Category Archives: Philosophy

Building the Engine

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I was talking to my friend Brian the other night when he suggested I keep a dev log on my latest in-progress game. I explained that I had planned to, but that my line of thinking always seems to go something like this: “Hmm…I have somehow discovered a few free hours in the day in which I can do something with. Let’s see, I can either work on my game and actually make progress, or I can spend the rest of the day writing about working on my game and make no progress. Yeah, I’ll just work on the game.” Plus GoDaddy seems to have issues hosting WordPress for some reason, and it will occasionally crash when I attempt to save an article. This usually results in the deletion of whatever I had written since I last saved, as just happened. Why does technology still have such blatant shortcomings? I mean, WordPress should have been able to do something halfway intelligent, you know, like attempt to save but present an error message if the request failed or timed out. At least I wouldn’t have lost my work. Is it too much to ask for good, solid software?

Anyway, my friend pointed out that taking the time to write about my development experiences is a more balance approach over programming all day. Plus it helps me to step back and analyze what I have been doing, which is very valuable in the long term of things. That said, let’s jump in (and rewrite a few paragraphs.)

 

The Title

PuzzleCode is the name of the game. The very basic, generalized, may not be fun yet, inkling of an idea in my head goes something like this: “There is a puzzle. Create a program to solve the puzzle. Rinse, Wash, and Repeat. ”

The overarching goal of the game is to teach the player the core concepts of computer programming, hopefully spurring enough interest to get the player to learn a ‘real’ programming language on their own. It makes sense to relate the concepts over just teaching one language because programming is a transferable concept. If you teach someone how to use a for loop, that person can, in a fairly short time, program a for loop in Python, Java, C# , C++, JavaScript, etc.

 

Where Are We?

In terms of the actual game I’m not really…anywhere. I’ve been working on the core game engine that will run PuzzleCode and future games I (and possibly others) develop. Now, a lot of semi-experienced to experienced devs out there upon reading this will think, “Dude, if you want to make a game drop the whole Game Engine BS and use something like Unity or ‘whathaveyou’ framework.” Now, I’m not no novice. Yes, its true that using the Mono Framework or GameMaker or XNA or Torque or any of the other engines or frameworks out there would allow me to build my game much much faster. But you see, I’m one of those types of people who derives enjoyment out of engineering. I like game development too, but I get very bored and apathetic if it is all game dev and no logic crunking engine building. The same goes in the opposite direction. All engine building and no game dev makes Johnny a dull boy.

I discovered this relationship that my mind demands when creating Project NERD for the Cyber Center using the Unity Game Engine, and I discovered it again when designing another game using Unity for a client on oDesk. I simply hate using game engines. I eventually hated it so much that I had to quit the oDesk job and move on to something else. The game engines that are available today don’t work the way I think they should work. They are inefficient to use. They are buggy. The interfaces are clumsy. They are not built with multi-threaded CPU architectures in mind. And they are, generally, overpriced. I build my own because I have more fun building then dealing with a slew of shortcomings offered by third-party game engines.

There is also something very…I dunno sublime about building a complex system. It becomes a direct extension of the creator’s mind. It encapsulates the way the builder views the world. The logic has a certain feel about it. This is true of pretty much any game engine. The games built atop Valve’s Source Engine have a very particular feel to them. Half Life 2, Zeno Clash, and Left for Dead all have different art styles, and were developed by different teams, yet they all feel as if they belong to the same family. I can describe the Source Engine as feeling ethereal, while the Unreal Engine (ironically) feels very base and gritty. I’ve heard consciousness defined as the ‘the feeling of processing information.’ I like this concept. When I read, I can feel it go through my head. When engineering I can feel the logic flowing from some hidden stream at the core of my mind. Game Engines then, are, in some way, the embodiment of the consciousness of the person or persons who built it. The logic feels as it feels for the creator to have thought of the logic.

 

PixelBurst

PixelBurst has a very long, unofficial history. I have essentially been working on variations of this 2D Game Engine since I started fiddling with XNA in 2008. Every game developed with it would bring about extensions, modifications, or, in some cases, complete revamps. I first developed PixelBurst in tandem with a puzzle game I was working on in 2008 called MindBog. I worked on MindBog and PixelBurst for months, before finally coming to the conclusion that MindBog’s concept simply wasn’t going to work. Frustrated and apprehensive with my shortcomings, I challenged myself to make a game in a single week using PixelBurst. This game turned out to be QuadTrix.

