Archive
I’m not a pastor. Consider what I say here to be the result of a layman’s study of the scriptures, which is exactly what it is. Please, don’t take spiritual advice from random people on the internet. Seek God in the scriptures and find a Godly Reformed pastor to give you counsel.
There is much to be gained by singing and praying the Psalms. Aldo Leon has compelling sermons on the benefits of doing so here and here. In short, the Psalms teach us how to pray, and how to sing. They are divinely inspired songs and hymns and prayers, serving as precise regulation of God on how his people are to sing and pray to Him.
There no more useful innovation to be done in the field of computing. If there is, almost nobody is working on it.
Computers are useful for processing data and communicating with others. Anything beyond that is useless at best, and harmful at worst. Our current computer infrastructure already solves the basic problems we want it to. We already have programs and protocols like email, and HTTP, and SMS, etc. which allow us to communicate with each others just fine. We already have programs that allow us to share documents and photos and videos and other files. We already have programs that allow us to do financial accounting, and banking, and currency transaction. We have programs to keep things cryptographically secure. Name any human function that we need computers for, and I claim it is already built. Useful computing needs only to be maintained at this point.
Acknowledging that modernity has many blessings is not an endorsement of everything that modernity does. That’s just like…basic logic, and it is my position. Neo-luddism as I have presented it is not an outright rejection of modernity or an arbitrary truncation of technological usage; it is a critical posture towards modernity in light of basic eternal truths of human nature.
Thus, even though modernity is full of blessings, it is not full of only blessings. We can logically throw out destructive and consumptive aspects of modernity that are not blessings, and still embrace the blessings. Modernity is not a monolith; modern technological advancements of the modern age are not all logically entailed in each other. Questioning whether we should really be carrying around these addictive mobile phones with us is not the same thing as questioning the use of penecillin in lieu of bloodletting.
The eccentric and highly competent Luke Smith is the quintessential Linux dude. I highly recommend checking out his website and his videos; he has a lot of tips and tricks and methods that are very useful to learn if you’re getting into Linux.
Luke believes (as do I) that you should own your own systems, especially for communication. Your technology should be yours, and work for you. Don’t use or buy products from people who hate you, or spy on you, or can shut you down via malice or incompetence, etc. Reasonable stuff.
I’ve recently worked on adding a fiat payment portal to this website. Being an independent writer/webmaster means sometimes you can’t justify sitting down to write or code in the midst of all your other obligations. So, if you like reading what I write, or want to send me feedback, please consider donating and participating over there!
I set up a poll to collect some feedback on what topics you would like me to write about next.
The top three killers of the American people are heart disease, cancer, and medical error.
That means the top three killers of Americans are largely preventable illnesses and conditions.
Our food is one problem. The staples of the American diet are seed-oil filled, ultra-processed, ultra-pasteurized, double-hybridized, geneticially modified, nutritionally depleted post-war consumer slop, with added sugar. These foods are addictive and unable to be processed by our bodies. Our fathers drank raw milk and ate homegrown meat and vegetables. Big Food and Big Pharma are to blame here, along with the government organizations who enable and tolerate them. But that’s a topic for another time.
One of the marks of the post-industrial world is the abstraction of basic human function. These abstractions are all around us, and serve to create the ease and efficiency of the modern world. It is the reason you can use the internet to order an Amazon package within minutes, and it arrive at your door within two days. The abstraction is the simple interface you interact with (your phone, or computer, etc.) combined with the massive infrastructure of supply chains, communication networks, financial contracts, international relations, and all the other innovations of modernity that stand behind it.
An abstraction is a mask for complexity, which allows you to move tremendous resources at your beck and call, making things easy, cheap, and fast.
Modernity is a series of abstractions from the real world.
The things we depend upon for daily sustinence are merely the presentation layer of a complex network of supply chains, technologies, contracts, laws, and financial instruments.
As moderns, don’t get our food from the ground, where it comes from, but from the grocery store, where it is pre-processed, packaged, and sold.
We communicate virtually via computer networks more than we do face-to-face.
