Paul Surrenders His Rights
Paul points out that workers of a field eat some of the crops, those who tend animals take some of the milk, etc. So why shouldn't those who tend the spiritual lives of people take some material things from them? This is the right of the clergy, and yet Paul does not partake because he thinks this will result in even more people converting.
This is a really interesting passage, the more I think about it, the more I think this is a fine message. The spiritual leaders among you are working to provide you a service. You think the service is valuable, why not give them some material items so they can get by. The reason I think this is ok, is that the message seems to be talking about making a living, not getting rich. There are 2 problems I can think of here. One is if someone uses the message to get rich (mega-churches for example), the other is when poor people are manipulated to give more money to their church than they can really afford, like the prosperity gospel. However, both of these objections would have to be a distortion of this verse, or perhaps just drawing on other sources.
The other part of this message is that he has a claim to their money but he isn't taking it. He is basically saying that saving their soul is better than taking their money, and if he can refuse some of what is coming to him to save a few more souls it is worth it. This is a good message. Of course I don't believe in the soul or anything myself, but the basic message here it to help each other out, and that I like.
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After I wrote this post, it occurred to me that this is a letter that Paul wrote to the Corinthians. He's not there preaching, he's at a far away place. It seems to me that the modern equivalent is the guys at the Vatican telling us that they deserve some money from the churches all over the world. This I'm not much of a fan of.
For the Corinthians Overview Post:
9:12 It is better to save a soul than make some money
Tuesday, August 7, 2012
Monday, August 6, 2012
1 Corinthians 8
Food Offered to Idols
My first read of this made no sense, I had no idea what it was talking about. I googled around a bit and found this page which explained that in pagan rituals they offer food to idols and some of the food gets eaten by the people attending the ritual.
If you eat food offered to the idols, it will not change anything, it won't make you better or worse because the Gods of those idols don't really exist and therefore have no real power. However, if someone who else sees you eating that food they might think that the other God's exist. This would cause an indirect harm and therefore you should not eat that food.
This seems pretty reasonable from their perspective. It won't really do anything because those Gods are fake so giving them attention is bad. From a marketing perspective it is really good, it's not exactly condemning the other religion, but it is keeping your people from standing in both camps.
My first read of this made no sense, I had no idea what it was talking about. I googled around a bit and found this page which explained that in pagan rituals they offer food to idols and some of the food gets eaten by the people attending the ritual.
If you eat food offered to the idols, it will not change anything, it won't make you better or worse because the Gods of those idols don't really exist and therefore have no real power. However, if someone who else sees you eating that food they might think that the other God's exist. This would cause an indirect harm and therefore you should not eat that food.
This seems pretty reasonable from their perspective. It won't really do anything because those Gods are fake so giving them attention is bad. From a marketing perspective it is really good, it's not exactly condemning the other religion, but it is keeping your people from standing in both camps.
Sunday, August 5, 2012
Know Your Biases
We all have biases. There are certain things that we think are true and other things that we think are false. It is natural to look for things that provide confirmation either way. If I see an article that agrees with a conclusion I have already drawn (say for example, that homeopathy is nonsense), it is easy to look at it and say "one more piece of evidence" without even reading the article. On the other hand, if I see someone that goes against my previous conclusion (say an article that claims vaccines cause autism) I might say "that person has no idea what they are talking about" potentially without even reading the article.
So we all have biases, it is not necessarily a bad thing, it is just a fact of life. But I think it is important for people to be very aware of their own biases. I am biased against religion...a lot. I hate religion actually, I wish it would go away. I think the world would be a better place without religion. I have a number of very well thought out, rational reasons for disliking religion. I also have a number of irrational reasons for hating religion, and I can't always tell the difference. It is important to be aware of my bias and try to take a step back every now and then and make sure I'm not just in some kind of a feedback loop.
The got onto this topic this week while thinking about my weekday bible posts. I was thinking about why I started doing them and why I do them now. One reason is simple, I find it interesting (boring at times, but interesting overall). Another reason is one that I have stated a few times, I hear theists talk about how much good stuff is in the bible and atheists talk about how much crap is in there, and I was curious how much of each is there. Here's where I started thinking about my bias, if I'm being honest with myself, I have to admit that I want to find more bad than good in the bible. I want to find things that are negative and I'm not particularly interested in finding things that are positive. It would serve my bias well if I discovered that the bible is garbage through and through, and therefore it is easy for me to highlight every negative thing that I come across and pass by any positive thing. This is of course, not reality, there is plenty of good stuff in there. The fact that I know my bias plays into how I perceive what I read, I have been trying to be more strict about what goes into the "bad" section and be more generous for what goes into the "good" section. I'd like to think I have succeeded in making it somewhat fair, but what I can say for certain is it is much better now than if I had just gone with my gut instinct every time.
