After so many of these classes, I think that I’ve been able to get a feel for the scope of these things. These classes are fine for providing brief answers to common tough questions. They are not sufficient for providing enough background and context for a serious debate with someone. See, no matter what you’re debating, if you’re going to try and argue with someone, you had better be sure not only in what you’re arguing, but what you’re arguing against.

I’ve used all three of Windows, OS X, and Linux for years, each as my main OS. I’ve taken a basic OS course and a basic computer architecture course. I have a pretty good understanding of how computers work. Are you, guy with a Dell laptop running Windows and studying business, going to tell me Macs suck and that I’m an idiot for spending so much money on a Macbook Pro? If you’re going to say my computer is a pile of crap, you’d better be damn well prepared to talk about stuff like UI or file system design.

I’ve never gotten into evolution debates. Why? Because I don’t know enough about it. I didn’t take grade 11 bio, so how would I expect to argue with a biology major about evolution? And honestly, it’s inconsequential to me either way. I would need to be pretty arrogant to forge ahead and try to argue with someone like that.

The most dangerous thing about apologetics is the tendency for us to miss the point. Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code is our favourite dead horse to keep flogging. Yes, it’s hilariously full of ridiculous inaccuracies, which are substantiated only with his claims that he totally researched it all, man. Anyway, it’s an interesting starting point for exploring the history of the church after what’s recorded in the New Testament. But then, we start to become eager to strike down anything that’s inaccurate, without understanding the context, making us look like pedantic jerks.

One of the “arguments” that writers and speakers love to trot out is pointing out how inaccurate Da Vinci’s painting, The Last Supper, would be if Mary Magdalene were depicted in the painting and that it’s not supposed to be a literal rendering of the real Last Supper. Well, of course not, Da Vinci kind of existed hundreds of years after. That’s not the point of the painting though. If someone had done some basic research, like read the book, it’d be immediately obvious that the painting has nothing to do with “proving” that Jesus and Mary were married and has everything to do with the fictional plot, in which the painting was a vehicle for Da Vinci to communicate his message through his works. Suddenly, the relevance of the painting in this context is useless.

So what is the point? It should really only be used to clear up misunderstandings or to answer some questions that someone who’s curious might have. You can’t use your patchwork knowledge to confront someone or wage a long campaign to convince them. If you do, you’ll likely only aggravate things.

The other danger is if the class degenerates into an echo chamber. In this case, the teacher gives standard, generic answers and the participants take it in. In the other case, the teacher provides counterpoints and the students rubber-band to treating those counter-arguments with derision. The danger here is that that derision carries over to conversations with non-Christians.

What bothered me was a claim that a BBC documentary about Jesus was biased, because it focused too much on naturalistic evidence rather than also providing Christian arguments. Even worse, it was compared to the Paul Maier interview, where the interviewer was asking fairly obviously pointed questions for Paul Maier to blow off silly secular arguments. Pretending that a BBC documentary, which has proper journalism, is as credible as a staged interview means that you’re being deliberately obfuscating and obtuse. Yes, technically, there is no true neutral stance, but bias is not a binary value.

It’s the sorts of arguments like those against naturalistic viewpoints that are harmful to these sorts of things. We can’t just write them off as obviously wrong or biased, because this is the perspective of the people we’re trying to talk to. And if you wouldn’t blow off an argument as ridiculous in front of someone you’re talking to, why would you need to do it while we’re trying to understand that viewpoint? Trying to dissect an argument so that we can know how to respond to it is much more easier when we don’t poison the well with our own bias.

I guess I’m really tired of the “here’s why we’re right” version of apologetics where we don’t consider why people might think the way they do. Thankfully, the iteration of the class I’m in right now is doing a pretty good job, what with the healthy amount of processing alternate viewpoints and arguments and trying to deconstruct them properly.

Early in the campaign when no one knew who he was, Obama’s charisma was a valid consideration to bring up. Was there any substance to his rhetoric? How would he govern? Did he have the capacity to handle the Presidency? As the campaign went on and he demonstrated that he was competent, this argument became less and less of an issue. And in the months following his electoral victory, he proved that he could act quickly and decisively and act transparently, through his first executive actions and cabinet appointments.

