Catching Up

Long time, no post.

I’ve been having a blast re-connecting with high school buddies through Facebook. I’m on Spring Break, and enjoying the vacation. Watched a current student being baptized this weekend by a former student, who now works in this community as a youth pastor. Things have a way of coming back around, that old wheel of life keeps turnin’.

Economy is troubling, and my President Obama seems not to know that we who voted for him need that “Change” we were choosing, when we chose him. It’s great to have a man in office who is not a constant embarrassment, but if the current Treasury Sec’y and economic advisors are not tossed out in favor of those who might actually have workable ideas, I fear for our future.

Looking forward to a Las Vegas get-away this week, some time at the Central Cali coast in a couple months, and a summer of classes at La Sierra, and re-connecting with Jana.

I’m praying for a successful student week of prayer next week, the first one we’ve tried in a while.

I’ve finished reading the Dark Tower series by Stephen King through a second time, and am currently reading Everything’s Eventual, Nightmare’s and Dreamscapes, and recently enjoyed Just Around Sunset.

I’m building a nation at cybernations.net, and a virtual citizen at erepublik.com; for a few minutes each day, an interesting simulation plays out under my direction.

I guess I haven’t found a lot to blog about lately, and my Facebook network seems more flexible and relevant than what I was able to build here at jimblog.net.

Thanks for reading, anyway!

USS Hamul

I was so tickled today to receive an email from my sister Sherry.  Sherry was second born of us five, an occupational therapist living in Colorado with her husband, Gary.  They love hiking and taking pictures of their adventures.  She often sends me pictures and albums.  But today she pointed me to a very interesting picture of my father, Robert Miles.

She had recently asked our dad about the ship he had served on during his Korean War days in the U. S. Navy.  During Thanksgiving visits to my dad’s place in Las Vegas, I had heard the story about the tender ship before; it was the USS Hamul, and dad’s job was to repair radios and electronic equipment.  Tender ships were like floating repair shops and ammo warehouses, tending to the needs of the battle group.

Well, the idea struck her to check the Internet for history of the USS Hamul.  Turns out somebody made a website dedicated to the ship: www.usshamul.com, and had posted a few pictures of the various crew compliments.  His crew is pictured on this page: http://www.usshamul.com/photo_013.html, and I reposted it below.

That’s my dad, Robert Miles, on the front row, 5th from the left.

Kim’s Myspace

Kim just made her first myspace page, and it’s fantastic and I’m so proud! If you care to check it out: Kim’s Myspace Page

Fog of War

Sin blinds.
Power corrupts.
God loves.
Truth shines.
The battle rages on.
The darkness
of misapprehension
is a fog
of war.
All souls
are soldiers,
knowingly
or not
willingly
or not.
Every mind, a moral agent.

Kim Graduates!

Congratulations, Kimmy, my beautiful wife! (she’s the one on the left, cheek to cheek with her best buddy and fellow nursing school student, Lisa).

My wife has just completed an ordeal that vaguely resembles a college degree, but more accurately could be described as an insanely cruel and unusual punishment meted out on unsuspecting moms-with-kids going back to school to get a better income.

Anyway, Kimberly, I’m so proud of you, that I had to put you front and center on my blog today!

I love you!

Jesus Is All About Free Will

My conclusions about Christ, based on writings about him that I’ve been reading for the last 20-odd years, are that He created the human race with free will built right in. He did that in order that the love he wanted to share with us would be genuine and not forced (force being evidently incompatible with love). He seems to be the type of person who is all about love, learning, relationships, growth, and creativity, and not so interested in force, violence, death, destruction, or “power trips.” Oddly enough, though, very many who look into what he is all about don’t “get” him.

It seems that the human race was not the only creation of his; in fact a previously created species, which also had free will, has apparently fallen prey to the weakness that free will itself contains, namely power-addiction. A free moral agent can by the nature of free will obviously choose to do whatever it wants at any time; given that possibility, it was a statistical inevitability that a created agent would at some point make a self-destructive choice.

I’m sure he knew about the risks and weaknesses of free will before he let creatures loose in the universe who were vulnerable to the abuse of choice; at any rate, he seems to have had a contingency plan all along for healing those whose addiction to self-aggrandizement is not too far gone as to be beyond help. Incredibly, he has never forced anyone of his creatures human or animal to do anything against their will. He has chosen instead to give humans a very powerful set of sensory tools, a very high-order computational organic super-computer brain, and a recorded history of events to compare their current on-going experiences against.

