Posts Tagged ‘Personal’

USS Hamul

// August 4th, 2008 // Comments Off // General

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.

uss hamul 1952 electrics repair crew

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Fog of War

// June 13th, 2008 // Comments Off // General

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.

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Kim Graduates!

// December 13th, 2007 // Comments Off // General

Kim & Lisa

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!

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Jesus Is All About Free Will

// October 3rd, 2007 // Comments Off // General

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?

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Moccasins and Perception

// October 1st, 2007 // Comments Off // General

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.

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