are good that I won’t be celebrating my 37th birthday in this apartment. Over the years, I’ve accumulated projects I’ve never gotten to. There’s a touch screen computer that’s a bit slow for regular use, but would be fantastic for a wall-mounted home automation controller. I got rid of every aftermarket car stereo I’d ever owned. Firewire cables were a staple of my college years, as I captured video from mini-DV camcorders. My last two laptops haven’t had FireWire connectors, and I haven’t shot a video on those camcorders in nearly a decade. My first TV tuner card that invoked years of having a custom-built cable box is no longer usable; it found its way in the pile. The first hard drive I added to an HP tower I got on clearance when I worked at Staples to make my first NAS is in that pile. A DVD player I used to play a DVD at a party I DJ’d many years ago went in the pile, causing me to realize that, in all likelihood, I’ll never play a DVD at an event again. The real difficulty, however, is the realization that I’ve got a number of these scrapyard and garbage runs ahead…and they’re not going to get easier.

I figure that by time I move out, I will have to essentially embrace my inner Thanos – half of everything I own will have to be donated, recycled, given away, or thrown out. I can’t take it with me. I’ll probably have to get rid of my custom-made DJ console that got me through many great years. Can I part with the Adobe Premiere keyboard that hasn’t worked on the last five computers I’ve owned, but I still remember the day my mom and dad bought it for me when I was 17? How about the Stanton CD Player, something else I haven’t DJ’d with in years, but was the only piece of DJ equipment my mother ever purchased for me as a gift? Alternatively, do I keep it forever?

I know this is the beginning of me preparing for the next chapter in my life. I’m not ready for it. I know that this is how life works, and I know that trying to pretend that I can hold on to the best of my teens and twenties by keeping clothes I don’t wear and CDs I don’t use is irrational and illogical. I know it’s all “just stuff”, and that “not getting to do everything I wanted to do by now” is just a fact of life, for everyone, at every stage in life…but maybe that’s really the underlying problem: the fact that the next stage in life is a total unknown.

Every time I think about the next stage in life, it scares me…because I have no idea what it is…like, not even a little bit. After grade school, there was college. After college was ‘getting started in a career’. Now…I kinda don’t know how I feel about any of the ‘usual courses’. I don’t want to climb the corporate ladder at some Fortune 500 company, I don’t want to be a parent, I don’t want to move to a different state or country, and I don’t want to save up for a boat. But I also feel poignantly aware that at some point, life is going to happen to me. I won’t be able to wake up and just worry about the computers I have to fix tomorrow. I’ve been telling myself I’m going to practice DJing more, but that keeps not-happening, and even if I put all my free time into my turntables, it’s not a viable career field for me anymore. Defining myself by my career in general isn’t exactly a winning proposition, either.

Clearing out several hundred pounds of scrap is most definitely a step in the right direction. I know it’s good for me. I just have so much trouble being able to deal with being an adult in this context, and it makes me so incredibly scared to have such a total lack of clarity. Emptying my closets just reinforced that reality to me.

But…maybe there’s hope. I’ve done this before. I know I have. The hard drive I threw out today? Its host computer was thrown out years ago, as was the one after that – my first true NAS. I remember getting rid of the Nissan Xterra I had before my current car, and the Volvo before that. I worried that getting a sedan would make it difficult to transport my DJ gear, and while there were one or two logistical issues, the 160,000 miles I’ve driven in it have saved me so much in gas, the car paid for itself. I said goodbye to some old friends. I said hello to some new ones. I said goodbye to a very good boss. I said hello to another very good boss. Today, I said goodbye to some old computer components, and one day, I’ll be saying goodbye to this apartment.

This…this must be how faith is built: having no idea where I will be spending my 37th birthday, or how, or with whom…but believing that I will be in a place I call home, and with people I care about. Because really, when I get down to it, I realize that my mental image of an epic 37th birthday for me doesn’t involve me being surrounded by antiquated hard disks or car stereos. 

Warframe is a video game. Specifically, it’s a free-to-play looter-shooter.

For most of my readership, the second sentence needs a bit more elaboration. A “free-to-play” game is one that isn’t a transactional purchase, but instead costs nothing to play, but has an in-game economy where players can purchase items for actual-dollars as they progress, though an actual financial outlay is not required. Basically every game you’ve ever played on your phone that has had some sort of in-game currency is an example of this model.