So why is the fact that he’s popular still a strike against him now that we’ve learned that he’s not just an empty suit and he is fully capable of the Presidency? If you’re a conservative and reasonably well-informed, there are so many other points to hit him on. I suspect it’s because most of the people that subscribe to the “popularity makes me suspicious” meme are not well-informed.

It’s an easy argument to make, because most people will consider it reasonable to mistrust something that’s popular. That cynicism appears to most people as intelligence. It’s the same reason people believe in retarded conspiracy theories. It’s the belief that you’re not one of the sheeple and that you’re sticking it to The Man.

During every election cycle, there’s always someone that reminds everyone else that the Antichrist is supposed to charismatic. I guess the implication is that we’re not supposed to vote for that particular candidate, but that conclusion is retarded based on theology. I mean, if a particular candidate is the Antichrist, they’d be in power regardless according to prophecy. So why does that have any bearing on your political views?

The other case study in “popular people are bad” is always Hitler. The fact that this argument even works betrays the lack of informedness among the people having the conversation. Anyone with even a cursory knowledge of history can explain why. Reagan was ridiculously popular, but American conservatives still worship him. Or how about Roosevelt or Kennedy?

This argument is made even more ridiculous when you consider that most of the people that I talk to are in their twenties. They’re always suspicious of super-charismatic politicians? Who was the last politician with charisma that they would’ve been suspicious of? Was it Clinton or Chretien? George H.W. Bush? Brian Mulroney? For the States, it probably would’ve been Reagan, but none of my friends would’ve been born. For Canada, it’s even more hilarious, because it’s probably be Trudeau.

But this matters because this idea harms good candidates while promoting bad ones. Under this hypothesis, getting people to like you and having a firm grasp of English and rhetoric is bad while oversimplifying issues and sounding like an idiot is good. What other reason is there for labeling anyone who can put coherent sentences together an elitist? Why else would McCain be pressed to choose Palin? Why else would George W. Bush win the presidency twice?

Not supporting a particular politician just because they’re charismatic is just a way for someone to avoid being called out for not actually understanding anything and is a convenient way to avoid having fact bear on their political views while not having to justify it.

A lot of the time during election seasons, I will often hear at church the congregation being asked to pray for Christian leaders among our politicians. Of course, we never really go into how we could recognize a Christian leader in our government. How would a Christian MP do his or her job? Would they represent their constituents’ views, even if they were contrary to their own or would they vote based on their faith? Would they respect the democratic process or would they willfully obstruct and disrupt it to get the results they want?

To be honest, I suspect that when we Christians ask for Christian leaders in our government, we don’t actually want honest, accountable politicians, but just a guy who promises to vote against abortion and same-sex marriage. Do we seriously consider the character and integrity of who we’re considering to give our vote? If we don’t, then we’re being disingenuous when we pray for Christian leaders to rise up. Of course, if you’re fine with Christian leaders who aren’t principled, then I guess I’d have to concede that point.

And this is the problem that I have with the conservative parties in North America. It turns out that they aren’t accountable, they aren’t transparent, and they don’t have an ounce of integrity left intact. All of Stephen Harper and the Conservative Party of Canada and John McCain, Sarah Palin, and the Republican Party should not have the vote of any Christian that values honesty, integrity, and accountability.

McCain and Palin together have done nothing but lie about Obama’s policies and character, lie about their qualifications for the office that they’re running for, and lie about Palin’s questionable history and both of their poor track records as senator and governor. Their party has done nothing but smear and swiftboat the opposition since they’ve been in power. Their party’s politicians are constantly trying to evade subpoenas and investigations.

In Canada, it’s not much better. The Conservatives are the party that had a 200 page booklet published and distributed among their caucus detailing how to obstruct parliamentary committees. This is the party that runs attack ads on Stephane Dion using that retarded picture of him over and over again. I’d honestly expect snarky, mean-spirited ads to come out from the NDP more than the Conservatives.

These are the people that Christians support. Is it any wonder why most people don’t see us as people who value integrity and accountability?

We’re overloading on too much information! Our attention spans are short! We can’t concentrate on anything! We’re so much more superficial now! We can’t stay still anymore! We’re burning ourselves out! We’re going too fast! I keep on hearing these things said so much that they’ve become truths. The technologies is always bads!