Unfortunately, the first owners of human DNA totally screwed up the strains available to us by making early on some very self-destructive choices. And so here and now so many generations down the pipeline, our senses and brains have all they can manage to not be distracted by the constant chaos of our environment, which through unfortunate choices we ourselves are seriously damaging. It’s hard to think! Let alone make any kind of meaningful sense out of the crazy stuff that a world full of free moral agents all power-addicted and self-destructive and creative, and silly, and capable of the most beautiful profound statements about life, the universe, and everything!

He has entered into the human reality, the human home planet, even the human skin. He has had it all recorded with a pretty high degree of accuracy. And he has carefully availed himself of key opportunities to personally speak to various writers he hand-picked for their ability to relate to their readers. I think he was careful about that because he is so not about using force, and yet when he shows up the impact upon their senses he makes really blows them away. It must be mind-blowing to hear a word from God, especially when he utters some profound truth about yourself.

Given all of that, what are you going to do with Jesus?

Moccasins and Perception

Free will means that I am free to attend to (pay attention to, or perceive) any input or stimulus which my sensory tools are able to distinguish as separate from all incoming information. Perception is not equal to reality; reality cannot be perceived with any degree of simultaneous accuracy by any two people, much less a community (be it a religious or a scientific community, or mixed or blended of both). The previous statements cannot even be proven or disproven based on our assumptions of perception and free will and accuracy. Neither scientific reasoning nor religious belief can be possible without information, perception, evidence, assumptions, and conclusions about “reality.” Community is only possible by assuming that our perceptions about reality are similar enough to be shared and therefore accurate.

My perception of reality is completely defined by my very unique set of life experiences, culture, point of entry into space and time, moral values, lifestyle, habits, relationships including son, sibling, friend, enemy, foreigner, believer, member, husband, father, teacher, colleague, etc. Therefore, the reality which I am currently perceiving can only be shared by another person on the most elementary level. No one can walk in my moccasins; I can not see through the eyes of another. I can only make the attempt, and see what happens.

My current conclusions about reality are that I can spend what’s left of my time on earth dissecting the perceived realities of other communities and my own; OR, go with what I “know” to be true, and act on it; and that I would rather GO and ACT, than be dissected, or be one of the dissectors. At alternating intervals, however, I do both the acting, and the dissecting.

sumotori

Click here to download and play a cool game called sumotori. It won an award for being the best game of its size (86K!).

I Love Movies

Last Saturday night, my wife and I went with a huge group of couples from our church to see a movie at the local theater. It was a blast! The movie was Wild Hogs, with Tim Allen, John Travolta, Martin Lawrence, William H. Macy, Ray Liotta, Marisa Tomei, and an awesome cameo appearance by Peter Fonda, the god of biker coolness. It’s a movie I’d call fluff, but seen with your wife and seven or eight other couples, all de-stressing from their hard weeks at work, tossing pop-corn at each other (yeah, Kim started that), and just plain enjoying themselves– that was a very rare treat for me.

Ever since I was a young boy, I have loved going to see movies. At my age, I recall those old days when the only place we could find movies to see was at the movie theater, and on the occasional prime-time or late movie on TV (pre-SatelliteTV, pre-TIVO, pre-cable, pre-VCR). But television back then was one big 30 inch wooden console in the family room; surround sound, plasma screens, and DVDs were then only a glimmer in some R&D nerd’s horn-rimmed glass-encased eye. And then, the movie theaters only had one screen, a large velvety curtain that actually remained closed until the movie started (and when the lights went down, you may or may not have seen ONE preview before it started), and old guys wearing vests and slacks tearing tickets. If you wanted to see a movie more than once, you actually had to buy another ticket, and watch it in the theater again. How far technology has brought us, eh?

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I Love Linux

I’ve been watching the development of this Microsoft-alternative closely. Every few years for the past 12 or so, I’ve downloaded the latest, greatest linux attempt at actually doing what Microsoft does, only better. Not until this year was I convinced enough to keep a version of linux on my computer, in order to experiment with it and get to know it better. Read the rest of this entry »