QuadTrix revealed how hideous the whole thing was. PixelBurst was messy and slow and difficult to use. I would have been better off simply writing raw code to do what I wanted. But I was also a newcomer to the whole game programming thing, and as any game programmer will admit, starting down the path of becoming a game programmer is daunting. You have to learn so many different skills at once that it is impossible not to become overwhelmed. It feels as if every piece of knowledge is a prerequisite to something else. All you want to do is draw an image on the screen, but before you do that you must understand how the entire universe works on a sub-quantum level….that’s how it feels anyway. So yeah, major kinks were to be expected.

But it wasn’t all bad. I just opened up the ancient Visual Studio 2008 solution to take a gander at QuadTrix and the version of PixelBurst it runs on, and it’s amusing how many ideas have survived the cuts over the years. Really, even the C++ version of PixelBurst I am working on now follows a nearly identical vein of logic at the core. So even the old version had some good ideas in it, it was just covered over by noob cruft.

After QuadTrix I knew some major redesigns were necessary. I kept a bunch of the code, but I also redid a huge portion of the core. I call this version PixelBurst 2.0. I started building Nut Harvest 360 using this engine, but, as I stated in past biographies, the lack of a proper visual editor and monetary burdens put this game on indefinite hold. So I built Didgery instead.

It is somewhat interesting to me that my best game (imo) was built on an engine one generation away from a bunch of beginner mistakes. I was able to build Didgery fairly reasonably, but there were still a number of issues I had to deal with that slowed me down a good bit. Things were also too rigid ( a problem I discovered when building MindBog. ) I would like to go into detail of why this was, but I’m afraid it would take much more time than I currently have available.

Things were slow for a while after Didgery. I was going to school at Shawnee so I didn’t really have any time to do anything. But then, on some spring or winter break, I decided to put a lot of ideas in my head into action. PixelBurst 3 was built, and, for the first time, it solved the long standing rigidity issues by using an Entity-Component system. The problem was that it was less of an Entity-Component system and more of a Component-Component system. The thing was so flexible that it was laughably unusable. I’ve heard stories of athletes who stretch so much that their joints will pop out of place if they are not careful. It felt somewhat like that. It was also incredibly slow, and, due to the flexibility, complicated to use. Greg and I started the yet unfinished Platforming Block 360 on this engine.

I then worked, for real money, for two real years. Though I didn’t do anything with PixelBurst during that time, the development experience I gained during these years shaped my views for the latest and greatest PixelBurst.

So now…here we are. I have been working on the forth incantation of PixelBurst for about a month now. Unlike the previous versions of PixelBurst that run on C#, PixelBurst 4 is written in C++, so none of the code from the old versions are reusable. It’s kind of nice to get a clean slate of things and write it the way it should have been written years ago. The interesting thing about PixelBurst 4 is that it is engineered it in such a way that the engine itself is generic. What I mean by this is that one could develop a 3D game just as easily as a 2D or a 2.5D game using the same engine. There is no other engine out there, that I am aware of, that touts this sort of behavior. It is also trivial to switch the rendering APIs. Right now it is using DirectX 11 to render the sprites, but I could switch it to OpenGL 4.3 or DirectX 9 within a day, and I can do this because the inherent ‘decoupled’ nature built into the engine. The design of PixelBurst has enormous potential, and I look forward to seeing where it leads.

Anyway, that’s pretty much where I am. I’ll try and write my progress at least once per month. Hopefully the next time I write I’ll have some sparkly images to display. Wish me luck :)

To View the Bible in a Different Light

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It occurred to me after writing a letter to a friend that perhaps the Bible is meant to be taken on a very allegorical level. When we study God of the Old Testament we realize a creature that is very cold and raw, and indeed, one that, in my studies, contains characteristics much nearer to Satan rather than one would hope to see in God. We see a very cold entity, one with insatiable blood-lust and little regard for those he created. We also see a vast and powerful entity, one that brought all into existence and set in motion the fundamental Law of Nature that has us all bound.