The context and catalyst for this post is a short conversation that I was around for concerning deeper conversations in the context of fellowship. I was surprised at how quickly the blame was put on technology for something that I consider to be our fault. The great thing about these sorts of conversations is that it takes anywhere from thirty minutes to a few hours for me to gather up my thoughts, so that will explain my lack of contribution in these things.

Of course, this post isn’t a direct riposte, for those of you who have any idea of what I was referring to (not that I’m sure anyone bothers to read this anymore). But, after a few years of observation within the church, I’ve decided to put forth more of my opinion in this matter, because I believe that the fact that technology is actually a reason for our shortcomings means that there is something wrong with our premise regarding this thing.

The main evidence offered to support the idea that this ethereal threat of technology looms about is the contrast between our generation and some sort of generation before us. The definition of generation in this case changes from group to group, but it’s usually in the form of “you kids are [something bad] because of [technology] compared to [generation before]“. This seems to imply that as time goes on and there is somehow an increase in technology, we become more bad in some way.

In the case where generations are real generations, the time period would be measured in decades. So instead of being the corrupt youth of today, what would we have been doing if we were living x amount of decades ago? According to this myth, we would be having deeper conversations, reading more, and generally being more thoughtful. Do you actually believe that? Do you really believe that just because we remove the Internet and computers and video games and TV and all of these other things that are bad for us that we’ll be living more meaningful lives?

I, sure as hell, do not.

I call shenanigans on this fast paced, instant entertainment destroying meaningful stuff school of thought. Technology and entertainment do not magically make people less inclined to grow in our relationships with other people. The argument says that we’re all distracted by all of this stuff. That implies that there wasn’t enough stuff to entertain the folks back in the day and that they did not have these problems we are trying to fix today. To me, that argument sounds ridiculous.

And every time this argument gets brought up, two technologies that are very dear to my heart are inevitably brought up and denounced. These are the Internet and video games. For some reason, we love to equate these two things as wastes of time, especially in the context of the depth of relationships between people. Instant messaging is a waste of time. Facebook is a waste of time. Video games are a waste of time. Stop spending so much time on the Internet! Why are you always playing games? Try going outside!

These things are only wastes of time if people make them wastes of time. Facebook is such a powerful way to connect with people and it makes it really simple. We make Facebook a waste of time when we use that power to join meaningless groups and add retarded applications. This is why it was far more potent when it emphasised exclusivity rather than allow this rampant, global Facebook-wide garbage.

I believe in the potential and power of technology to change and improve our social interactions. Technology is a tool. It cannot be inherently good or bad. It is neutral. It is what we make of it. The problem isn’t technology, it’s people. Technology has nothing to do with how close friends are. No, relationships are about trust. Trust has nothing to do with any of this stuff we’ve been blaming our shallow relationships on.

So the reason why we aren’t engaging in deeper conversations is not because we are tainted from the start. It is a matter of trust. Why should I share thoughts on very important things to people that I don’t trust? We can’t expect people to magically open up if we haven’t reached a certain level of trust. I know I definitely have opinions that will offend people and make them not like me if they don’t know me well enough.

And so, logically, if there is a level of trust where such opinions can be exchanged, why isn’t it happening? Are we being distracted by the interwebs? The answer is simple, we simply don’t want to do these sorts of things. There are a lot of fun things we can do instead of talk about serious things. So at this point, the blame is squarely on the people. Regardless of technology, we humans are awesome at dodging things.

And now, because this is srs poast, I will make a plea for thoughts to be shared through comments, because this is what this is all about right? Also, I want to see if people are still interested in what kinds of crap I have to say so I can write further craps knowing that I’m not speaking to this phantom audience I have in my head.

The guest speaker at CCF was talking about social justice, and it was a very good talk. One of the questions that was asked of him was, what do we do? His answer: right now, we can’t do anything, except to work hard through school and get into a position where you can do something.

Something I’ve always tried to do is to connect everything I do back to my faith. Whether it’s design, math, or programming, there will always be some way to connect what we do with God. And why not? After all, he did make it so that ??¬? can never be true and that ?f?df(x)dx=f(x).