A looter-shooter is a game that tends to focus more on a gameplay loop where one, as satirical reviewer Yahtzee Croshaw summarized it, “Go to the place and shoot the lads”. Essentially, one goes to a place, shoots a bunch of lads who apparently deserve to be shot (and who generally also believe that you deserve to be shot), and looks for new weapons and armor and upgrades to those things so that the next time you have to go to a place and shoot lads, you are more effective in doing so. Rinse and repeat for the duration of the game.

My good friend Andrew had recommended I try Warframe. It always bothered me when games have me make a bunch of decisions at the beginning, but I did that thing – I picked my class and my initial powers, and my preferred rifle and sword thing…and I set out to go to a place and shoot some lads.

I’m about 14 hours into the game now. I’ve shot many, many, many lads. Nameless faces, themselves looking to provide me with a complimentary lead transfusion or relieve me of my appendages through a short surgical procedure. I’ve visited a dozen maps and tried multiple mission types…and it has failed to engage me. Fourteen hours in, and I feel like zero progress has been made. I’m some sort of guardian that came back from the dead…I think…but that was addressed in a cutscene early in the game that was incredibly muddy in its exposition. “This was a thriving colony…until the Greneer came” is pretty much all of the backstory I got when I landed on my first planet to shoot lads. Who are the Greneer, why did they come to the colony, who did they subjugate, what have they gained by taking it over? I haven’t met a citizen of that planet so I have no personal investment that I’m aware of; why am I piling up dead Greneer for them? Maybe I’d feel I was on the wrong side of this if I heard what started this conflict, but the gameplay so far doesn’t give me any sense of why I’m justified in emptying ammo clips into fellow soldiers.

So, story isn’t its strong suit…fine. Story isn’t always necessary for a fun video game. I am sure nobody who has ever played Tetris has wondered where these boxes are coming from, why they are falling, or where the boxes go when they disappear. It’s a bit of a juxtaposition to be emptying ammo clips into Greneer without cause and calling it ‘just a gameplay loop like Tetris’, but let’s go down that road for a second…

The game’s loot mechanics have yet to pay off – I’m still using my initial weapon set. I haven’t come across a single weapon or armor pickup. There’s a crafting system, but every single ‘blueprint’ I could use requires resources I haven’t come across yet. I came across my first in-game merchant on my last play-through, but he didn’t have any weapons for sale. The second merchant sold fishing gear. I’ve gotten a few upgrades to my existing weapons, but I still haven’t gotten my first sniper rifle, and short of buying one, I see no way to get one. Fourteen hours in, and I’m sitting on a pile of resources that can’t be used because I don’t have enough other resources to make even low-end equipment. I’m shooting the same lads for the same nonsensical reasons with the same guns and I’m wearing the same armor. The Warframe Wiki has 6,354 articles as of this writing…and I’ve come across reasons for maybe a few dozen. There is indeed an encyclopedia’s worth of terms, but none of them have seemed to have any bearing on my ability to get new gear. This loop is broken.

Now, you might be thinking, “well duh, Joey, the reason for this is that you’ll pony up for the weapons you want! That’s the schtick of free-to-play games, right? Why are you surprised?” I’m surprised because there’s another free-to-play game that got me to compromise my principles and pay for in-game items…and the $100 in total I spent in it is more than I’ve paid for any other video game I’ve ever owned. I was constantly playing that game, to the point where I was rude to a friend and playing it while we were out getting sushi and I had to apologize to him because it was borderline addictive behavior. That game is Star Trek: Timelines.

Timelines is basically a computerized card game; its gameplay loop reminds me a lot of the Star Wars CCG that I played in my adolescence. One acquires different Star Trek characters, then upgrades them by acquiring items, which is done by going on missions. The missions involve picking a group of characters to do different tasks, assigning them to those tasks, a dice roll, and a pass/fail each task. Do a god enough job, you get a bunch of loot at the end, as well as experience points to level up your characters. It’s really easy to pick up and figure out. There are a few different in-game currencies, resource management is inherent throughout the game, and the game kept me coming back – and spending money on four different occasions – because I actually had fun doing it.

