Ramblings
I have been wanting to write something but I've been busy. I have all sorts of ideas for things to write, theological, philosophical, political, and so much more, but now I feel compelled to just ramble on. Maybe I'll inject a few nuggets of all of the above as I select random recent events as a jumping off point.
There was this party in Bishkek on Christmas eve. I dare say it was legendary, in a World Airways sort of way (there are a lot of those, actually). I'll forgo the details that would make the story unfit for publication, not to mention way too long. The gathering ended up in the hotel bar listening to the live band. The band consisted of a guitar player, bass player, drummer, and singer. The singer was from South Africa and the rest of them were from the U.S. and Canada. I wound up sitting in for the last song with them. Good times and all that...
Fast forward to my layover in Bishkek a few days ago. The first night, after dinner, one of our flight attendants wanted to have a cup of hot chocolate before hitting the sack. We went to the bar and listened to that same band for a few minutes while she enjoyed her delightful looking drink. Their singer wasn't with them. I mentioned to the flight attendant that they had a singer when I saw them (and played with them) in December. That's when I found out that she sang, too. We had a wonderful conversation about our shared love for making music. I would have asked the band where the singer was, but we left before they finished the set they were playing.
We had to get up really early, or so we thought. I slept for a while and then worked out before I made the wake up calls. Just when I was going to call the ISM, the phone rang. It was scheduling notifying me of a 24 hour delay. They said it was for weather, which sounded odd to me given the fact that the plane was already on the ground and the weather was fine. Turns out, it was the passengers who couldn't make it to Bishkek.
I wound up staying up for a while. During the wee hours of the morning, I was chatting with one of the flight attendants who flew out on the airplane we brought in. That's when I found out what happened to the singer. She got pneumonia and passed away the week before we were there. The next night I made a point of going back to the bar to share my condolences with the band. Life is short and you never know when it will be over. The news was shocking, and her passing is tragic, but I'm glad I had a chance to see her sing and to play with her.
Getting home has been quite a production this time around. I lost yet another day off due to the delay. When they went to rebook my travel, they decided to buy me a ticket to Boston instead of Manchester. When I called to tell them that Manchester, not Boston, was my designated airport, they went about fixing the problem by tacking on a limo from Boston to Manchester. After what seemed like about a dozen phone calls, I finally had a legal plan that ended with me flying into Manchester. I didn't know about that plan until I was on the airplane to depart Bishkek, but for those less-than-eight blissful hours on the way to Leipzig, I thought all was well. Then I got there and discovered my flight to Frankfurt had been canceled. I wound up taking the train.
Speaking of travel, there's been a debate going on amongst our pilots about business class travel, at least for overseas commercial flights (funny that I write this while sitting in economy on a trans-Atlantic segment on Lufthansa). I sent a long and abstract message outlining some principles that I thought would be good to apply to all employee benefits. One person criticized it as too complicated, and I'm sure the message itself was too long. On further reflection, it seems like the ideas would be good for all benefits for all people in all working relationships. There were three principle ideas:
1: Allow individuals maximum control over how they receive their compensation
2: Reduce mandatory dependency on the company
3: Maximize the availability of tax-exempt/free benefits available in exchange for compensation
With respect to the business class debate, applying these principles is easy: allow individual crewmembers the option of business class travel instead of more pay, and allow them maximum control over how they receive that travel. Seems simple to me.
The current debate over health care would be well served by applying those principles at all places of work. Allow workers to decide whether they will receive health insurance as part of their compensation or more money, allow them to have a policy independent of the company, and allow that all to be done on a tax-free basis. This is not how things generally work now. Most companies that offer insurance do so with some amount of subsidy (ours is huge). Opting out of the insurance frequently yields, at best, a small increase in pay. And few if any companies allow the employee to choose where they get their insurance from. Frequently, there's only one choice (the company's choice), there are a very limited number of plans (3 in our case), and leaving the company means, eventually, losing your insurance.
I'm a month and a half into my New Years Resolution to workout regularly. It's going reasonably well. I have, so far, kept my 7DMA (7 Day Moving Average) at 3 workouts or higher (it was at 5 for a day or two last month). The changes I made to the routine itself seems to have resolved the problem with my feet. So far, it appears sustainable. Keeping the willpower up, though, has been challenging. I've been surprised at how much encouragement (even if from myself) that I've needed.
