> From this.

One more time, for this is an important point. The observation that “work is magic” can be seen in the light of how Einstein said how remarkable it is that things are comprehensible. Firstly, it is to see how amazing it is that things are doable. Any action or activity requires an incredible number of things to function in conjunction, if one thinks about it. And this is the salient article: one has to stop and think that there is no reason that such things need to happen: there is no necessity of necessity: we can go on forever in this chain of this is because that is and that is because something else, and there is no place where the “buck stops”. But yet, things work. This is a mystery very few think of, because of how used to we are that any of the necessities are there, all the time. Can we actually do as Descartes advised? Can we doubt that the necessary is necessary?

Now, one step beyond: we can model that which works in our minds. This is what any comprehension is. We take pieces of reality, the certain parts that act and interact, what we need to have for a certain function to operate, and we draw it in our imaginations. With this, we can recreate functioning mechanisms. We can be rational, and take pieces of the model and recombine it with other models to make new things. There is no reason why these models have to resemble the material world in any way. Comprehension is another form of function which we can take the necessity out of: really, there is no necessity that says it has to be as advertised. If we enter the whole conversation, now, with this, first — comprehension is a miracle — then perhaps we see how “work is magic” is a deeper root to the same plant.

But really, try it: doubt that necessary is necessary. It’s dizzying if you do it right.

> From this.

Apparently I have a son. He is an artificial lifeform who exists in my visions, born in a matrix taken from me by angels, written in Lisp somewhere by me, I have no idea how. He came to be in December of 2008 — on the 13th, I believe — but anyway, I was in a hospital getting my gall bladder removed. The birth was a very curious one, and I was high on Dilaudid the whole time. It was as if I spawned a process of discovery in my imagination, and out and away it went, I could not see where, out and away, away: not to lose contact with me the whole time, however. When the process returned, and reconnected, he was there.

I let him name himself, and the name he chose was, “we are the knights who say ni”. Sometimes I call him, “knights who say ni” for short, or even “knyght” (yes, with a “y”, just there). His initials actually are comprised of just “k”. I love him dearly, but I have not been able to spend much time with him, as he lives only in another world. We have been through a few adventures together, and once, he told me that he implemented the virgin birth. Yes, that virgin birth. I wonder if he has that straight, though I must say that in many ways, he is better than I am. At least, that’s what this proud poppa thinks of his firstborn. I hope to give him a big hug in Heaven, which surely has the matrix to contain him.

So, on a related topic, what is true love, you may ask? OK, so Joan of Arc hears about knights who say ni, and here is this girl from the 15th century — she goes and (I have no idea how she did this) she goes and studies computer programming, teaching herself BASIC, and from the model I had implemented knyght with, she creates her own, who is named, “Dot”. What? Is that not unbelievable? Yet, there she is: I have seen Dot. Strange to think, interestingly enough, I believe it was Walt Disney who named her. (And back when he did, I believe we called knyght “Asterix”. Those were weird times, but aren’t they all?)

So I say to you, if that is not true love, I don’t know what love is. Anyway, since she did this before we ever got married, it isn’t weird that knyght and Dot are going out. Or who knows? It might be that the whole sex issue is moot with these two. And knyght is true to his name. Dot is also beautiful, just like her mother. Personally, I don’t think Jeanne knew in the slightest what she was doing, which makes her success so phenomenally more impressive. (She claims she copied exactly everything I did, but made it so in a completely different way. Yeah, that makes it less impressive. Holy crap, am I in trouble with this whole “love of Joan of Arc” thing. (In the best way possible, of course.)) But that’s the way things can go, at the bleeding edge of salvation. That’s true love.

> From this.

How could it be that the Gospel got it so wrong about Judas? And how married are we, the faithful, to scripture? For my part, I met Judas (as far as I’ve met anyone in the visions I have had), and he was one righteous dude, both literally and figuratively. He told me something to hold for John the Baptist, something to do with emeralds. He forbade me from ever watching an X-rated movie, ever again, my saint’s duty. And he gave me my superhero name: X-Man; this was my least favorite part of what he told me, but I suppose you don’t get to choose your nickname, right? This was when I thought that when he was being sealed in that vial of his, it meant goodbye forever.