But then we look at Jesus of the New Testament, who is very much different than the God detailed in the Old, so different, that I find it impossible to call them the same entity, unless God has some sort of bipolar/personality disorder. Indeed, he embodies the characteristics and essence of Christian. He exhibits love, mercy, humbleness, and many other positive traits that, if we were to all express them, would make the world a much healthier and tolerable place. But he is, and this he admits, here to fulfill the Old Testament. Now it is here that I have stumbled for quite some time. While I admire the idea of Jesus and feeling that he is, in many ways, more than human and here to save us in some way and show us the true path, I cannot associate him with the Old Testament, as it goes against everything that he is.

But let us look at things in a different light, a light that occurred to me after lying in bed all night churning over thoughts spurred by intimate conversations with a friend. This way of thinking will likely be opposed by traditional Christians, but, for whatever reason, I find this concept very easy to swallow, and, in some way, comforting. What if the God of the OT is less an entity and more of an encompassing concept, just as, perhaps, Jesus is less of an entity and more of an encompassing concept? What if God is sex, birth, evolution, death, the big bang, the physical? What if He is all the Old Ways that required us to murder and struggle to survive?  And what if Christ, being born from this and thus based on it, as all life has been based on it for millennia, saw a better way? He saw a way of peace and love, instead of the hate and agony that nature, by its steady but irresistible ebb, had formed the Earth and shaped her inhabitants. He saw a way much higher than The Law that bounds us all. He saw that a second birth was required, a birth from the raw, cold Law of nature into something much higher, something divine. What if God is the underlying framework and Jesus is the improved process?

Jesus puts to death the old way. It’s time for us to move on, to embrace the spiritual, to leave the dehumanizing concept of money and debt back in the old ages from which they belong, to develop a new system by which the ideals of the human spirit can better be expressed. It is time for a society in which the Earth and her creatures are viewed not as resources, but a society in which life is respected and seen as neighbors and good friends on our collective journey. Let us fix our sights on such a goal, for if we express the New and suppress the Old, then it will, as evolution, come about naturally.

DreamForever – A Biography Part 2

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It was a decade ago this day.

I find it utterly paradoxical how one can be so far removed from a point in time physically, yet the memories in ones mind always feel startlingly recent. It is as if the mind is a natural paradise free from the swift river of time.

Part 1 of the DreamForever Biography (which was somehow written over a year ago) describes my first ever experience with game development in the form of a simple game engine called RPG Toolkit. I loved that engine. It was fun. It was easy. It was stress relieving. I began using it exactly ten years ago this day.

The Log of My Life, a nearly 400 page day-by-day self-documentary  experiment that I began writing a little over a decade ago has only this to say:

Praise the Lord, my dad got home today. I got RPG Toolkit yesterday, thanks to Brian’s dad. Brian also came out. -11/17/02

My dad had been in the hospital with serious, very life-threatening, health issues. It was nice to have something to sink my mind into, to help me forget all the spiritual/financial/health/marital troubles my family was going through at the time. I recall rushing home from the school bus just so I could spend the remainder of the evening absorbed in game development. Game Development was a solace in my very tumultuous life.

Part 1 of the DreamForever Biography left off at NutHarvest 360. I think it is time for part 2.

Didgery

“Life is a series of weighty obligations.” – William D. Trooper

If there is one thing that is fairly certain about college, it is debt; lots of it. You may not graduate much smarter or with a useful portfolio, but you will likely leave with mountains and mountains of debt.

True fact: debt creates an enormous amount of stress. I know this from a very first-hand perspective.

I needed money, and I needed it badly. I had dropped out of college twice already: once from Devry in Columbus and again from Devry Online. The grace periods on my loans were quickly running out. My parents themselves were encumbered with debt, and I would have been damned to add twenty some thousand more on their shoulders. QuadTrix was developed simply for practice, and I didn’t have the time to build proper tools to finish Nut Harvest 360. I needed to build something that didn’t require development of a complicated toolset. I needed quick money.

In a cool panic I sat on my hardwood floor with a pencil, an ancient notebook, and an equally ancient deck of cards. Didgery, or as I named it at the time, “Card Game”, was born.

The Beginning of Didgery

 

Didgery’s Unique and Perhaps Questionable Game Mechanic at Top Margin. “Idea: The longer you play, the tighter the rules become.” This would later evolve into the progressive struggle for elemental balance.

 

I wrote a lot of ideas that night and in the days following it. This old high school era notebook, which is sitting before me now, must have at least thirty pages of detailed notes. I was serious about making this work. I had to make it work.