The fun I had playing Timelines was rooted in a sense of progress. I got to see characters level up, I got to complete missions with those leveled-up characters I couldn’t complete before. I got plenty of loot. Sometimes it was immediately useful, while other times it was enough to be indirectly useful and I was able to make progress in steps. For about six months I was playing daily; it straddled the line between ‘habit’ and ‘addiction’. It was my cruise to Bermuda in 2019 that broke the habit; with very limited internet I spent ten days not-playing it, which broke all my inertia-based streaks and made it far easier to not-return to it. I still drop in once every few months, play a round, and leave it…but the reality is that in that six month span, I spent money on that far-less-ambitious game.

So, what did Timelines do that Warframe doesn’t? Here it is…Timelines made the first hours rewarding. Its gameplay was obvious from the beginning, failing missions didn’t have a price tag, early character leveling was easy, basically every item drop had something useful, I started with a massive amount of the mission currency and early missions used very little of it. There were virtually no barriers to progress. When I failed my first mission, the way to advance my characters enough to solve it was obvious, and allowed me to do so without paying money. As I continued playing, I started wanting characters I didn’t have, sometimes for stats I needed to complete missions, and sometimes it was based on liking a particular character…and the store made sure I knew how to get them. The game has ways I can play with friends, or with strangers I meet in-game, but I can play all by myself if I want and never interact with another player.

Every single one of these attributes contrast with Warframe’s design for newcomers. I can’t build, the earned currency is useless, I can’t try different weapons, it seems to try and press me to play co-op missions and then simultaneously make me feel more ‘alone’ in-game when I do so. I might be more engaged with Warframe if I better understood the story, but I don’t. I might be more engaged with Warframe if I felt like the actions I took and the choices I made in the game impacted the game world, but they don’t. I might get some amount of enjoyment out of it if I was allowed to try any of the weapons beyond what I started with, but I’m not. There’s nothing for me there. I uninstalled it.

Here is where I finally compare it to faith: it is incredibly easy – and common – to have faith feel like Warframe if you’re new to considering eternity. This is doubly true if one has had a bad experience with faith in the past, or if one presently has a particular faith and is considering a different one. Christianity has a whole culture surrounding it, and it’s very, very easy for newcomers to be confused regarding what is directly Biblical and what is merely cultural. It’s easy, as seasoned Christians, to forget what it’s like to be in the “early levels”.

Even as Christians, it’s common to struggle with matters of the faith, the state of earth, and the omnipotence of God. It’s super common for me to look at a situation and be like, “uhm…God could totally solve this in, like, 20 minutes, and even that’s 19 minutes more than He would probably need, and it really wouldn’t be that much of an inconvenience for Him…yet this problem still exists, so ¯\_(ツ)_/¯”. One of the things that’s been a bumpy part of my faith is trusting that God is addressing the matter in some way or another, and that my perspective is limited and also is nowhere near understanding the nature of God’s ultimate desires and intents. It’s taken as long as it has to get here because it’s easy to use “He works in mysterious ways” as a hand-wave dismissal of the matter at hand, rather than see such situations as the sort of thing that requires a level of faith far higher than I presently have and trust in His perspective and goodness. If I, someone who has been a Christian for over 15 years (or 30, depending on how you count) can still have difficulties with the fundamentals, then it would be a pretty terrible thing for me to expect that from someone who is new to the faith, or who doesn’t ascribe to the faith at all.

I’m not saying that Star Trek: Timelines’ Skinner Box mechanics are the sorts of systems The Church should seek to implement. I’m also not saying that the primary reason anyone comes to Christ (or attends a particular church) is purely a function of the people, ignoring the role of God in both The Church and the life of the non-believer or new believer. What I am saying is that as long term Christians represent – or misrepresent – Christ in how we interact with those who don’t share our beliefs and/or our knowledge of what the Bible says. It is very easy for our representation of the Gospel to alter its perception, not because the Gospel has changed, but because we misrepresent it. 

If we’re going be an encouragement to those around us to pick up their cross and follow Christ, we need to make sure that we aren’t treating them in a way that makes them feel like the way I did playing Warframe: lost, confused, alone, overwhelmed, powerless, and primarily concerned with parting me from my money. The Gospel is none of those things, but if we’re representing it as such with our lifestyles and our interactions, it will be of little wonder why we contribute to new believers deciding they are better off uninstalling.

