I have this serious love/hate relationship with social media. I love staying in contact with family and friends scattered all over the world. But social media can be a horrific waste of my time, and I don't think of myself as retired or ready to die. As the poet Robert Frost famously wrote, "But I have promises to keep, and miles to go before I sleep." I am self-employed as a writer. If I don't sell a book or a short story, I don't earn any income. If I waste hours upon hours each day engaged in asinine, juvenile arguments with presumably adult men and women about religion, politics, or Georgia Bulldog football, I'm wasting hours of precious time that should be dedicated to my work. Earlier this year I threatened to quit Facebook entirely, having purged my Twitter account, with the idea that I would focus all of my attention on professional work, instead of writing for fun or worse, arguing with somebody who has assumed they know more about a subject than I do. However, publishers in this digital era of mass communications expect writers to develop and maintain a social media presence. To my eternal surprise, my wife also opposed a permanent self-imposed ban from Facebook, even though I did manage to delete my membership from all the large forums where most of the arguments seemed to take place. This left me in a bit of a quandary. Could I remain on social media, without getting sucked into a black hole of absurd arguments? The challenge may not be insurmountable, but it has certainly proved to be formidable. Today has been a prime example of why I "hate" … [Read more...]
Liberal limbo
How low can you go? According to Roman Catholic theology, limbo is a place where the souls of people who haven’t been baptized into the Christian faith must go when they die. Since we are going to be talking about human beings and I know I'm not supposed to judge other people, this article won't be speculating about whether or not liberal extremists will end up in heaven, hell, or limbo. I don't think limbo is the same thing as purgatory, but I'm not a Catholic, and therefore not an expert on the faith by any means. Perhaps more relevant, there is also a dance contest that originated in Trinidad called the limbo. Participants bend over backwards and compete to see who can go the lowest under a horizontal bar that continues to be dropped slightly with each successful pass. That definition of the word seems to be more apropos for this article, so we'll stick with the conceptual image of political dancing under a bar constantly getting closer to the ground. Liberal extremists hate everyone who isn't a liberal extremists, which includes conservatives, religious people, the police, and most other authority figures. Liberal extremists include most Greens, radical environmentalists, Antifa, BAMN, Black Lives Matter, the "Squad" in Congress, an overwhelming majority of the lamestream media, and a disturbing number of RINOs. In my entire lifetime, I’ve never seen the degree of hatred and disrespect shown toward a U.S. president that could compare to what has been said by television and print “journalists” about President Donald Trump. Nine out of every ten stories … [Read more...]
Why I hate the NCAA
It can't be personal, because I don't personally know anybody who works for the NCAA, but I hate the organization as a whole because it reminds me so much of our federal government: it is a bloated bureaucracy that seems to exist only for making bizarre, arbitrary, and confusing decisions with enormous power over student-athletes, and zero accountability for those decisions. Don't believe me? Go to the NCAA website and try to figure out how to ask a person responsible for athlete eligibility a question. There aren't even any email addresses or phone numbers listed for their media resource contacts! What chance do you think a serious "blogger" might have getting his questions answered through the same NCAA media inquiry form used by an ESPN reporter? I'm guessing zero, but I went through the motions. For that reason, it was written on Monday but will be saved for publication until Tuesday, to give the NCAA an opportunity to respond. Though I don't expect the NCAA to even tell me the time of day, I'm going to follow the same protocol as any serious journalist and give the source an opportunity to respond before I rip them to shreds. The deadline came and went without my question answered: "Why was Luke Ford's appeal denied?" Oh, how do I hate the NCAA? Let me count the ways, using a baseball analogy to talk about football: Strike 1: Kolton Houston is forced by the NCAA to undergo elective surgery to remedy a doctor's mistake in order to become eligible to play for the University of Georgia. Houston received an injection by a doctor of a banned substance to … [Read more...]
The reality of miracles
Landen Hoffman About a month or so ago, my life dramatically improved after I basically stopped arguing with people on social media. First I announced that I was leaving Facebook entirely, only to have my wife talk me out of it, by surprise. But I did hold true to my promise to remove myself from all the "debate" forums where I wasted WAY too much of my life in ultimately fruitless conversations with people uninterested in reason and evidence when it might have an adverse effect on their current thinking. In fact, one of the most ridiculous arguments that I have had to deal with during my time spent as a Christian pugilist (never been very apologetic about my own thoughts and opinions) on the internet has been the claim by a few of the more outspoken atheists that miracles do not ever occur because God does not exist. It is ridiculous to argue about miracles because (a.) the definition of one is nebulous and (b.) people who don't believe in miracles can easily reject them as failing to meet their nonexistent criteria for one. To an atheist, a miracle probably requires them to see a physical manifestation of divine intervention, and even then they might dismiss their witness of a miracle as a hallucination their mind imagined because most atheists don't want to believe in God. Why would I say that? It sounds kind of harsh and judgmental, I suppose, but I said it because it is true. Atheists have made up their mind, and just like everybody else, they don't want to be wrong. This explains why there are so many atheists wasting their lives on social media arguing with … [Read more...]
The conceit of belief
A recent article I wrote titled "Anecdotes versus evidence" tried to explain the difference between an interesting story with an extraordinary claim and real evidence of a phenomena obtained via the scientific method. Quite predictably, there was a critic lurking on social media who wanted to challenge the crux of the article without bothering to evaluate the content. In the article I had listed three specific examples of extraordinary claims that apparently could be evaluated using credible scientific evidence proving beyond reasonable doubt that strict materialism was false, and that the metaphysical mind can learn new information even when temporarily separated from the physical brain. The idea behind writing the article was to provide the information and people who disagreed with me could fairly evaluate the same evidence and argue my interpretation of what the evidence meant. This critic merely assumed the evidence to which I referred was no better than any other alleged evidence he'd ever seen, and refused to look at the evidence I had offered. Instead, he wanted to challenge my methodology so he could downgrade the evidence back to only anecdote. My answer was quick and easy: I had actually looked at the evidence. I didn't just make an assumption. The direction of his line of inquiry soon became clear: my critic wanted me to acknowledge that I was simply taking the word of witnesses as gospel truth without questioning their veracity. That will only work if we apply the same standard in every situation. How do we know anything is true? The reality is … [Read more...]