One of the Earliest Builds of Didgery

I always develop the menu interface before I start work on a game. It helps me discover the game’s style.

Even though I had the game mechanics fairly well-grounded, I was quarreling with myself over Didgery’s visual style. Didgery actually had nothing to do with harmony or elements whatsoever until very very late in the development cycle. In fact, I was preparing to release Didgery without this harmony element at all. So…what was Didgery about?

A Month Or Two Of Development

 

Exactly One Month Later

 

Didgery, in the state presented here, was centered around the concept of Debt/Credit. Each card held a monetary value. The bigger the chain, the more money you earned. Due to interest (presumably from some debt you owed), however, you were always losing money, forcing the player to constantly create chains to avoid bankruptcy. This interest rate grew as the game progressed, which caused the game to become increasingly fast-paced and difficult. Didgery always ends with the player losing. It was meant, and still is meant, to be a deeply pessimistic game; a reflection of my emotions at that time.

The Main Menu During the “Dizzy Style” Era

The style seemed to be at odds with itself. On one end there was a disembodied hand on the menu screen with deep choir vocals, while on the other hand there was a floating money-bag that you tossed cards into to escape the ever encroaching interest rates. None of it made sense. I knew there was a problem, and I knew there was an underlying theme trying to rise to perfection, but I just couldn’t think of the ‘word’ of the theme. It felt like my mind was actively trying to hide the ‘name’ of this theme when I tried to search it out.

And I was going to release it this way. At this point in my life I was receiving notices that the grace period on my loans were ending ‘for realz.’ Add to this the fact that I had a collection agency breathing down my neck because I paid my last semester of Devry Online using a Credit Card (due to my inability to receive enough funding in the form of loans), and you might be able to understand how dreadful everything felt. It was like my spirit was knotted up and dying.

And then it happened. One of the reviewers over at the XNA Forums mentioned that Didgery felt very Zen like. Suddenly, it clicked, and I saw Didgery for what it could be. I couldn’t bring myself to release Didgery in its currently confused infancy, not now. In only a couple of weeks I removed the money bag and replaced it with something that made much more sense.

The Elements of Harmony

Didgery shifted its concept from debit/credit to balance. Interest rates were replaced with a villain, a mysterious dark presence that gradually consumed the elemental energies. The goal was now to feed the elements with energy from the cards and keep the world from descending into hell for as long as possible. There is still no win state. No matter how long you stave off the evil, it will eventually overcome your efforts. This is one of the most questionable parts of the game, and it is my favorite.

Thanks to the playtesters on the XNA forum, I was able to really pull the style of Didgery together in about a months time, and I think it really paid off. Unfortunately, it didn’t pay off my loans… You see, these changes and additional polish were pushing the release date back further and further.

The quickie project that I decided to work on to make some “seriously necessary cash” was quickly turning into a many-month serious project. I got my first loan bill in the mail, and I had no money. I had to do something. A friend of mine (Mr. Frazier) informed me that a college nearby (Shawnee State University) offered game programming classes. Why had I never heard of this? I considered the possibility and the alternatives. I could either attempt to get a well-paying job with no portfolio within a couple weeks, or I could literally buy myself more time by going deeper into debt. The latter option was the only one that seemed feasible, but attending college again presented a real threat to Didgery: how could I finish the game if all my time was spent in school?

I think that is a pretty good place for me to stop at for tonight. Keep an eye out for Part 3!

 

A Case Against a Loving God

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As I sit on my patio this evening and watch the lowing sun stream through the trees and paint the yard a yellow-green, it is difficult for me to feel any great animosity towards the powers that be. It is within this singular moment that everything feels at peace with itself. The leaves rustle to the gentle cadence of the breeze, and the wild birds, distant and near, play their continuous song in unbroken bliss. There is not a one thing out-of-place in the natural order in this singular moment, indeed, the illusion is so great that it is easy to believe that God built everything from the foundation of love.

There has been a gradual realization within my inner self as of late, one that it so simple and sublime I scarcely understand why the idea had not before entered my mind. I used to believe that the Holy Bible, the incorruptible word of God, if you will, was the means by which we could, in some small way, understand God. I realize now, that it is not truly possible, or perhaps even recommendable, to understand God from a corruptible book built from human hands. For indeed, any Holy Book can be misconstrued to meet the agenda of people, civilizations, and organizations. The best way to understand God is to move past religion and look upon the creation itself. It is then that we can scrutinize the intent of the true God, instead of whatever God we were taught to believe in via religion.