I got Covid. And I no longer have it.

I was very fortunate. Aside from the first day or two after the onset of symptoms, I’ve worked through worse colds. My sense of smell is taking its time to return, a lingering side effect which seems to be commonplace. My case was very, very mild. Like I said, I was fortunate – it was so similar to a regular cold that I almost didn’t get tested.

A coworker spent time in the hospital as a result of Covid not too long ago. There’s no clear reason why I didn’t have a similar experience. Whether or not the science eventually sheds light on the common thread regarding the severity of symptoms, I can only attribute my experience to God’s protection, and yes, I will give Him credit for that.

I have one friend who has virtually no concern about getting Covid at all. To be clear, it’s not that she believes Covid isn’t real, it’s an ambivalence toward getting Covid. Her concern is far more focused around government overreach and societal norms being shifted, and to that end, I don’t think she’s completely wrong.

In contrast, I was speaking to a friend today with whom a catch-up dinner keeps getting postponed. Despite implicit availability, he is hosting a small number of family members; his household has committed to a  voluntary lockdown until they leave out of concern of catching Covid. Despite the unlikelihood of getting Covid from me, the concern is so great that his family is eschewing the outside world until his family heads home. The desire to avoid being the cause of a family member getting sick is understandable; I don’t think he’s wrong, either.

Personally, I always took the stance of “if I get the ‘Rona, I get the ‘Rona”, wore my mask, and left it at that. I made it eight months, but I did, in fact, get the ‘Rona. I’m very much aware that such a stance is far easier to have in retrospect when my experience with being sick didn’t involve a ventilator.

As I bring faith back into the picture here, there is yet another line whose limits are worth exploring. Both individuals I’ve referenced above share my adherence to Christianity. They would both likely agree on the validity of 1 Timothy 1:7 – “For God has not given us a spirit of fearfulness, but one of power, love, and sound judgment.” (HCSB). They would also both likely agree on the validity of Proverbs 20:15 – “A fool’s way is right in his own eyes, but whoever listens to counsel is wise.” (HCSB).

When it comes to Covid, I feel like it’s so unclear: Somewhere, a line is crossed between “listening to counsel” and “having a spirit of fear”. Inversely yet synonymously, that same line could be drawn between “following one’s foolish way” and “having a spirit of power, love, and sound judgment”. Both sides would argue that what they are doing would fall under ‘wisdom’ rather than ‘spirit of fear’, and yet their approaches are mostly opposite each other.

Christianity is no stranger to people achieving virtually-opposite conclusions. I’m certain you can come up with your own example. In the case of Covid, however, I’m not talking about government policies or something that ends up being fodder for a future statistics class. I’m talking about the tightrope walk between “trusting in God” and “being cautious”. I’m reminded of this scene from Austin Powers. It’s amusing to find a biblical parallel at a Blackjack table, but ignoring the fact that the antagonist was cheating in the clip, they both said they wanted to “live dangerously”, but only one of them did so.

Christianity isn’t safe, and wasn’t meant to be. No matter where you look in the Bible, someone had a rough time advancing the cause of Christ. Someone did something unsafe for the advancement of the Gospel; virtually every apostle died in connection with their spreading of the Good News. At the same time, the difference between spreading the Gospel and spreading Covid is undoubtedly self-evident: one saves, the other, well, doesn’t.

Both of the people in my examples would agree that only one of those two things is worth dying for, but I think they’d also agree that it’s possible to die of Covid without dying for Covid. What one calls “living life without fear”, the other would call “living life without prudence”. What one calls “esteeming others above one’s self”, the other would call “living in fear”. What I called “leaving it in God’s hands”, others would call “unnecessary risk”.

I really don’t have a conclusion I’ve drawn, or some spiritual or practical insight I can express. It feels like we’re all right, and all wrong at the same time. This is the precipice of moral relativism – a bottomless well to which the Gospel gives no credence or merit. In terms of the practical, I don’t think that any of these approaches should be made illegal, or that they’re inherently immoral. I do think, however, that there must be a way that God is most glorified, and that all three of us seek to pursue that method, while finding ourselves on divergent paths as a result.

I hope that the correct path becomes more apparent as time progresses. Until then, I wish you all good health, and a good holiday season.