In thinking about the overview posts, I was thinking that something that would be really awesome is if commenters could argue with me over what goes into the overview pages. It would be great if people could point out that I am skipping certain verses that should go on the good side and perhaps being too harsh on the bad side. Or if I have poorly summed things up here or there. This is unfortunately impossible given the way I have been doing it up to now. So I have decided to make a small change (and we will see if it sticks or not), at the end of each post, I will put what will go into the overview post. It seems like that could invite discussion, which is really the reason for the blog in the first place.
So we all have biases, it is not necessarily a bad thing, it is just a fact of life. But I think it is important for people to be very aware of their own biases. I am biased against religion...a lot. I hate religion actually, I wish it would go away. I think the world would be a better place without religion. I have a number of very well thought out, rational reasons for disliking religion. I also have a number of irrational reasons for hating religion, and I can't always tell the difference. It is important to be aware of my bias and try to take a step back every now and then and make sure I'm not just in some kind of a feedback loop.
The got onto this topic this week while thinking about my weekday bible posts. I was thinking about why I started doing them and why I do them now. One reason is simple, I find it interesting (boring at times, but interesting overall). Another reason is one that I have stated a few times, I hear theists talk about how much good stuff is in the bible and atheists talk about how much crap is in there, and I was curious how much of each is there. Here's where I started thinking about my bias, if I'm being honest with myself, I have to admit that I want to find more bad than good in the bible. I want to find things that are negative and I'm not particularly interested in finding things that are positive. It would serve my bias well if I discovered that the bible is garbage through and through, and therefore it is easy for me to highlight every negative thing that I come across and pass by any positive thing. This is of course, not reality, there is plenty of good stuff in there. The fact that I know my bias plays into how I perceive what I read, I have been trying to be more strict about what goes into the "bad" section and be more generous for what goes into the "good" section. I'd like to think I have succeeded in making it somewhat fair, but what I can say for certain is it is much better now than if I had just gone with my gut instinct every time.
In thinking about the overview posts, I was thinking that something that would be really awesome is if commenters could argue with me over what goes into the overview pages. It would be great if people could point out that I am skipping certain verses that should go on the good side and perhaps being too harsh on the bad side. Or if I have poorly summed things up here or there. This is unfortunately impossible given the way I have been doing it up to now. So I have decided to make a small change (and we will see if it sticks or not), at the end of each post, I will put what will go into the overview post. It seems like that could invite discussion, which is really the reason for the blog in the first place.
Saturday, August 4, 2012
Let's imagine a 4 dimensional cube
I was recently thinking about a fun old trick that I used to enjoy showing to students that would allow them to imagine a 4 dimensional object. Today we are going to imagine a hypercube. The key to doing this, is to imagine explaining to a 2 dimensional person what a cube is, if we can figure out how to describe a cube using only 2 dimensional objects, we can then use analogy to imagine a 4 dimensional hypercube with 3 dimensional objects.
So, imagine there is a guy (let's call him Edwin) who lives in a plane, Edwin is a 2 dimensional person and has no concept of a third dimension. We are going to describe a cube by building it out of squares. The first thing you might think to try is the following picture. (Please forgive my poor paint skills)
This doesn't work though, because we only see a cube in this 2D picture because we have seen a 3D cube before. To Edwin this is just a jumbled mess. Think about this as a purely 2D object, I see a little square in the middle, a triangle in the top left and bottom right, and 4 irregular 4 sided polygons. This is just no good at all. We need to do this without overlapping any lines.
So, we start with a single square, and if Edwin walks off any of the 4 sides of the square, he ends up on another square. At this point Edwin probably is picturing something like this.
A pretty good start for sure, we can now try to explain to Edwin that the 4 outer squares are actually pushed into the 3rd dimension. When he crosses those lines he is making a 90 degree turn into a new direction he's never thought of before. Furthermore, the 4 outer squares are connected in ways not shown in this picture. For example, if he goes up, then turns left, when he gets to the edge of the square he will step onto the square to the left. There are basically 2 ways to draw this, we can use colors to show edge identifications or we can distort the picture, here we can see both of those options.
The picture on the left shows the flatness of the squares perfectly, but we have to imagine "jumping" from one square to the next when we hit a colored line. The picture on the right shows the proper spatial relationship between all 5 squares, but the 4 outer squares are distorted since we have pushed them into 2D from their natural 3D space. This picture on the right is the one we want to focus on, it is more useful to us.