What do we see when we look upon the creation? Do we see pure love, or do we see life fought with struggle and agony? Do we see pure fairness and equality, or do we see deception and death? In the natural order, does one life live without taking the life of another? In the natural order, does one life live without struggle, or is struggle what allows one to live? It’s interesting, because I see minute traces of the good in the natural order, but it is saturated with the negative. If a loving God (whoever that might ultimately be) did create the universe, then why did he not saturate the order with the good, and have but traces of the evil? Indeed, all life seems to be constructed to cause agony to some other life form.

I am left with the logical conclusion that God is, at best, overwhelmingly indifferent. What is your conclusion?

The Discrete Identity of Sin and the Universal Law of Good and Evil

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It is truly disquieting what beliefs one naturally inherits and accepts from a group assembly. Equally troubling is with what ease our minds can be molded from birth by religious doctrine to seek not out God, but rather, vicariously accept external belief on what the nature of this grand being is. Many churches, it seems, are more of a place where one goes to hear a cliché message of what God is like (usually these messages involve love, care, kindness, forgiveness, etc.), rather than a place one goes to truly seek out the nature of God. Hardly does there exist an assembly that truly presses its congregation not to accept what they have been taught, but to read the Bible free from the heavy chains of religion and discover the nature of God for themselves. When one does this, it becomes apparent that there is a gaping hole between the actual God of the Bible, and the God that many profess to know.

Several months ago I began a Biblical journey with the express intent of realizing, if even but in the smallest of degrees, the truest nature and personality of God.  As I was reading and rereading the first chapters of Genesis in late December and early January, I was struck with a profound concept regarding sin and the knowledge of good and evil (at least in the way I traditionally see the concept viewed.) For most of my life I assumed that sin and evil were identical concepts. Indeed, Christians often speak of sin as representing a grave misdeed, that is, evil.  I was pondering over verses seven through eleven of Genesis chapter three, however, when I suddenly realized this not to be the case.

“And the eyes of them both were opened, and they knew that they were naked; and they sewed fig leaves together, and made themselves aprons. And they heard the voice of the LORD God walking in the garden in the cool of the day: and Adam and his wife hid themselves from the presence of the LORD God amongst the trees of the garden. And the LORD God called unto Adam, and said unto him, Where art thou? And he said, I heard thy voice in the garden, and I was afraid, because I was naked; and I hid myself. And he said, Who told thee that thou wast naked? Hast thou eaten of the tree, whereof I commanded thee that thou shouldest not eat?” [Genesis 3:7-11]

Note that Adam and Eve were in a perpetual state of evil (that of being naked) since the beginning of their existence, but God cared not of this matter. God cared only that they held his singular commandment (to eat not of the tree of knowledge of good and evil) in perfect order.  This fact, then, heavily suggests that sin, and knowledge of good and evil, are disparate concepts. Furthermore, God seems to show some anxiety after learning of the ascended state of his creation:

“And the Lord God said, Behold, the man is become as one of us, to know good and evil: and now, lest he put forth his hand, and take also of the tree of life, and eat, and live for ever: Therefore the LORD God sent him from the garden of Eden, to till the ground from whence he was taken. So he drove out the man; and he placed at the east of the garden of Eden Cherubims, and a flaming sword which turned every way, to keep the way of the tree of life.” [Genesis 3 : 22 – 24]

The fundamental drive behind God’s anxiety may share a common root to a great fear that plagues humanity: the fear, or perhaps resentment, of judgment.  For, if we assume at the moment that the concept of good/evil and sin are disparate to one another, would not the ability to discern good, and the ability to recognize evil, then allow man to place under scrutiny God’s actions? And would not the ability to recognize good from evil allow man to compare God’s commandments against these universal laws? Or perhaps God is troubled that man is now two thirds a true god. Man is at this moment immortal and knowledgeable of the Law of Good and Evil. The only grand ability lacking between humanity and God at this point in time is great power, and that is something that, given enough time, might have been obtainable. It was necessary for God to impose mortality upon his creation to keep the scales balanced, or rather, to prevent them from tipping too much in our favor.

