Infinite Mass

Of late, I have become fixated on a curious yet dreary task, still in its infancy, of understanding the type of person who drives a car with a loud engine. I’m talking about the ones that rev and split the night like a steam-punk thunderbolt, interrupting both audible and internal conversations with indiscriminate malice. 

As someone who navigates the spoken word like an uphill ice slope, struggling with gasping efforts at articulation should I find the grace of your undivided attention, you can understand how I might feel about such interruptions.

You can understand me when I say: it would not strike me as unjust to round up these renegade road warriors and detain them for questioning. But I promise this sentiment is academic; I mean them no harm.

And you know that whenever someone says, “I promise,” you can bet grandma’s farm that they mean it.

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Elevator Pitch

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The classroom is large enough to hold about thirty students, one professor, and two chaperones, which works out swell because that about sums up our group. I’m attracted to the huge industrial-grade windows at the back of the room, more so for the rich Los Angeles cityscape beyond them. If you smash your face against the window and slide your eyes to the left as far as possible, as if to embody Jim Carrey on his best day, you can see almost half the city. Not saying I did this, but if you happen to meet anyone from the building across the street, maybe don’t mention that you know me.

Or do mention it. It’s not as if the suits in the building across the busy street know my name. Just my contorted, idiot face trying to see if the Uruks really are taking the hobbits to Isengard.

The room has a clean, indoor smell, though if it were my forty-story building, I would’ve stripped and replaced the carpet months ago. Correction: I would’ve sold the building and set up shop on an island in the South Pacific. But that’s neither here nor there—strike that, it’s all there and 5,501 miles from here, a classroom in a corporate-collegiate building in downtown LA.

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Biblical Christianity in Four Parts – Part II

Disembodiment: The Great Lie

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Note: if you haven’t yet, check out Part One of this series here.

Contents

  1. Intro
  2. The Assumptions
    1. Assumption 1 – Salvation
    2. Assumption 2 – Platonic Dualism
    3. Assumption 3 – Innate Immortality
  3. The Errors
  4. Death Defeated
  5. Models and Semantics
  6. Outro

Intro

“If you died today, do you know where you would go?”

If you have ever lasted until the end of a typical church service, I assume you have heard one of the elders ask this question, usually as one of the worship leaders plays the piano or guitar softly in the background. And before I expound on the question, I want to point out that this is not a bad way to end a Sunday morning service, at least in terms of cadence and structure.

Quite the contrary, it is an ideal denouement, a chance for those visiting and even the regular members to reflect on their standing with the God whose only passphrase for granting them salvation is that they merely believe. 

And the journey we start after believing, with its sudden turns and pitfalls, convinces me it is never wrong for us to pause and reflect on our standing with God. However, if such reflection leads us anywhere, it ought to lead us to inspect the question of “where we go when we die” within a biblical framework. As we reflect, we might discover that beneath the question’s surface lies a set of untested assumptions and at least two resulting fundamental errors.

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Biblical Christianity in Four Parts (Prologue & Part I)

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Prologue

What follows is a layman’s attempt at a theological argument, which I suppose makes it a shot in the dark. By taking this shot, I risk the assumption that no stray dart will cause harm. But I think my assumption is low-risk for the following reasons:

  1. I will only be read by a few people.
  2. These same people are confident in their faith but not so arrogant as to avoid a challenge.
  3. Metaphorical arrows fired into a metaphorical abyss don’t usually derail someone’s life-size relationship with their Creator. 

As for the writing itself, I share ideas I’ve wrestled with for many years. In the contest, I’ve come to such a point of mental and physical exhaustion that I feel the only way to find rest is to publish the work in its current, incomplete form and allow more educated people to obliterate it. The gnawing reminder that I am not a studied, credentialed theologian has kept me from my writing desk, and perhaps that is not terrible. Like any sober person, I am persuaded that shooting anything in the dark is unwise. 

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Mega Man Legends

According to One Fan…

Released December 18th, 1997, for the Sony PlayStation (and later ported to the Nintendo 64), Mega Man Legends is the blue bomber’s first foray into the world of 3D adventure gaming.

Although perhaps not as well-known as Ocarina of Time (1998), Capcom’s bold move to reincarnate their flagship 2D hero in a 3D open world created a game that has taken its place among some of the greatest, albeit underrated, adventure RPGs of the past three decades.

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