Believing Magic is Fake Doesn't Add Much IQ

Will your SAT score automatically go up more if you give up your belief in a holy book with magic in it? The answer is no. However, it WILL go up more if you study and practice problems, regardless of your beliefs regarding magic.

You will not master intellectual content unless you expose yourself to it. You can't expect to learn probability or the binomial coefficient just by saying you don't believe in magic. Skepticism is not a substitute for opening a STEM book and absorbing the content within.

Anyone that believes that adopting a "magic is stupid" philosophy is sufficient to rank them among the highest of the high in terms of intellect is being severely misled. Going to take A LOT more than that.

Math and Science Made Me Believe in Miracles More

Events can only be scientifically confirmed when they're a part of a controlled, consistent environment.  Is real life outside of a laboratory ALWAYS controlled and consistent, without exception, as the philosophy of determinism insists?  Impossible to prove, but I would say the odds are not good.  Reality has no obligation to fit inside of the small box of required criteria to always make sense to our nature-created brains.

After studying a bit of the natural sciences over the years, particularly mathematics, I've come to discover that rare, uncontrolled events simply have no part in a scientific experiment.  It's not that they can't possibly exist so much as they can't possibly be detected through the scientific method.  These kinds of events cannot be verified scientifically ever, whether they have the ability to exist or not.

In the admittedly stupid movie titled, "A Talking Cat!?!" the feline protagonist Duffy attempts to help a few mentally lost people with some of their life problems.  He talks to each of them separately, but explains he can only talk to them once, never really giving us a satisfactory explanation of why this is.  Now if a situation like this ACTUALLY happened outside of an imaginary story, the only evidence we'd ever have of it is eyewitness testimony that's not worth believing.  No one can control when Duffy chooses to talk.  For all we know he never spoke to anybody else other than these few dimwits.

So it does help to know the potential limitations of the scientific method as well as its incredible strengths.  It's clearly the best tool we have for understanding the physical aspects of reality, but that alone isn't enough to make it infallible.  Weird and rare events that happen to only a few unreliable people can still potentially pop up without the scientific method ever acknowledging their reality.  Only a deterministic philosophy, which encompasses FAR too much to be proven by empirical methods, places a limit on such possibilities.  

But even if eyewitnesses claim such events occurred, I think I'll be like Arthur C. Clarke and remain skeptical of such claims.

Condemn, Tolerate, or Embrace?

I think I remember my son getting some sort of Minecraft strategy guide a long time ago, and it classified sentient objects you encounter as either benign, neutral, or aggressive.  And that reminds me of the response people can have towards behaviors.  They can embrace the behaviors, tolerate them, or condemn them.  

Notice the distinction between tolerate and embrace here.  They are not the same thing.  Tolerance is comparable to allowance in the form of ignoring a behavior without any active participation.  Embracing on the other hand consists of genuine involvement and enthusiastic approval with repeated encouragement.  Tolerating and embracing are two very different responses to a behavior.

Moral and Mathematical Constraints

The citytutoringmath YouTube channel, while perhaps not correct on everything, certainly does an excellent job repeatedly reminding us that true liberty is not the absence of constraint, and that a lack of self control leads to chaos rather than liberty.  When we rid ourselves of all forms of discipline, we do not get a utopia and instead get quite the opposite.  Sin must never be given a playground in which to run around unencumbered.  Even though this should be obvious, it's frankly shocking how often we get an impression that so many people believe the opposite regarding self control.

But what I thought about recently is that while moral constraints are necessary for society to achieve and maintain prosperity, mathematical constraints can be just plain interesting and add spice to someone's mathematical life.  Fermat's Last Theorem is trivial if you allow all reals and don't restrict the solutions to integers. But when it gets restricted it becomes MUCH more interesting.  So interesting I can't even follow it.  When Diophantine Equations start going into imaginary number rings, that non-decimal constraint they throw up can cause things to get wild in a hurry.  I believe I mentioned this in a previous post about 26 being a special number in that it's the ONLY number exactly one after a perfect square and one before a perfect cube.  You start going into imaginary numbers to solve a problem involving integers.  Crazy, but true.

The Most Abused Bible Verse Today? - Matthew 7:1

"Do not judge, or you too will be judged."  A verse that is used extremely often to justify any action (even unbiblical ones) on the grounds that it should be left up to - not the final judge - but no judge at all.  Clearly this is not the intent of the verse.  Let's think about what the intent may be.

Obviously only God can judge a man's final destination.  Because even if a man is as lost as can be, God can save him at any point.  So mankind clearly lacks both the ability and authority to condemn the soul of one of their own.  And I do think this verse warns against attempting to judge a man in such a manner.