If man now has the ability to judge good from evil themselves, then what is sin? It is obvious that sin isn’t some sort of barrier to keep man from doing evil, as God would have commanded Adam and Eve to be clothed. We can deduce from Genesis 3:11 that to sin is to break a commandment of God, or to go against his will. It is possible, when seen from this viewpoint, to do good, but still commit sin. And it is possible, from this viewpoint, to follow God’s commandments, but still commit acts of evil.

This then, brings us to a moral dilemma. If God commanded us to perform an act of great evil, what would one do? To not follow God’s evil request would cause us to disobey (or sin against) God, and therefore invoke his wrath, but to follow his command would perhaps break an even greater law, one that the all-mighty himself may be subject to: The Law of Good and Evil. The ‘traditional’ and ‘religious-taught’ Christian likely will say at this moment that God is incapable of sin, and thus would never ask a person to commit an evil act. I must remind the one thinking this that they are but confusing two different concepts. It is indeed logically impossible for God to sin, for how can God go against his own will? It is very much possible, however, for God to commit evil acts, and the Holy Word is filled with instances of him doing so. One of the more fascinating, and troubling, cases is in Numbers 14.

The story in Numbers 14 takes place several years after God had wrenched the Israelis free from Egypt’s iron grip. They had all left their slavery (and everything they had ever known) on God’s express promise that he would bring them into a much better place, a place ‘flowing with milk and honey’ [Exodus 3:8].  God had already shown himself to be a very demanding and demeaning entity during this journey by murdering, on several accounts, thousands of Israelis. There were even times when God appeared to play games of life and death with Israel, granting them food that they deeply desired, and then killing them while they ate.

“And there went forth a wind from the LORD, and brought quails from the sea, and let them fall by the camp, as it were a day’s journey on this side, and as it were a day’s journey on the other side, round about the camp, and as it were two cubits high upon the face of the earth. And the people stood up all that day, and all that night, and all the next day, and they gathered the quails: he that gathered least gathered ten homers: and they spread them all abroad for themselves round about the camp. And while the flesh was yet between their teeth, ere it was chewed, the wrath of the LORD was kindled against the people, and the LORD smote the people with a very great plague.” [Numbers 11:31-33]

I can in some ways empathize with God’s anger towards Israel. The Israelis had proven to be a distrustful group who were not at all shy to vent their frustrations and worries, and they did so on numerous occasion leading up to this moment. The incessant whining of a people you were trying to help would undoubtly become irksome, but I can’t help but think that God is, in part, to blame for their discomfort in the first place. There were numerous times (see Exodus 15:23, Exodus 16:1, Exodus 17:1) in which God led them into bleak scenarios and failed to provide basic needs for the multitude until they were angrily complaining about their lack of welfare.  Had he met their needs, or communicated before the journey what sort of hardships they were to face, then the whining would have likely been much less prevalent. Now that we understand the state of Israel (that of being hungry, thirsty, and terrified of a seemingly unjust entity with great power) let us move on to Numbers 14.

This chapter takes place right after God had commanded Moses to send scouts into Canaan. After searching the land for forty days they returned with grim news:

“And they told him, and said, We came to the land where you sent us, and surely it flows with milk and honey; and this is the fruit of it. Nevertheless the people be strong that dwell in the land, and the cities are walled, and very great… And Caleb stilled the people before Moses, and said, Let us go up at once, and possess it; for we are well able to overcome it. But the men that went up with him said, We be not able to go up against the people; for they are stronger than we… The land, through which we have gone to search it, is a land that eats up the inhabitants thereof; and all the people that we saw in it are men of a great stature. And there we saw the giants, the sons of Anak, which come of the giants: and we were in our own sight as grasshoppers, and so we were in their sight.” [Numbers 13:27 – 33]

At this news Israel beings grumbling, going as far as to wish that they would have died in the wilderness or in Egypt than to be consumed by the giants living in the land:

“And all the congregation lifted up their voice, and cried; and the people wept that night. And all the children of Israel murmured against Moses and against Aaron: and the whole congregation said to them, Would God that we had died in the land of Egypt! or would God we had died in this wilderness! And why has the LORD brought us to this land, to fall by the sword, that our wives and our children should be a prey? were it not better for us to return into Egypt?” [Numbers 14:1 - 3]