And so I’m always trying to find out what God would have me do with the skills and interests he’s placed in me. How does typography further the kingdom? How do web standards advance the kingdom? How do recursive descent parsers expand the kingdom?

So the obvious thing is to use your gifts at church. And obviously, that’s too easy. It’s great for discovering and developing your gifts, but Jesus called us to the ends of the earth. The extent of our talents should not be the church.

So what other ways are there to excercise your skills? Christ called us to go out and serve the weak, the needy, the broken, and in doing so, show them the love of Christ. The problem is that there’s so much to do. The hungry, the sick, the oppressed, it’s impossible to serve all of them especially with our finite skillsets.

I am studying software engineering. Presumably, I’m going to go on to become a software developer and come up with some hot algorithms to parse some hot language. But how does software accomplish the Great Commission? And that’s when I read and listened to Eben Moglen’s “Software and Community in the Early 21st Century”. Afterwards, what I had to do was made much clearer.

Below, is the transcript from the talk; thanks to Geof Glass who transcribed it.

Software and Community in the Early 21st Century

I want to talk about the piece of our common lives that Paul is pointing at – these rules, these methods of living together around software. And I want to try and explain what I think their larger moral and economic meaning is. It is both a moral and an economic analysis: it has to be. It began as a moral question. It remains a moral question. But it becomes along the way also a window into the economic organization of human society in the twenty-first century.

If you think about the twentieth century economy out of which we are passing, its primary underlying commodity was steel. The making of steel was the twentieth century’s root activity, and societies measured themselves substantially by their success in producing steel. It was the first sign of the reawakening of Europe as an economic entity after the devastation of the Second World War. What we now think of as the European Union and we thought of for a while as the European Economic Commission and before that as the Common Market began, as you may recall under Jean Monnet, as the coal and iron union to bring back the European Industrial Economy. The Asian Tigers began to claim for themselves rising importance for themselves in the world economy when they began producing noticeable amounts of steel. And when Mao Zedong tried to imagine an alternative form of economic development for the People’s Republic of China in the Great Leap Forward, his best thought was backyard steel furnaces.

So that was how the twentieth century thought about collaboration in the economy: it made steel. And from steel it made the rest of what the twentieth century possessed for the exploration of the environment and the control of nature for human benefit.

The twenty-first century economy is not undergirded by steel. The twenty-first century economy is undergirded by software. Which is as crucial as the underlying element in economic development in the twenty-first century as the production of steel ingots was in the twentieth. We have moved to a societal structure in this country, are moving elsewhere in the developed world, will continue to move throughout the developing economies, towards economies whose primary underlying commodity of production is software. And the good news is that nobody owns it.

The reason that this is good news requires us to go back to a moment in the past in the development of the economies of the West, before steel. What was, after all, characteristic of the economy before steel was the slow persistent motivated expansion of European societies and European economies out into the larger world – for both much evil and much good – built around the possession of a certain number of basic technological improvements, mostly around naval transportation and armament. All of which was undergirded by a control of mathematics superior to the control of mathematics available in other cultures around the world. There are lots of ways we could conceive the great European expansion which redescribed human beings’ relationship to the globe. But one way to put it is they had the best math. And nobody owned that either.

Imagine if you will for a moment a society in which mathematics has become property, and it’s owned by people. Now every time you want to do anything useful – build a house, make a boat, start a bridge, devise a market, move objects weighing certain numbers of kilos from one place to another – your first stop is at the mathematics store to buy enough mathematics to complete the task which lies before you. You can only use as much arithmetic at a time as you can afford, and it is difficult to build a sufficient inventory of mathematics, given its price, to have any extra on hand. You can predict, of course, that the mathematics sellers will get rich. And you can predict that every other activity in society, whether undertaken for economic benefit or for the common good, will pay taxes in the form of mathematics payments.

The productization of knowledge about computers – the turning of software into a product – was, for a short, crucial period of time at the end of the 20th century, the dominant element in technological progress. Software was owned. You could do what you could afford, and you could accomplish what somebody else’s software made possible. To contain within your own organization a sufficient inventory of adaptable software to be able to meet new circumstances flexibly was more expensive than any but the largest organizations seeking private benefit in the private economy could afford to pay.