Now, we have 5 of the six walls of this cube, we simply have to imagine a 6th square whose 4 edges connect to the 4 outer edges of this picture and we have a cube with 6 walls. We simply have to "fill in" the interior of the cube with three dimensional stuff and we have ourselves a cube. This last bit will be pretty impossible for Edwin to understand, but hopefully he will understand the 2 dimensional walls and how they all fit together.
We are ready to move on to the hypercube, but I want to mention one aside with this picture on the right. Imagine if you have a cube and you put one side right up to your eyeball. This is what you will see, the opposite side is a big square right in the middle of your vision, and the other 4 squares are distorted around the side.
Ok, now we are going redo this work, but we will start with 3D and work into 4D. Imagine you start with a cube, on each face of the cube, we attach another cube, we wind up with the following picture (stolen from here)
Now, if you go into any of the "outer" cube and make a 90 degree turn you should "jump" into one of the other neighboring cubes. Again, we distort the picture (stolen from here)
We are finally ready to imagine the hypercube. Think back to the cube built from squares, you start in the middle square and walk into one of the other squares. When you cross and edge from one square to another, you are really making a 90 degree turn out of the page. The same thing happen here. You are in the middle of the cube in the middle, you can fly into one of the other cubes. When you hit the face that the 2 cubes share, you are really making a 90 degree turn into the 4th spatial dimension. So we have the little cube in the middle of this picture. The 6 cubes adjacent to it that are distorted in this picture, and the final cube that is connected to those 6 that isn't pictured. Those 8 cubes are the boundary to the 4 dimensional hypercube.
Hopefully this made some kind of sense. It is obviously better to do it person, and with physical models instead of pictures and a good bit of hand waving. Just remember, the key is to think about what is going on with Edwin and extrapolate that to yourself.
So, imagine there is a guy (let's call him Edwin) who lives in a plane, Edwin is a 2 dimensional person and has no concept of a third dimension. We are going to describe a cube by building it out of squares. The first thing you might think to try is the following picture. (Please forgive my poor paint skills)
This doesn't work though, because we only see a cube in this 2D picture because we have seen a 3D cube before. To Edwin this is just a jumbled mess. Think about this as a purely 2D object, I see a little square in the middle, a triangle in the top left and bottom right, and 4 irregular 4 sided polygons. This is just no good at all. We need to do this without overlapping any lines.
So, we start with a single square, and if Edwin walks off any of the 4 sides of the square, he ends up on another square. At this point Edwin probably is picturing something like this.
Now, we have 5 of the six walls of this cube, we simply have to imagine a 6th square whose 4 edges connect to the 4 outer edges of this picture and we have a cube with 6 walls. We simply have to "fill in" the interior of the cube with three dimensional stuff and we have ourselves a cube. This last bit will be pretty impossible for Edwin to understand, but hopefully he will understand the 2 dimensional walls and how they all fit together.
We are ready to move on to the hypercube, but I want to mention one aside with this picture on the right. Imagine if you have a cube and you put one side right up to your eyeball. This is what you will see, the opposite side is a big square right in the middle of your vision, and the other 4 squares are distorted around the side.
Ok, now we are going redo this work, but we will start with 3D and work into 4D. Imagine you start with a cube, on each face of the cube, we attach another cube, we wind up with the following picture (stolen from here)
Hopefully this made some kind of sense. It is obviously better to do it person, and with physical models instead of pictures and a good bit of hand waving. Just remember, the key is to think about what is going on with Edwin and extrapolate that to yourself.
Friday, August 3, 2012
1 Corinthians 7
Principles for Marriage
You should not engage in sexual immorality, but each person should get married and have one person who it is ok to have sex with. Nobody should withhold sex from their spouse. If you are unmarried or a widow, it is good to stay that way unless you have trouble with self-control. In that case you should get married because "it is better to be married than to burn with passion."
Get married so you can have sex, it's in the bible!
If you marry an unbeliever they become holy through you otherwise your children would be unclean.
Interesting rule.
Live as You Are Called
Live the life that the lord has assigned to you. Whatever condition you were in when called remain there with God.
It seems to be saying to stay where you are and don't strive to better you life, although it also says if you are a slave and you have the opportunity to become free you should do it. So I'm not really sure what the point is here.
The Unmarried and the Widowed
If you want to get married that is ok, but if you do you will be distracted by worldly things.
This is much more measured that most of the stuff I have come across, so that is good. Not sure I agree with it though, we are all distracted by worldly things, married or not.