I was deadheading on one of our flights with military personnel on board. I've become accustomed to the patriotic rah rah stuff that goes on with the military. There was the usual "thanks for your service to our country" stuff, but one thing caught my attention in a big way. As I was nodding off to the sounds of a bunch of patriotic songs playing over the sound system (America the Beautiful, I'm Proud to be an American, etc.), I heard an inspiring speech thanking the soldiers for defending our four freedoms - the freedom of speech, freedom of religion, freedom from want, and freedom from fear. I was probably the only person on that airplane to perk up at that. Defending freedom is a good thing. Defending FDR's fallacious philosophy, not so much...
Speaking of fallacies, there's a question I've heard many times before. Can God make a rock so big even he can't move it? The question is designed to express doubt in the proposition of an omnipotent God. On its face, the concept of omnipotence appears self-contradictory and that question makes the contradiction clear.
The problem with the question is not that it calls into question the doctrine of God's omnipotence, but that it presumes the wrong context for God's omnipotence. The question assumes that the context includes God. In other words, the question asks, "Is God more powerful than God?" Neither answer satisfies the skeptic who wrongly assumes that God's omnipotence must require God to be more powerful than God. Obviously such a proposition is absurd.
Maybe that's an example of a dumb question, just like asking, "when did you start beating your wife?". The correct answer is to illuminate the illogic in the question itself, and correct the misunderstanding about the doctrine of omnipotence. The idea of a God being all powerful over all of creation (space and time, everything we can directly experience) is not absurd. The idea of a God being more powerful than himself (or 'itself') is, at least according to our logic. The Bible doesn't describe the latter, only the former.
Similar faulty reasoning applies to arguing that God must exist because created things require a creator. This begs the question, "Who created God?" The Bible doesn't say that God logically must exist because creation exists. Extracting the argument from creation to an abstract principle and applying it to God results in a never ending loop of Gods. That may be as clever a construction as the last question, but it doesn't represent what the Bible actually describes. What the Bible does say is that creation (the universe and everything in it) exists because God created it. That doesn't mean that something else must have caused God to exist, but it does mean that God did cause creation to exist. Any more is simply unknown to us.
That's probably plenty of pondering for now... and I'm out of battery... :)
V-
There was this party in Bishkek on Christmas eve. I dare say it was legendary, in a World Airways sort of way (there are a lot of those, actually). I'll forgo the details that would make the story unfit for publication, not to mention way too long. The gathering ended up in the hotel bar listening to the live band. The band consisted of a guitar player, bass player, drummer, and singer. The singer was from South Africa and the rest of them were from the U.S. and Canada. I wound up sitting in for the last song with them. Good times and all that...
Fast forward to my layover in Bishkek a few days ago. The first night, after dinner, one of our flight attendants wanted to have a cup of hot chocolate before hitting the sack. We went to the bar and listened to that same band for a few minutes while she enjoyed her delightful looking drink. Their singer wasn't with them. I mentioned to the flight attendant that they had a singer when I saw them (and played with them) in December. That's when I found out that she sang, too. We had a wonderful conversation about our shared love for making music. I would have asked the band where the singer was, but we left before they finished the set they were playing.
We had to get up really early, or so we thought. I slept for a while and then worked out before I made the wake up calls. Just when I was going to call the ISM, the phone rang. It was scheduling notifying me of a 24 hour delay. They said it was for weather, which sounded odd to me given the fact that the plane was already on the ground and the weather was fine. Turns out, it was the passengers who couldn't make it to Bishkek.
I wound up staying up for a while. During the wee hours of the morning, I was chatting with one of the flight attendants who flew out on the airplane we brought in. That's when I found out what happened to the singer. She got pneumonia and passed away the week before we were there. The next night I made a point of going back to the bar to share my condolences with the band. Life is short and you never know when it will be over. The news was shocking, and her passing is tragic, but I'm glad I had a chance to see her sing and to play with her.
Getting home has been quite a production this time around. I lost yet another day off due to the delay. When they went to rebook my travel, they decided to buy me a ticket to Boston instead of Manchester. When I called to tell them that Manchester, not Boston, was my designated airport, they went about fixing the problem by tacking on a limo from Boston to Manchester. After what seemed like about a dozen phone calls, I finally had a legal plan that ended with me flying into Manchester. I didn't know about that plan until I was on the airplane to depart Bishkek, but for those less-than-eight blissful hours on the way to Leipzig, I thought all was well. Then I got there and discovered my flight to Frankfurt had been canceled. I wound up taking the train.