We are moving to a world in which in the twenty-first century the most important activities that produce occur not in factories, and not by individual initiative, but in communities held together by software. It is the infra-structural importance of software which is first important in the move to the post-industrial economy. It isn’t that software is itself a thing of value – that’s true. It isn’t that applications produce useful end-point activities, or benefit real people in their real lives. Though that’s true. It is that software provides alternate modes of infrastructure and transportation. That’s crucial in economic history terms, because the driving force in economic development is always improvement in transportation. When things move more easily and more flexibly and with less friction from place to place, economic growth results; welfare improvements occur. They occur most rapidly among those who have previously been unable to transport value into the market. In other words, infrastructure improvement has a tendency to improve matters for the poor more rapidly than most other forms of investment in economic development.

Software is creating roadways that bring people who have been far from the center of human social life to the center of human social life. Software is making people adjacent to one another who have not been adjacent to one another. And with a little bit of work, software can be used to keep software from being owned. In other words, software itself can lift the software tax.

That’s where we now are: at that moment, on that cusp. In this neighborhood, at this moment, the richest and most deeply funded monopoly in the history of the world is beginning to fail. Within another few months, the causes of its failure will be apparent to everybody, as they are now largely apparent to the knowledgeable observers of the industry who expect trouble for Microsoft. The very engineering limits of trying to make software that you own work as well as software that the community produces are becoming apparent. It used to be suggested that eventually software produced without ownership relations might achieve superiority beyond that of software produced by proprietary producers. It used to be argued that that might eventually happen. When those of us who have some theoretical experience in this area said, “why do you only think it’s going to happen eventually – it’s happened already”, people had a tendency to point at the monopoly products and show the ways in which they are still, in one way or another, better. “You see, you can’t do it.”

The browser, as we are all aware, is a pretty crummy piece of software. It’s commodity activity now, these browsers. And Microsoft has written some browsers. And they have been working on the browser they just released for years. And now they have announced what their best browser, at present levels of engineering investment, can be. And on the day of its release, it is less good than the unowned competitor. Produced by who? What? Where? When? On the day of its release. What is being seen this week, next week, the week after about Internet Explorer version 7 will soon be seen about operating system kernels, file systems, desktop and window management, and all the other commoditized parts of a client-side operating system at which we are now operating to produce superior software at infinitely lower price. We are still – only partially of course, but we are still a capitalist society. And when someone entrenched, no matter how deeply, is producing overtly inferior goods at three orders of magnitude higher price or infinitely higher price, the event – or the outcome of the event – is obvious.

Ownership of software as a way of producing software for general consumption is going out, for economic reasons. But as I said, the economic insight that we can get from watching the transition from steel to software is far less important than the moral analysis of the situation. The moral analysis of the situation presents where we are now as, if I may borrow a phrase, a singularity in human affairs.

One of the grave problems of human inequality for everyone who has attempted to ameliorate the problem of human inequality – which is most thinkers about the morality of social life – the gravest problem of human inequality is the extraordinary difficulty in prising wealth away from the rich to give it to the poor, without employing levels of coercion or violence which are themselves utterly corrosive to social progress. And repeatedly in the course of the history of our human societies, well-intentioned, enormously determined and courageous people willing to sacrifice their lives for an improvement in the equality of human life have had to face that problem. We cannot make meaningful redistribution fast enough to retain momentum politically without applying levels of coercion or violence which will destroy what we are attempting. And again and again, as Isaiah Berlin and other late 20th century political theorists pointed out, through hubris, through arrogance, through romanticism, through self-deception, parties seeking permanent human benefit and an increase in the equality of human beings have failed that test and watched as their movements of liberation spiraled downward from the poison of excess coercion.

We do not have to do that anymore.

The gate that has held the movements for equalization of human beings strictly in a dilemma between ineffectiveness and violence has now been opened. The reason is that we have shifted to a zero marginal cost world. As steel is replaced by software, more and more of the value in society becomes non-rivalrous: it can be held by many without costing anybody more than if it is held by a few.