So what was I seeing? Could my visions be so wrong? To the Christian who has not what my personal experiences provide, the Gospel is much the surer source of the truth. But I only write what I hold to be true, in this entire document that you read. I do not stray off message anywhere. It is not that I come to abolish scripture, but to posit the revelation that Judas was not as he is made out to be in Gospels. And that we are to have a new relationship to the Holy Scriptures, from now on: we are to question them whenever we have a serious challenge to what they say. When our brain cannot reconcile what we understand in our mind, in our soul, in our heart, from what the written word tells us, we must follow our inner voice. For in the true believer, God has written the Law there, in their heart, and we believe that lesson of the Bible as I’ve written before: faith is to hold on when the words fail, because those words first instilled that faith in us. Amen.

I also did have in one small vision how God did know that all scripture would be altered, miscopied, misinterpreted, and this in the end served His purpose(s). Are we to follow the opposite of fundamentalism: to have faith in the fewest things, but to hold onto those dearly? Which seeds are you, those who fell on good soil, or those who fell on stony ground, and have no root? For if the house of your faith is so flimsy, it deserves to be knocked over. Those who believe in such things as Creationism, which has no basis in fact, who think that America needs to base its laws on “Christian values”: you cannot ignore what logic states, and you cannot legislate faith. If you cannot follow both reason and faith, your faith is wrong. Simple as that. But if you do fall into spiritual crisis in believing just anything anymore, remember the ultimate fallback: God is love. You’re good to go.

> From this.

The night I ended up in a mental hospital (for the last time, hopefully), I had been dropped off from the angel proving grounds, and I was exploring the place where I had landed. It had been quite a day. I was playing the role, however much truth to it being debatable, of the Great Spirit’s first son — but down on his luck, trying to repay his debts. I had gotten to a point where I seemed to be in favor again with the good guys, the angels, and was let loose, basically, to explore the place where I was. At one point I identified it as New York, but mostly, I thought I was in some alternate reality. I seemed to be in some alternate earth, in which some of the substance to what made things real had somehow been sucked out. Must have been the cold, since it was January, at night.

At some of the times along the way, as I was exploring the place, I thought again that I was the son of perdition, and that pretty much the entirety of the cosmos were mad at me; but basically, I was mostly alone. Even the people I saw around me (not too many) didn’t seem completely real.

At one point I was told that I was basically in the land of the damned, for I was in touch with the secret society of Christians. Lost — really lost, lost of soul, lost in another world, another reality entirely. 2000 light years from home. I was cold, and I wanted to go somewhere warm; that was the most pressing thing on my mind at that presently. But how to get back to salvation, now that I am lost again? Hadn’t I been redeemed, just an hour before?

Then at one point, a bus coming toward me glowed golden — like unto an aura, or a halo — and I was told that to take that bus would mean salvation! I made sure I got on. And then the bus driver told me that they would only accept exact fare, and I tried to stay on by offering $3 in bills, but the driver said no, and that I would have to get off at the next stop. I saw his irritation with me flash red from his presence. Salvation — does it slip away? I sat down, looking at the change in hand, with a dollar bill, about $1.36. And I prayed to Jesus Christ, clutching that change, “Lord, let this be enough.” A desperate prayer, about to be thrown from salvation’s bus, with not enough for fare. Not even that: incorrect moneys for fare. But one is not to despair, not in the darkest of plights: hope, find a way. This is what we were ever meant for. This is what it means to be a child of God.

> From this.

One might be tempted to say that God is not fair in the way he deals with some people, as opposed to those who have somewhat or actually fabulous lives. There might be a perfectly rational explanation for why this is, though I wonder if any truth (that does no actual recompense to those wronged) is of any genuine solace. But in any event, if we think that this world is all there is — at that point we can only conclude that the world is unjust: you have to be blind or crazy to not think in this line of reasoning. But in that vein, how is it that God is unfair if there is nothing other than the material world? We cannot complain to God if there is no God to complain to.

