Over at Mark Morgan’s great site, Voices of Unreason, there’s a flame-filled discussion of Wicca going on. I don’t know enough about Wicca to have an educated opinion on that topic, but a bit of the discussion caught my eye, and I chipped in my 2¢. Feel free to drop in over there and contribute to the discussion.

Here’s my meager contribution:

Brian Carnell said:
Well put. It’s just another religion in the same way that Ba’hai (sp?) is
just another religion or Islam is another religion.

The idea of something being “just another religion” intrigues me. As I think I’ve mentioned before, I’m a Christian because I think it’s true, not because of the psychological release or emotional gratification it gives me. (Frankly, there are times when it’s an absolute pain and I’d rather not have to deal with it.) When I say I think it’s true, I mean that its postulates — that there is a god who created the world, that there was actually a person named Jesus who by his death altered our relationship to that god, etc. — are factual, even if we don’t have the means to incontrovertibly prove them in our current state.

The corollary to that is that if these things are not true, I want nothing to do with Christianity. Betrand Russell makes an excellent case that if there’s no god it’s better to face that true fact and get on with life than it is to continue deluding oneself. I agree with him entirely in that, but disagree with his opinion as to God’s existence.

Back to the original topic: I think of religions as being ultimately valuable only to the degree that they are true. Saying “just another religion” seems to put them all on equal footing. But if one cares at all about their truth, they can’t possibly all be on equal footing, since they say such radically different things. Christianity posits an infinitely powerful, personal god who is involved with the created world. Deism, by way of contrast, views God as powerful and personal, but uninvolved in his creation. Now, if God does exist, he can’t be both active in and uninvolved with creation, so one or the other is closer to truth. And if God doesn’t exist, they’re both a load of cheese, and should both be tossed out.

So, how does one think of anything as “just another religion”? If their only value is a false comfort, I want nothing to do with any such nonsense. But if there’s any truth in religion at all, they can’t all be on equal ground.

When we lived in Denton, Kathy and I would sometimes make our way to the local cinema for a date. On one of these occasions, we were standing in line outside the theater when we noticed a group of men, evidently from a group home, milling about in front of us with their two female attendants. Kathy and I quietly watched them for a while, smiling at their evident enjoyment at the outing.

As we followed them into the theater, one of them came up to me and stuck out his hand. I took it and began to shake it. “Hi there!” I said brightly to him. “I like beer!” he responded, standing about 4 inches closer to my face than most Americans consider polite. “Yeah, that beer’s good stuff!” He was still shaking my hand, and leaning a bit closer, said in what he thought was a conspiratorial tone of voice, “I’m a girl!” “No kidding? You certainly hide it well.” After another moment’s thought and a glance over at Kathy, still shaking my hand and losing the conspiratorial volume level altogether, he pronounced “I LIKE YOUR WIFE!”

We all broke up laughing at that point, and his attendant brought him back to the rest of the group, apologizing between gales of laughter. We smiled about that incident for days, and cut loose with an occasional “I LIKE YOUR WIFE!” from time to time.

This weekend, Steve, Travis and I played a 5 hour gig at The Coffee Pot, here in San Marcos. Though we took a few breaks and invited several other musicians up to play, it was still a pretty grueling session. I haven’t been brave enough to whip out the hammered dulcimer for performance yet, but did get to play cello with a couple of people I hadn’t worked with before. Some friends from Denton were in attendence as well, and we had them jump in for a few tunes too.

After several years of secrecy, the people at Groove have released the fruits of their labors. Groove is a collaboration tool that allows people to use shared workspaces to coordinate the activities or information of a group of people. In some ways, it competes with Conversant, the platform I run this website from and which I helped build. Unfortunately, there’s no Mac version in sight, though it should be reasonably easy to build a version for Mac OS X once they’ve completed their Linux version. In any case, if you’d like to try it out with me, my user ID is SeanMcTex.

Those of you who have been keeping up with my flights of imaginative fancy for a while know that I had a lot of fun creating laser displays for a bit. (See The Cheap Laser Show for all the details.) You will also be aware that I’m a bit of a computer game junkie. Now there’s a project that combines both of these interests into one wacky project: LaserMAME. (It’s swamped at the moment, thanks to Slashdot.) The software allows you to play old vector graphics games like Tempest and Battle Zone using a laser controller to display the images, which can then be projected against a wall, a building, or the clouds if you’ve a powerful enough laser and don’t mind the FAA throwing you in jail. Neat.

As Steve, Travis and I have been playing more in coffee shops and for church, we’ve decided that we really like the variety that using a bunch of different instruments introduces into the performance. To that end, I recently ordered a Masterworks 15/14 Hammered Dulcimer, which arrived yesterday. I’m having a ton of fun with it already, though it requires a kind of percussionist’s dexterity that I’m still a long way from having down. I’m getting the hang of where the notes lie quickly, though, and really like the tone of the beautifully crafted instrument. It’s going to be a lot of fun to work it into performances in a month or two! (If you’re curious about the tuning, you can see a chart here.)

We had our first official, open meeting of Three Rivers Church last night. Kathy and I were honored to be able to open our home for the meeting, though we’re already aware that we’ll shortly be needing larger accomodations. We discussed what the Bible has to say about what a church should be as well as what everyone present hoped to see in the group. There were a number of people there who weren’t part of the initial crew, including one couple who it was our pleasure to meet for the first time who had done mission work with orphanages in Russia.

It’s exciting to see things finally coming together in a tangible way, to have reached this milestone in the church planting process. Though we don’t plan on being up and going with regular Sunday meetings until Easter, these Wednesday night meetings will help to build our little community until then.

The Perfect Storm is reminiscent of Melville’s great Moby Dick, not only in that it centers on the sea and the people who live and work there, but also in the sheer number of details and tangents and the breadth it covers. Ranging from meteorology to fishing techniques to aircraft designs to rescue training to marine engineering, the book is a compelling account of an enormous storm and its effects on many people’s lives. I have yet to see the movie, but it seems like it would be a difficult book to translate to that medium while preserving the book’s flavor, since there’s so much background material included to flesh out the story. Another one for the “to-read” list.

David Brin is currently among my favorite authors. Up until now, I’ve read only his novels, including The Postman, Earth, and the excellent Startide Rising, which is in the process of being turned into a film. The River of Time is a collection of his short stories, chock-full of interesting ideas, theories, and characters. It made me consider whether I like the novel or the short story better as a form. My conclusion was wishy-washy enough to be worthy of Charlie Brown: I like ’em both! In the same way that I enjoy a huge Thanksgiving dinner, but I’m also glad that Cool Ranch Doritos exist, I’m glad we’ve got both the big works and the more bite-size peeks into the minds of authors.

Anyway, back to the book. It’s good. If you like Brin, read it.

We thought Liam was handling Maggie’s arrival just fine, and would continue to be the utterly charming little boy that he has been up to now. But shortly after her arrival, he discovered the power of the word “No,” which, of course, he doesn’t deliver that way, but in all uppercase with exclamation points: “NO!!” In addition, he’s getting more ornery and obeying instructions less readily, so it looks like we may be in for some increased parenting challenges for a while. He is, fortunately, still unfailingly kind to his new little sister; we’re not sure whether this was brought on by her arrival or whether he’s just reached that point in his development. In either case, he’s spending more time in solitary confinement in his room, where he pushes the screen out of his window and drops his blocks out onto the dirt below where the neighbors retrieve them for us.