We buy more things online from ecommerce giants like Amazon, and box stores like Home Depot, than we do from mom and pop brick and mortar stores.
We are, as one of my friends put it, a “third person society”; our friendships are third person (podcasts), our politics are third person (whatever they’re doing on Washington), and even our sex is third person (pornography).
We don’t even use our own money to buy things anymore; we take short term loans of other people’s money via an electronic network (a credit card) to pay for our own purchases.
The Christian Prince is a great man, whose rule and example galvanizes the political will and civil cohesion of a Christian nation.
I’m not saying Trump is that man. But, Trump gave us a glimpse of what that kind of man can do.
He took a bullet to the ear, meant for his head, and instead of just making a direct escape, he paused, stood up, and pumped his fist to indicate to a watching nation that he still won’t back down without a fight. It was one of the most glorious and galvanizing things America has seen in a long time.
Setting aside specific time each day (or at least a couple times a week) to lead your family in worship is an important thing for a man to do. The man is the head of the family, and family is the first government that God instituted in creation. One of the purposes of this government is worship; a man is not only to provide for his family’s physical well-being and protection, but also to guard against heresies and unbelief in his own family, and to nourish his own with spiritual nourishment from the word of God.
The first lesson about success in life is that it is path dependent.
Where you arrive depends on the path you took to get there. When you’re young, many paths lie before you. You can be anything, because you aren’t anything yet. When you make decisions to take your life in a certain direction, other paths, and therefore other destinations, close off. When you’ve chosen to be a software engineer, it’s hard to pivot to becoming a plumber when you’re 40 (and vice versa). If you’ve just started learning chess at 27, you’ll likely never be a grandmaster. The longer you’ve lived someplace, the harder it is to move somewhere else.
Dear reader,
As you’ve probably noticed, I haven’t posted anything on here in a while. This has been semi-intentional. The unintentional part of why I haven’t posted in so long is simply that life is busier for me. I’m no longer a wide-eyed early 20s man anymore, and as such, my life has a larger number of responsibilities. Blogging is one of the first things on the chopping block when time is short.
Over the past couple of years, I have slowly been disconnecting myself from the technological matrix that has seemingly engulfed everything good, true, and beautiful in our world. A few years ago I completely disconnected from Instagram and Facebook. I had an anon Twitter account for short periods in the interim, but I’ve gotten rid of that too. I switched my phone from Apple to a non-Google OS called GrapheneOS which runs on Android. I paid off my only car and shredded my only credit card. I’ve never owned a TV, and never will. I’ve never owned a video game console. I’ve had a Reddit account for all of 5 minutes. And most recently, I’ve finally cut myself off from that nagging spectre, YouTube, which took some of the most drastic action yet to accomplish.
The land of the Geats was peaceful, ruled and guarded by king Beowulf, now an old man. All was well, until a lowly thief, a man of weak constitution, stole from the treasure collection of a dragon. That old hoard guard was awakened to human footsteps, and accounted among his vast wealth that one piece small piece was missing. Enraged, that winged demon began to terrorize the Geats, relentless in his fury, killing them one by one and burning their homes, their crops, and their livestock. Darkness fell upon the Geats, and terror gripped their hearts.
One thing that isn’t often discussed is how much grief you experience just by growing up.
Thomas Cole’s 1840 and 1842 works called The Voyage of Life allegorize the trajectory of a man’s life in a series of 4 paintings, depicting childhood, youth, manhood, and old age. Cole accompanied his paintings with a description of each.
A stream is seen issuing from a deep cavern, in the side of a craggy and precipitous mountain, whose summit is hidden in clouds. From out the cave glides a Boat, whose golden prow and sides are sculptured into figures of the Hours: steered by an Angelic Form, and laden with budsand flowers, it bears a laughing Infant, the Voyager whose varied course the artist has attempted to delineate. On either hand the banks of the stream are clothed in luxuriant herbage and flowers. The rising sun bathes the mountains and the flowery banks in rosy light. The dark cavern is emblematic of our earthly origin, and the mysterious Past. The Boat, composed of Figures of the Hours, images the thought, that we are borne on the hours down the Stream of Life. The Boat identifies the subject in each picture. The rosy light of the morning, the luxuriant flowers and plants, are emblems of the joyousness of early life. The close banks, and the limited scope of the scene, indicate the narrow experience of Childhood, and the nature of its pleasures and desires. The Egyptian Lotus in the foreground of the picture is symbolical of Human Life. Joyousness and wonder are the characteristic emotions of childhood.