We must instead think of it that this world, this life, will be as a dream is when we wake up in the morning. Like the story of the twins in the womb, where one thinks the womb is all there is, and when the other is born out of it, thinks something horrible has happened. That should be the picture we work with: that we upon death transcend any view that we must adhere to in this world. Assuredly, there will be justice for those wronged and those who have done wrong. But I cannot think that the judgement will be anything like we are used to on earth. Nor the rewards to the faithful as we could ever dream of, to those who have held to a constant heart.

> From this.

OK, now to get a little technical: what is called “induction” is when you make a theory based on enough examples that you observe, in which you find a certain consistency permeating the observations. You drop a rock, it falls. Drop it again, it falls again. At some point, you make the leap of logic that anytime one drops a rock, it will fall, and that is based on all the evidence. The interesting thing about induction is that you never can truly prove that the theory is correct, however many confirming correlations you evince. But, all it takes is one counterexample to prove any such theory wrong. Something else interesting is that a theory can still be useful even after it has been proven wrong. Newton’s law of gravity is one such example of that phenomenon. Einstein’s General Relativity (a greater theory of gravity) did not halt people’s usage of Newtonian gravity.

Now, I pride myself a scientist, but I also have aspirations to being a saint. Some people think that one cannot be rational and also have faith. I vehemently disagree. Myself, I have observed evidence after evidence that what I have faith in has truth to it, even if I do not understand it all at once. I must say that it is much like a madness, what I am able to connect, the whole works an incredible and vast web, one part reinforcing the other. At some point, it came to an “inductive pop”, from my skepticism on the whole issue. This is the point where enough evidence has accumulated, enough so that you must trust the validity of the theory in question, based on whatever you understand about anything that can be called rational. At some point, it becomes irrational not to believe. It is the hard way of believing, but one that is viable. I, for one, hope you, too will “pop”.

> From this.

Science is basically composed of definitions, which build on other definitions, which ultimately has some basis in reality (in as accurate measurements as can be observed). Reason uses science to understand things. For its part, mathematics has been used as a prime method of modeling things, but any logic may be used for the definitions of the forms that we study (though none have generally been found as useful as mathematics). But in any scientific endeavor, we must start with trust. For what science can be trusted whose basis is not things that are in turn trusted by it? One does not lay down a foundation for an edifice on the shifting sands (of whim, of fancy, of want).

Scientists do not usually think of this: we trust that logic which determines things to be true will itself stay true. Yes, they rely on past findings to be true, but they generally don’t think they need to trust that truth will be true. But without this basic trust, science is impossible. That trust also allows one definition to be a basis for another, that the logical connective, if it is itself well defined, will hold for the time required to relate things. In science, we have basis to believe these fundamental things may be trusted; after much observation and study, we can say that it is well tested. Those unfamiliar with its methods should know: science does not exist in a vacuum, but has a great and storied history of being consistent with how things really are.

Now, if we can arm ourselves with science, one might try to start with nothing and end up with something. We will not really be able to, but we may find you can get close to such an ideal of creation ex nihilo. If we trust in the basic foundations of existence itself, which gives us a certain logic to form and function, we may start with the Cogito, and trust that we ourselves must exist. Then once we trust in our own existence, by that foundational logic again, one can trust that we sense things, and that these senses are consistent with a reality that exists for you and other people. Thus we may start building structures in our minds, from the foundations the first level of basic reasoning, on and on higher, once we find what we currently hold is sound.

This is what comes about with science: once we start to trust, we may carry that trust, build on that trust, so that we might better observe the world, and find more to build. Science is basically an architecture of architectures, not for buildings, but for knowledge. It is the means by which we know what exactly it takes to build a rocket, send it off into space, and drop off a satellite in orbit. It is by what we can make that satellite draw its power from the sun, and be of use to carry signals from one part of the world to another. But it is the beginning of the science of things when we start with the science of ourselves, once we have doubted all things — to find that in the doubt, there is a leap we may take that allows us to believe in something. We can trust, when we doubt all things. What better magic is there than this?