I also think the verse warns against judging too harshly.  A man should treat others fairly in order that he can attempt to justify that he himself should be treated fairly.  But this is where the verse starts to get abused.  Fair gets twisted into soft.  And as the evaluation softens, the standards soften too.  We start judging even the hardest crimes with the softest consequence.  I do not believe the verse ever intended such a result.  

Low standards are not a good way to live.  Particularly since the standards of Jesus were quite high.  Loving your neighbor is a very high standard.  But if you twist this verse enough, you can get the depraved thought that harming your neighbor should not be judged harshly at all, in case we decide to cause some harm to our neighbors as well and are now accountable to a harsh result.  Why should we not reap a harsh result for harsh behavior?  I cannot find a Bible verse anywhere that states a person who commits a harsh crime does not deserve a harsh consequence.  Just because God grants a sinner grace does not mean the sinner is entitled to it.  

Matthew 7:1 was never intended in any way to be carte blanche to do as you please without fearing any kind of condemnation from your fellow man or from the scriptures.  A primary purpose of the scriptures is to judge and condemn sin, so that conviction will lead to confession and ultimately repentance.  In citing the Lord's Prayer, as Jesus taught us to pray, we ask for our sins to be forgiven.  We do NOT ask that the sins we engage in never get judged as sinful.

So I believe we are to avoid the judgment of souls entirely, to judge current character only when prudent and then only very carefully, and to judge actions according to how Biblical doctrine specifies those actions.  If scripture calls it sin, we need to call it sin as well.

Pros and Cons Between Generations

I hear generations fight with each other about which had it easier.  And I think back and realize how I struggled finding a job after getting a college degree, and my dad didn't struggle with that quite as much. And I probably won't have as good of a retirement as he had either.  But ALSO he had a MUCH rougher childhood.  He didn't spend most of his time playing video games like I did.  Nor did he have anywhere near the level of toys I had.  He worked at his dad's gas station without pay.  And even when he had free time the entertainment he partook in wasn't near as sophisticated because video games weren't even invented back then.  My childhood was MUCH better than his even if his adulthood might have been a bit smoother economically than mine.  Also he studied engineering and I studied math, so that might have made a difference as well.

But of course, that's only the economic prosperity part of the equation.  Some people who have less still enjoy what they have more than those with a greater number of possessions.  And as much as I enjoyed my childhood, I actually enjoy my adulthood more.  It's not as economically prosperous, but life is about much more than how many toys you have to play with.  Sometimes it's about your mission, even if that mission is mostly unglamorous minor responsibilities that won't change the world or anything.  They're important to me and a few other people, and I think they're important to God as well.  God cares about small things, even if it doesn't always seem like he does.

Wasted Potential is Worse than Wasted Effort

Ecclesiastes chapter 11 says that whoever watches the wind will not plant.  

A man like this finds weather conditions for planting to be unideal every time he contemplates the endeavor.  So he never does it.  This is an example of a man saving effort by wasting potential.  

Compare this to the main that waits for tolerable conditions to plant instead of ideal conditions.  Or even one that plants in conditions that may be extremely far from unideal because he has no choice.  He may be wasting his effort, because the seeds may not grow.  But if they don't, he's ultimately not much worse off than the man that didn't plant at all, and may actually be substantially better off if luck is on his side.

The man that never planted at all only has one thing as the result of his effort-saving.  An excuse.  "Well, the weather wasn't good," he might say.  And he might be correct.  But that will be of little comfort if his neighbor DID plant in weather that wasn't good and actually got something as a result of it.  Are excuses really so comforting that they're worth wasting potential on?

I see this in young men online who get discouraged by the admittedly bad job market.  Entering the job market wasn't easy for me in my 20's either, and I remember the job search not being a fun experience.  I don't want to go through it again if I can avoid it.  I can sympathize.  But it never entered my mind at that time to totally give up on working for a living, because I knew that wouldn't end up going well.  I wanted to at least TRY to ultimately end up with more than just an excuse in my life if I could.  I'd rather fail making the continuous attempt and wasting the effort than not even make the attempt and waste the potential.  And in my case I did fail for a while, but not forever.  What at that time seemed like an eternity of wasteful effort is now in the long-distant past.  The effort ultimately paid off, and I believe more often than not, effort tends to do just that, if someone can just hold out and exercise consistency and patience.

So anyone in a tough position where effort doesn't feel like it's going anywhere, remember the trade off, and keep taking the chance.  Because wasted potential is even worse.