You should not engage in sexual immorality, but each person should get married and have one person who it is ok to have sex with. Nobody should withhold sex from their spouse. If you are unmarried or a widow, it is good to stay that way unless you have trouble with self-control. In that case you should get married because "it is better to be married than to burn with passion."
Get married so you can have sex, it's in the bible!
If you marry an unbeliever they become holy through you otherwise your children would be unclean.
Interesting rule.
Live as You Are Called
Live the life that the lord has assigned to you. Whatever condition you were in when called remain there with God.
It seems to be saying to stay where you are and don't strive to better you life, although it also says if you are a slave and you have the opportunity to become free you should do it. So I'm not really sure what the point is here.
The Unmarried and the Widowed
If you want to get married that is ok, but if you do you will be distracted by worldly things.
This is much more measured that most of the stuff I have come across, so that is good. Not sure I agree with it though, we are all distracted by worldly things, married or not.
Thursday, August 2, 2012
1 Corinthians 6
Lawsuits Against Believers
You should not bring disputes between believers to the secular court. Matters between believers should be handled within the church.
This is an interesting idea, I like discouraging using the court system, but to forbid it is a whole other matter. What if another believer is trying to screw you over? Are you just supposed to take it? I guess the verse says you are supposed to take it to the church elders. I also don't know how the courts of the day compare to the courts of this time, perhaps it is not even a fair comparison to make.
Flee Sexual Immorality
If you perform sexually immoral acts you are committing a sin against the body of Christ because your body and his become one.
One of the problems I have with religion is that it makes people have issues with sex. Sex shouldn't be this big horrible taboo, it should be something we can have a conversation about and feel ok doing. The fact that this is so vague is bad, "I'm having a sexual desire, is it bad? Am I bad?" I don't like that kind of self questioning being encouraged.
You should not bring disputes between believers to the secular court. Matters between believers should be handled within the church.
This is an interesting idea, I like discouraging using the court system, but to forbid it is a whole other matter. What if another believer is trying to screw you over? Are you just supposed to take it? I guess the verse says you are supposed to take it to the church elders. I also don't know how the courts of the day compare to the courts of this time, perhaps it is not even a fair comparison to make.
Flee Sexual Immorality
If you perform sexually immoral acts you are committing a sin against the body of Christ because your body and his become one.
One of the problems I have with religion is that it makes people have issues with sex. Sex shouldn't be this big horrible taboo, it should be something we can have a conversation about and feel ok doing. The fact that this is so vague is bad, "I'm having a sexual desire, is it bad? Am I bad?" I don't like that kind of self questioning being encouraged.
Wednesday, August 1, 2012
1 Corinthians 5
Sexual Immorality Defiles the Church
You are sexually immoral of a particularly bad kind, men sleeping with their "father's wife". Remove those who have done this from among you. Although I am not there in the flesh, I am there in spirit and have already judged guilty the person who has done this. You are to "deliver this man to Satan" so his spirit may be saved "in the day of the Lord".
I have a few comments here.
First, why "father's wife"? why not "mother"? This is just strange terminology.
Second, he just said not to judge last chapter, and yet here he is judging when he isn't even there.
Third, what does delivering him to Satan mean? It sounds like he is saying kill him and send him to hell, but I think that might be based on the modern take on things. For if you sent him to hell in the way we think about it, he would never be saved.
You shouldn't boast.
Agreed.
When I said not to associate with sexually immoral people, I am not saying that you cannot associate with outsiders who don't follow our rules, for this would restrict all contact with outsiders. But you should not associate with those inside the church who do these things. You shouldn't judge outsiders, that is for God to do, but cleanse the church from within.
Again, he is saying to judge right after he said not to judge.
You are sexually immoral of a particularly bad kind, men sleeping with their "father's wife". Remove those who have done this from among you. Although I am not there in the flesh, I am there in spirit and have already judged guilty the person who has done this. You are to "deliver this man to Satan" so his spirit may be saved "in the day of the Lord".
I have a few comments here.
First, why "father's wife"? why not "mother"? This is just strange terminology.
Second, he just said not to judge last chapter, and yet here he is judging when he isn't even there.
Third, what does delivering him to Satan mean? It sounds like he is saying kill him and send him to hell, but I think that might be based on the modern take on things. For if you sent him to hell in the way we think about it, he would never be saved.
You shouldn't boast.
Agreed.
When I said not to associate with sexually immoral people, I am not saying that you cannot associate with outsiders who don't follow our rules, for this would restrict all contact with outsiders. But you should not associate with those inside the church who do these things. You shouldn't judge outsiders, that is for God to do, but cleanse the church from within.
Again, he is saying to judge right after he said not to judge.
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