In the English-speaking world (and it was primarily in the English-speaking world: in Scotland, in North America, at the outer edges of the British Empire) we moved towards a system of universal public education in the course of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Protestant North Europe moved over a lengthier period of time in a similar direction, but universal public education still had to be conducted on the basis of knowledge that could not be indefinitely duplicated.

Books are the first mass-produced article in Western society. They are the cheapest method of making large amounts of information available by broad public access available in analog technology. And they are still grossly expensive, difficult to move, cumbersome to keep and catalog and maintain, and very difficult for people to have access to who are not already located in socially central places. They are also vulnerable, as anybody who remembers the burning of the Sarajevo library will recall vividly. It takes a day with contemporary technology to destroy the libraries it takes centuries to build. And in times of great social stress, libraries burn.

Now we live in a different world, for the first time. All the basic knowledge, all the refined physics, all the deep mathematics, everything of beauty in music, in the visual arts, all of literature, all of the video arts of the twentieth century can be given to everybody everywhere at essentially no additional cost beyond the cost it required to make the first copy.

And so we face, in the twenty-first century, a very basic moral question. If you could make as many loaves of bread as it took to feed the world, by baking one loaf and pressing a button, how could you justify charging more for bread than the poorest people could afford to pay? If the marginal cost of bread is zero, then the competitive market price should be zero too. But leaving aside any question of microeconomic theory, the moral question, “What should be the price of what keeps someone else alive if it costs you nothing to provide it to them”, has only one unique answer. There is no moral justification for charging more for bread that costs nothing than the starving can pay. Every death from too little bread under those circumstances is murder. We just don’t know who to charge for the crime.

We live there now. This is both an extraordinary achievement and a very pressing challenge. There were good reasons after 1789 to be a little doubtful about the wisdom of revolution. Because revolution meant coercive redistribution likely to spiral downward in the well-known way. In the economy of steel, people who make steel become workers. They have little individuality. They are reckoned as workers in an industrial army. And as Marx and others like him pointed out in the middle of the nineteenth century, that is largely likely to lead to the model internally of political progress through a clash of armies. We don’t live there anymore.

We find ourselves now in a very different place. You live there, I live there, my other clients live there. It’s a place in which the primary infrastructure is produced by sharing. The primary technology of production is unowned. The effectiveness of that mode of production in the broader society is now established. Plus or minus the couple more years left before Microsoft fails entirely, we have now proven either the adequacy or final superiority in crass economic terms of the way we make things. We have brought forward now the possibility of distributing everything that every public education system uses freely everywhere to everyone: true universal public education for the first time. We have shown how our software, plus commodity hardware, plus electromagnetic spectrum that nobody owns, can build a robust, deep, mesh-structured communications network which can be built out in poor parts of the world far more rapidly than the twentieth century infrastructures of broadcast technology and telephones. We have begun proving the fabric of a twenty-first century society which is egalitarian in its nature, and which is structured to produce for the common benefit more effectively than it can produce for private exclusive proprietary benefit. We are solving epochal problems.

We are introducing new possibilities based upon new technological arrangements to deal with the fundamental political difficulties that we have coped with, and our predecessors in seeking equality and justice have coped with, for generations. We are very lucky. We live at a time when technological progress and the pressure for human justice are coming together in a way which can produce fundamental satisfactions that have eluded us for centuries. But in that luck there comes responsibility. We need to get it done.

There are other people with other views. We are not everybody. The other views assume that this technology too can be shaped to support hierarchy, that it can be shaped to support ownership, that it can be shaped not only to ignore the moral question I have put forward, but to make that moral question invisible to almost everybody. Forever. The folks on the other side are also very powerful. They look way more powerful than we. They are also quite clear-sighted. They also understand that there is an epochal openness here, and they have no more intention of giving up what they claim as theirs now than they ever have had.

The dystopic possibilities of where we live are non-trivial. If you imagine, right now, a flood of billions of dollars of consumer products moving towards you in containers from the East, containing devices that use all this software we have made, but lock it down so no-one may tinker with it, so that if you try and exercise the freedoms that it gives you, your movies don’t play anymore, your music won’t sing, your books will erase themselves, your textbooks will go back to the warehouse unless you pay next semester’s tuition to the textbook publishers, and so on. The magic of this technology is that it can be used for the great ideal of capitalist distribution: never actually give anybody anything. Just as it can be used for our fundamental purpose, which is: always give everybody everything.

