All posts by John Suykerbuyk

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The first and last day of my prayer challenge.

“If ye ask anything in my name, I will do it” – John 14:14

“Therefore I say unto you, what things soever ye desire, when ye pray, believe that ye receive them, and ye shall have them.” – Mark 11:24

I’m participating in this weeks 2nd most popular Facebook topic to conduct an experiment. For the number one most popular thing I see is in regards to the lottery now passing $500 million dollars.

I aim to combine them in an experiment that should last no more then a day.

Thanks for playing along.

Seventy percent of America believes in God, about 30% are dedicated Christians that adhere to the standards laid out by what they believe to be are the earthly spiritual leaders of God Himself.   This is in spite  of the fact that there does not appear to be a uniform standard even though they all share the same “infallible” text books. If the quoted scriptures above are true – and they are the literal unshakable word of God, then logic dictates that about 20% to 30% of our population should have drawn the same winning lottery numbers tonight and will share equally in God answering their prayers.

If instead, God is supremely prejudicial in answering prayers, then the most devout, the one with the most sincere prayers and the one who has lived a most deserved life will become a very rich person while all others will be subjugated to being valued members of a his infantile children’s club.

If instead a third outcome takes place and some one off group or individual wins the lottery who other then the tribal response to such things, lets out a “thank you Jesus!”, then one of two things will have happened. Either the scriptures are not the literal word of God or God is a liar.

If either of those two outcomes make you feel uncomfortable, there is a third option. In contrast to Genesis, we made God in our own image to serve our own needs and to make ourselves feel good.

Nearly every fight for equality in this country has found its most staunch and arbitrary resistance in biblical reference throughout our history. This has been reinforced by the false interpretation that we where founded as a Christian nation much as modern Iran was founded to be an Islamic nation. We, America, was not and the founding fathers went to some lengths to annotate that fact for posterity while being somewhat encumbered by a lack of literary vernacular, historically removed far enough from clutches of centuries of church based rule.

As we are now coming to mandate the teaching of creationism with absolutely no foundation save for the “literal word of God” in our classrooms, we should pause. As we continue to deny sexual equality for no other reason save for the literal interpretation of a few cherry picked old testament passages that lie in conflict with the New Testament, we should pause.

There is no historical precedent for the faithful having any form of edge in picking winning lottery numbers, just as there are exceptionally few incredibly wealthy and retired fortune tellers.

We should use caution when applying doctrine as justification for law. While there are a number of anecdotal stories of relevance, there are no infallible truths in the bible. The earth is not flat, it never flooded, it is older than six thousand years, and Adam and Eve were not the origin of mankind.

I’ll not deny the benefit of prayer as an indirect tool in living less mindlessly. If praying about winning the lottery makes you more mindful of your budget and the value of charity – great. But I refute unequivocally the suggestion that a magical extraterrestrial mystery dude is going to help anyone win the lottery – or answer a single prayer.   Ever.

Tonight we find out.

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While visions of sugar plumbs danced in their heads…

By the time you read this, perhaps the most successful of all spacecraft programs will have returned to earth for the third time after an unprecedented and flawlessly combined 1700 days in orbit with three return trips to our home world before commandeering all of Cape Canaveral.

Yes I am talking about the super classified X-37B.

What we know as the space shuttle program was gross attempt at a 37,000 unique heat shield tile prototype for a reusable heavy lift vehicle. It’s only sustaining grace was the human crew capacity.

A year after the shuttle program was cancelled, the X-37B was into its 2nd test flight of more than 600 days. No humans on board and absolute precision to execute the electronic orders sent to it.

Given that it has a Geo-stationary lift capability greater then the cargo space of any Toyota Pickup truck in production, it kind of makes you wonder how it has been complimenting the NSA (its stated mission during Bush II).

For the curious, it lands tomorrow night at Edwards AFB for the last time before taking over the recently vacated shuttle’s home in Florida.

Opinion

Autobiographies are written by liars

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As a kid there where two kinds of literature that I devoured.

Those books that taught me about a subject I craved to understand and those that shared a detailed accounting of how someone either created the subject matter or who aggregated it well enough to create something new. I always favoured the raw content until I found it indigestible without the context of the human perseverance that lead to the understanding.

On occasion, I come up with a point of view or frame of reference that a few close friends find interesting either by way of provocation or enlightenment. Often my efforts to explain my conclusions require me to self examine the trail of bread crumbs that lead me to a conclusion. Most often I find reinforcement, but sometimes the need to refactor.

It is this struggle to figure out how I became me, with all my filtered perceptions and my intrinsic situational interpolation that I have come to realize that every autobiography I have ever read, was at best, a collection of well intentioned lies and filtered truths.

Some write diaries to help them with their essay of self. Most diaries are written in a second person narrative, usually to a future self as motivational or in the voice of wishful thinking. Some are written for posterity, and willingly neglect details that don’t support the intended projection of idealism. Perhaps the only diaries that are historically relevant are those which unintentionally document a historical event (such as Anne Frank’s).

It is now a well documented phenomena that the simple act of recalling a memory, modifies that memory. Our water laden, squishy and pliable synaptic memory banks are not all that different from the ferrite core memories in the very first computers. The act of recalling information always has a side effect in the re-persisting of that information. Only recently has the legal system begun to accept the problem of memory modification through and by the science that was once was believed to be entirely therapeutic counselling.

I can’t remember reading a person’s autobiography who didn’t recall some life changing event before the author was 10. As we get older, the frequency of new experiences slows proportionately to the sense that time accelerates. I recall many life changing events from the age of 3 to the age of 9. None of which are accurate, but the perception of which continue to have a profound influence upon me.

Its as if the early and most momentous events in our lives are given some kind of force multiplying coefficient whose exponent is time.

I’m not really bothered by having been mislead by all the authors of all the great autobiographies I have enjoyed, nor by whose fanciful tales I measured myself as being somewhat deficient in some regard.

But I am relieved that as I am now somewhat more aged and nearer to being their peers in having lived while struggling to retain clarity on my earliest memories, I can see the wink across time by all those great contributors to the understanding of the human condition that shrugs and says, “well that’s how I remember it”.