There are those who say that circumcision is not a sign of faith, but rather an ordinance of the law, having nothing to do with faith at all. They do not deny that the sign of circumcision was the sign of the Old Covenant, rather, they uphold that the Old Covenant was only a covenant in the flesh, a covenant which demanded outward obedience to the law, with circumcision being merely the first task of obedience to it. As such, they say, given the uselessness of this Old Covenant in producing the obedience which God desired, God did away with it, replacing it with the New Covenant and its sign of baptism, signifying the spiritual resurrection of the individual. They say circumcision is not a sign of such inward change; whereas baptism is a sign of faith, circumcision only signified ancestral generation from Abraham, serving only to identify those covenant people of Israel through lawful ordinance applied in accord with natural reproduction. Scripture is opposed: circumcision is a sign of faith, and a schoolmaster of it.
The Christian tradition has always placed a strong emphasis on property ownership. In fact, it is such a central concept to the law of God that it is one of the Ten Commandments: “do not steal”. The books of the law, like with the other commandments, give various case law examples of how to “not steal” in day-to-day life and business. “Stealing” need not be limited only to the forceful or discrete acquisition of something which is not yours. Various laws against stealing prohibited improper or unjust valuations, as well as inaccurate weights and measures (Leviticus 19:35-36), usurous and consumptive interest on debts (Exodus 22:25), negligent destruction of property (Exodus 21:35-36, 22:6), breaches of trust (Exodus 22:7), and so on. Laws against theft were to be punished by restoration of whatever was stolen, plus an extra amount (usually 20-25%) to account for the damage done by the deed. Under God’s Law, whoever owns a piece of property really owns it; it is truly his, and only he has a right to its use. Disputes about property ownership were made before God between private parties, mediated by the Levitical priesthood as a representative of God’s law. God is the proprietor of all things, and hence is the only appropriate mediator to any dispute regarding property rights.
In some parts of the world, the dominant political theory from the late 16th century to roughly the late 18th century was a doctrine known as the Divine Right of Kings. This doctrine states that a monarch is not answerable to any earthly authority. The reasoning behind this is that the king is established by God Himself, and is thus answerable only to God for His actions. He may rule over everyone else with an iron rod, and be as benevolent or as harsh as he was determined to be. Neither parliament or the clergy had any legitimacy to doubt the actions of earthly king, let alone resist them. This doctrine fueled the absolutism of King James I of England, one of the greatest supporters of the Divine Right theory, and also heavily influenced the absolute rule of Louis XIV of France, who called himself the “Sun King”.
The Reformed world is one which is largely characterized by agreement. For all that Reformed men and women like to debate the minutiae of Reformed Theology, the fact remains that these disputes are largely insignificant when contrasted with the larger issues of the faith. The Reformed world is a fairly harmonious one, and in many areas of faith and practice, Presbyterians, Reformed Baptists, Dutch Reformed, and so on, are happy to call each other allies. This is likely due to the theologically robust and historically time-tested nature of Reformed Theology as a whole. It is a movement which, since its inception, has been rooted in a staunch Biblicism and bolstered by the confession of Church history even prior to the Protestant Reformation. Differences in more minor subjects are no cause for estrangement.
A few months ago, a good friend of mine sent me an essay written by notable British general and historian Sir John Bagot Glubb called The Fate of Empires in which he examined the lifespans of eleven different empires across history. Glubb’s observation was that each empire spanned a period of approximately 10 generations, or 250 years. The table below shows the data that Glubb was examining.
