Rubik's cube, 3 great bands you've never heard of.

Cool and, well, not cool.

I tend to read a few books simultaneously. I mean, not like an idiot savant or Data from Star Trek -- with my left and right eyes reading different texts -- I just usually have a few books laying around that I'm somewhere in the middle of. I try to choose books with an interesting contrast. Like a good book salad, some fiction, some science, a periodical, a novel.

Here are the three things I'm reading right now: Searching For God Knows What, by Donald Miller, The Origin of Species, by Charles Darwin, and Time Magazine. These three share a common purpose: they are all at least somewhat intended to persuade. Time can sometimes give you the unbiased facts, but more often than not, you can hear the human voices behind the words, the tone behind the story.

Miller is an open-minded Christian writer, he seems pretty right.

Darwin is defintiely right, but Miller keeps actually referring to the Garden of Eden.

JFK stopped nukes with his mind and helped civil rights. He was so right they killed him.

I've been thinking about right and wrong, as concepts, as moral weapons, as scientific views, as popular culture, etc. We give them different names: good and evil, true and false, or probably the most powerful, cool and, well, not cool. Most of us were born into an awkward, in between, philosophical puberty, the American heartland still clinging viciously to the pristine granite pillars of the Modern age, the coasts already erecting ugly, beautiful monuments to postmodernism. Two battle flags, one adorned with "!", the other with "?" and the weapons for both sides, Right and Wrong.

"If you think about it, right and wrong aren't even people, they are ideas, philosophical equations and that sort of thing, and so it is funny that anybody would think they are right in the first place. I suppose what we really mean when we say we are right is that something out there in the soup of ideas is right, and we simply agree with whatever it is the soup is saying. But this doesn't have anything to do with out rightness or wrongness; it just means we can read." -Donald Miller, Searching For God Knows What


(This guy is pretty sure he's right.)

I was born into a house with a few copies of the Bible, and oh, I dunno, off-hand, I'd say about zero copies of the Koran. My parents also had a subscription to, you guessed it, Time Magazine. So we choose sides and titles, and other titles are chosen for us: a little to the left, hippie, way to the right, Evangelical. But so much of it is happenstance.

I think that's where my deep respect for scientists comes from. The ideas that they "believe" are more than hand-me-down paradigms. They value innovation (liberal?), yet stability (conservative?). Theirs is a different breed of right and wrong, though it is rarely recognized as such. Instead, their objective, observable truths are often herded into the unfamiliar, the muddy pastures of spirituality or politics, where their words are twisted, their numbers ignored, their audience misled. They're asked to fight feelings with facts. Meanwhile, Christians aim scriptures at carbon emissions.


(Dave is absolutely certain he's right)

I'm not taking the relativist position, and I'm not saying that there is no right and no wrong. In fact, I often feel I'm in a very small minority of people who are actually trying to understand the many complementary facets of the world. I find no contradictions between science and religion. But it's not a black and white issue. Some philosophies are more right than others. Some people are bad. Good and Evil exist (the jury's out on cool). The problem is that it's a lot of work, trying to understand the world. You can't just listen to talk radio and read the Cliffs Notes. So write what you know...and remain silent about what you don't. In the mean time, enjoy a nice book salad. Otherwise, you end up like these guys:