Speaking of travel, there's been a debate going on amongst our pilots about business class travel, at least for overseas commercial flights (funny that I write this while sitting in economy on a trans-Atlantic segment on Lufthansa). I sent a long and abstract message outlining some principles that I thought would be good to apply to all employee benefits. One person criticized it as too complicated, and I'm sure the message itself was too long. On further reflection, it seems like the ideas would be good for all benefits for all people in all working relationships. There were three principle ideas:
1: Allow individuals maximum control over how they receive their compensation
2: Reduce mandatory dependency on the company
3: Maximize the availability of tax-exempt/free benefits available in exchange for compensation
With respect to the business class debate, applying these principles is easy: allow individual crewmembers the option of business class travel instead of more pay, and allow them maximum control over how they receive that travel. Seems simple to me.
The current debate over health care would be well served by applying those principles at all places of work. Allow workers to decide whether they will receive health insurance as part of their compensation or more money, allow them to have a policy independent of the company, and allow that all to be done on a tax-free basis. This is not how things generally work now. Most companies that offer insurance do so with some amount of subsidy (ours is huge). Opting out of the insurance frequently yields, at best, a small increase in pay. And few if any companies allow the employee to choose where they get their insurance from. Frequently, there's only one choice (the company's choice), there are a very limited number of plans (3 in our case), and leaving the company means, eventually, losing your insurance.
I'm a month and a half into my New Years Resolution to workout regularly. It's going reasonably well. I have, so far, kept my 7DMA (7 Day Moving Average) at 3 workouts or higher (it was at 5 for a day or two last month). The changes I made to the routine itself seems to have resolved the problem with my feet. So far, it appears sustainable. Keeping the willpower up, though, has been challenging. I've been surprised at how much encouragement (even if from myself) that I've needed.
I was deadheading on one of our flights with military personnel on board. I've become accustomed to the patriotic rah rah stuff that goes on with the military. There was the usual "thanks for your service to our country" stuff, but one thing caught my attention in a big way. As I was nodding off to the sounds of a bunch of patriotic songs playing over the sound system (America the Beautiful, I'm Proud to be an American, etc.), I heard an inspiring speech thanking the soldiers for defending our four freedoms - the freedom of speech, freedom of religion, freedom from want, and freedom from fear. I was probably the only person on that airplane to perk up at that. Defending freedom is a good thing. Defending FDR's fallacious philosophy, not so much...
Speaking of fallacies, there's a question I've heard many times before. Can God make a rock so big even he can't move it? The question is designed to express doubt in the proposition of an omnipotent God. On its face, the concept of omnipotence appears self-contradictory and that question makes the contradiction clear.
The problem with the question is not that it calls into question the doctrine of God's omnipotence, but that it presumes the wrong context for God's omnipotence. The question assumes that the context includes God. In other words, the question asks, "Is God more powerful than God?" Neither answer satisfies the skeptic who wrongly assumes that God's omnipotence must require God to be more powerful than God. Obviously such a proposition is absurd.
Maybe that's an example of a dumb question, just like asking, "when did you start beating your wife?". The correct answer is to illuminate the illogic in the question itself, and correct the misunderstanding about the doctrine of omnipotence. The idea of a God being all powerful over all of creation (space and time, everything we can directly experience) is not absurd. The idea of a God being more powerful than himself (or 'itself') is, at least according to our logic. The Bible doesn't describe the latter, only the former.
Similar faulty reasoning applies to arguing that God must exist because created things require a creator. This begs the question, "Who created God?" The Bible doesn't say that God logically must exist because creation exists. Extracting the argument from creation to an abstract principle and applying it to God results in a never ending loop of Gods. That may be as clever a construction as the last question, but it doesn't represent what the Bible actually describes. What the Bible does say is that creation (the universe and everything in it) exists because God created it. That doesn't mean that something else must have caused God to exist, but it does mean that God did cause creation to exist. Any more is simply unknown to us.
That's probably plenty of pondering for now... and I'm out of battery... :)
V-