Israel’s complaining irritated God with such degree that he was on the verge of murdering the entire congregation. It actually took a human figure, Moses, to keep God’s morality in line. But even after God granted Israel a pardon his rage wasn’t fully quenched, and he spoke a troubling message to Moses:

“Say to them, As truly as I live, said the LORD, as you have spoken in my ears, so will I do to you: Your carcasses shall fall in this wilderness; and all that were numbered of you, according to your whole number, from twenty years old and upward which have murmured against me. Doubtless you shall not come into the land, concerning which I swore to make you dwell therein, save Caleb the son of Jephunneh, and Joshua the son of Nun. But your little ones, which you said should be a prey, them will I bring in, and they shall know the land which you have despised. But as for you, your carcasses, they shall fall in this wilderness. And your children shall wander in the wilderness forty years, and bear your prostitutions, until your carcasses be wasted in the wilderness. After the number of the days in which you searched the land, even forty days, each day for a year, shall you bear your iniquities, even forty years, and you shall know my breach of promise.” [Numbers 14: 28 – 34]

Read the last sentence again:  “After the number of the days in which you searched the land, even forty days, each day for a year, shall you bear your iniquities, even forty years,  and ye shall know my breach of promise.” God broke the promise he made with Israel in Exodus 3:8. He had promised the entire assembly that he would bring them into a land flowing with milk and honey if they would follow him. But what happens when they get there? That’s right, God nullifies the promise he made. This knowledge profoundly alters my view of God, for I have been taught since my upbringing that God cannot lie or break his promises. The Old Testament, much to my dismay, stoically disagrees with this viewpoint. I must make clear, though, that God was actually answering the cry of Israel, for did not they wish to have died in the wilderness (Numbers 14 : 2)?

That was a rather lengthy delve, but it was necessary to make clear God’s capability for committing acts of evil, and our ability to judge those acts. Keep in mind that there are many more instances in the Bible that support these points, but it would take far too long to mention every one (or even just a few!) It’s interesting really…the more I read the Holy Bible for myself the more I discover that the nature of God is much less ‘godlike’ than what people generally profess (and what I used to believe may I add.)  The Bible is indeed an interesting book…

I’m always up for some philosophical debate, so hit me up in the comments section below if you are in the mood.

The Riddle of Life

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The contingencies present in the post-modern era constitute a means by which a man must constrain himself to unrealistic achievement.

 

The disdain of life is often what brings to arousal the action to sustain the cause of the disdain.

 

Thought is but a metamorphosis of the actions behind the divine; to discover the underlying well is to break free from the chains.

 

The bondage of the slave is a facet engraved into the systematic procedures commandeering the layman ways, for these surface into an imaginary cause by which we redeem ourselves, and bring into condemnation those admonishments of the wise.

 

The whole are mightier than the one; the whole is feeble; the whole is broken; the whole is petty; the whole is lossless. Only in the one can we find the whole. For in the one the whole is, and the whole of the whole wishes to be this. We are but blind-sighted.

 

Nature reveals her crevasses not in the vise of the visible, but in the shadowy wistfulness that embeds into this Earth its own meaning. To seek, we must stop seeking. To know, we must stop striving. To gain, we must give up what we have gained. To be one, we must lay low our ambitions.

The Coupling between Information and Destruction

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An interesting idea arose into my thoughts this morning as I drove to church. I was thinking about ancient times, and how many valued artifacts and histories were lost and/or obfuscated due to wars. Often, it seems that raids of war always somehow pronounced fire on a sanctuary containing important artifacts of the time. My thoughts then transferred to the modern era, and I began wondering if the same thing were possible due to the global scale of the internet.  As I thought on this matter I realized that, indeed, the same prospect still stands, as it appears that weapons technology (the means of destroying information) and the means of propagating information grow at nearly the same scale. If information is local, then the ability to destroy it is also local. For example, in ancient times, information was traditionally local (there was often not many quantities of information because of the time it took to produce (copying a book by hand for instance)). Thus this valued information could be erased by the technology available at the time (siege or fire.) If the information is global, then the means of destroying it is also global. In the modern-day, information is easy to produce and share across the globe with the aid of computers, but there exists powerful nuclear weapons that could still disrupt large quantities of it. A global nuclear war would likely destroy the information globally, and force us back into a more localized scope of life. I suppose the theorem could be extrapolated to say that if information is universal, then the means of destroying it is also universal, but that thought is too troubling to think upon for very long.