What’s more, the lifecycle of each of these empires appeared to follow a predictable pattern of stages from their inception to their downfall. Glubb identifies seven stages, in particular, that can be identified across every empire. They are, in chronological order, the Age of Pioneers, the Age of Conquests, the Age of Commerce, the Age of Affluence, the Age of Intellect, the Age of Decadence, and the Age of Decline & Collapse. The essay is a fascinating little read, and I’ll link it for [download here](/assets/doc/The Fate of Empires, John Glubb.pdf), along with some [helpful notes](/assets/doc/Broad Historical Categorizations.pdf) but for the sake of readers here I will give a brief summary of each age according to Glubb’s description.
There are chiefly three regimes of thought that have developed throughout human history. These are, in historical order: the Premodern, the Modern, and the Postmodern. All three of them have different ways of determining what is True, what is Good, and what is Beautiful.
In general, the regime of thought known as “Modernism” is the dominant regime of the Modern world, although that is quickly changing. It is associated with rationalism and materialism, the latter being the assumption that the only things that truly exist are material, and the former being the belief that what can be known is only that which can be deduced via human reason. Unsurprisingly, the rise of Modernism coincided with the rise of natural science. Although the two things are not synonymous, they share many of the same assumptions about the world and have a common view of how to attain new knowledge. Modernism’s defining characteristic is that it restricts Truth only to what can be observed and reasoned about. Because Modernists are materialists, this restricts their field of study to the interplay of universal laws, matter, time, and space. All that ever was and ever is and ever will be can be explained in terms of these things, and anything which cannot be reached by reason or observation is simply a non-entity. In other words, there is no room for spiritual or metaphysical explanations that cannot be observed, and any Truths that cannot be arrived at by a deductive argument are simply unknowable. Famous science educator Carl Sagan, an atheist, summarizes this view of the Universe by saying, “The Cosmos is all that is or was or ever will be. Our feeblest contemplations of the Cosmos stir us – there is a tingling in the spine, a catch in the voice, a faint sensation, as if a distant memory, of falling from a height. We know we are approaching the greatest of mysteries.” Sagan’s viewpoint is that the physical Universe is the same thing as the Cosmos; it is all that there is, and there is nothing else outside of it to govern it or intervene in its inner workings. The ideas of “meaning” and “significance” have no place in this, as they are not things which can be directly measured or reasoned to.
On the day of the feast of St. Bartholomew in the year 1572, thousands Huguenots were slaughtered in the streets of Paris by mobs of Roman Catholics under the decree of the French monarchy.
The Huguenots were a Protestant theological minority in France. They were importers of Calvin’s theology, and their numbers had grown steadily from an underground movement smattered across southern France to a much larger and more public presence. It is estimated that the Huguenots made up around 10% of the French population on the eve of the St. Bartholomew’s Day massacre. Their growing influence incited Catholic hostility, and a number of intermittent conflicts arose between the Huguenots and the Catholics in France during the 16th century known as the French Wars of Religion. During a time of peace prior to the massacre, a prominent Huguenot leader named Admiral Gaspard de Coligny had begun to sway King Charles IX towards the side of the Protestant faith. This brought consternation among the Guises, a royal family of ardent Catholics who were old rivals with Coligny. The Guises tried to solve this problem by attempting an assassination against Coligny, which left him severely wounded but still very much alive. The Huguenots were understandably furious that an attempt at Coligny’s life had been taken during a time of peace, and their outrage caused Queen Catherine De’ Medici and the rest of the royal court to be thrown into a panic, fearing that the Protestants would make a counterattack on the royal family. The Guise were dispatched by the royals to finish Coligny off, but a miscommunication led the town guard to believe that Guises meant them to kill of every Protestant in the city, and not just Coligny. The ensuing massacre on St. Bartholomew’s Day marked a turning point in the conflict between French Protestants and Catholics, as it is estimated that anywhere between 5,000 to 30,000 Huguenots died in the carnage. Similar massacres happened as word spread to neighboring towns and cities, resulting in the martyrdom of countless more Huguenots.