This week, a brilliant, well-meaning person in my Facebook feed was discussing the idea of an iPhone app which would highlight viruses (the ‘flu’ or ‘corona’ kind, not the computer kind) if present on a surface. My ‘this is a load of bovine excrement’ alarm went off pretty quickly, so I responded by trying to appeal to the fact that electron microscopes cost as much as an entry-level BMW, weigh hundreds of pounds, and the batteries to power them would weigh thousands, all of that ignoring the incredible amount of computing power required to identify and highlight viruses on a screen in real-time. Naturally, the answer received in response was something to the effect of “well, technology keeps getting better and smaller!”, which is only partially true – the power adapter for my laptop weighs four pounds because there comes a point at which ‘physics’ starts knocking at the door.

The person private-messaged me and attempted to be a bit more convincing. I ended up deciding to do the math. Now, I might not have gotten it correct because ‘powers-of-ten’ has always managed to have me off by a very-important digit or two, but the math I came up with basically said that my 4×2 folding table could fit nearly 8 billion flu viruses on its surface without stacking. The reality I was trying to point out is that everything we touch is covered in microscopic bugs in one form or another, so making an app that would point them out individually would be pointless, because even after bleach or Lysol (but hopefully not both), surfaces would still be too heavily covered for such an app to be useful.

I wasn’t the best math student, and I never, ever enjoyed it. Once I get past, maybe 9th grade math, my understanding asymptotically plummets (though admittedly, I happen to remember what an asymptote is), and if I were to dust off my high school and/or college transcripts, they’d show someone who wasn’t exactly a star pupil of the discipline. Though writing this blog entry makes me want to try taking a 9th or 10th grade final exam found somewhere on the internet just to see how much I actually remember, the high level concepts of algebra, logic, and statistics have served well as building blocks for a bulls**t detector.

When economists seem to project year-over-year growth forever, the math says that there will be a saturation point at which a company will be unable to expand further. This is how we explain why video game maker Bethesda thought selling a $100/year in-game premium subscription to a game that cost $60 off the shelf was a good idea. When politicians talk about massive spending bills, the sticker shock of ‘billions of dollars’ is commonly a scare tactic – those numbers are commonly tied to a multi-year timespan and a population of hundreds of millions of people. I’m certainly not advocating for infinite spending, but I am saying that math helps us turn that “$500 billion” number into “about $156, per person, per year”, which is about the cost of a large coffee at 7-11 twice a week. When friends try to pitch me on the latest multi-level marketing trend, they always tell me about the fantastic opportunities at the top of the mountain. I always ask three questions: What’s the median individual revenue, what’s the average of the first standard deviation, and what’s the percentage of people who make it to this top tier? …I’ve yet to get an answer, but I promise you it’s the fastest way to making sure you don’t get asked about the next one. ” The ‘if-then’ statements used to demonstrate logic proofs help teach inference and deductive reasoning, allowing broader pictures of human behavior to be ascertained with incomplete information. A good number of statements from an untruthful person paired with logic proofs like the fun Latin-derived ‘modus tollens‘ can help catch a liar in his or her tracks. A simple stand I recently made from plywood required a ruler and some trigonometry so I knew how to cut the legs out of a single piece of wood and ensure they were even. Simple multiplication was drilled into me in third grade, and being able to halve and double very quickly is incredibly useful when I’m DJing and have to get my phrases right so I don’t end up with weird segues that are too short or too long.

The fact is, math is frequently distilled down into drills and repetition, sterile in its presentation in some cases, and comically absurd in others. To be fair, the fact that I learned asymptotes in high school but checkbook balancing in college as a byproduct of an accounting class isn’t a testament to properly prioritized curricula. It’s not like there has been a massive push to implement things like tangential learning into math class. This leaves us to be exposed to math for its own sake, and the fact of the matter is that most middle school and high school students (or college students or adults, really) will respond well to that sort of execution. I really can’t fault most students, former or current, for pushing back against learning something with such an unforgiving right-or-wrong grading system at the same time that “getting a good grade” is the only objective ever presented for doing so.

So, when will you use math, you ask? “When you need to figure out if someone is trying to sell you on a load of bulls**t.” THAT is how that question needs to start being answered.