And so in fact, we now find ourselves in a more polarized place than usual. Not because Paris is starving. Not even because the lettres de cachet have grown so horrifying to the population. On the contrary, this population has never been less horrified by putting people in jail without charges and keeping them there forever than it ever has been in the past. The reason that we now face a more than usually polarized circumstance is that the sides that have confronted one another over equality and social justice for generations are now more evenly matched than they have ever been before.

You and I, and the people who came before us, have been rolling a very large rock uphill a very long time. We wanted freedom of knowledge in a world that didn’t give it, which burned people for their relegious or scientific beliefs. We wanted democracy, by which we meant originally the rule of the many by the many, and the subjection of today’s rulers to the force of law. And we wanted a world in which distinctions among persons were based not on the color of skin, or even the content of character, but just the choices that people make in their own lives. We wanted the poor to have enough, and the rich to cease to suffer from the diseases of too much. We wanted a world in which everybody had a roof, and everybody had enough to eat, and all the children went to school. And we were told, always, that it was impossible. And our efforts to make it happen turned violent on their side or on ours many more times than we can care to think for[?].

Now we’re in a different spot. Not because our aims have changed. Not because the objectives of what we do have changed. But because the nature of the world in which we inhabit technologically has altered so as to make our ideas functional in new and non-coercive ways.

We have never, in the history of free software, despite everything that has been said by lawyers and flaks and propagandists on the other side – we have never forced anybody to free any code. I have enforced the GPL since 1993. Over most of that time I was the only lawyer in the world enforcing the GPL. I did not sue because the courts were not the place for the rag-tag revolution in its early stage to win pitched battles against the other side. On the contrary, in the world we lived in only ten or fifteen years ago, to have been forceful in the presentation of our legal claims would have meant failure even if we won. Because we would have been torn to pieces by the contending powers of the rich. On the contrary, we played very shrewdly, in my judgment now as I look back on the decisions that my clients made (I never made them). We played very shrewdly.

When I went to work for Richard Stallman in 1993, he said to me at the first instruction over enforcing the GPL, “I have a rule. You must never let a request for damages interfere with a settlement for compliance.” I thought about that for a moment and I decided that that instruction meant that I could begin every telephone conversation with a violator of the GPL with magic words: We don’t want money. When I spoke those words, life got simpler. The next thing I said was, We don’t want publicity. The third thing I said was, We want compliance. We won’t settle for anything less than compliance, and that’s all we want. Now I will show you how to make that ice in the wintertime. And so they gave me compliance. Which had been defined mutually as ice in the wintertime.

But as all of those of us who are about to live with less ice in the wintertime than we used to will soon know, ice in the wintertime can be good if you collect enough of it. And we did. We collected enough of it that people out there who had money to burn said: “Wait a minute. This software is good. We won’t have to burn money over it. And not only is this software good as software, these rules are good. Because they’re not about ambulance chasing. They’re not about a quick score. They’re not about holding up deep pockets. They’re about real cooperation between people who have a lot and the people who have an idea. Why don’t we go in for that.” And within a very short period of time they had gone in for that. And that’s where we live now. In a world in which the resources of the wealthy came to us, not because we coerced them, not because we demanded, not because we taxed, but because we shared. Even with them, sharing worked better than suing or coercing. We were not afraid. We did not put up barbed wire, and so when they came to scoff, they remained to pray. And now, the force of what we are is too strong for a really committed, really adversary, really cornered, really big monopoly to do anything about.

That’s pretty good work, in a short period of time, that you all did. You changed the balance of power in a tiny way. But when you look at it against the long background of the history of who we are and what we want, it was an immense strategic victory, and not a small tactical engagement. Now, as usual, when you win a small tactical engagement that turns out to be a large strategic victory, you have to consolidate the gains, or the other side will take them back. So we are now moving into a period in which what we have to do is to consolidate the gains. We have to strengthen our own understanding about what our community can do.

I want to go back to the thing I said at the beginning. In the twenty-first century economy, production occurs not in factories or by people but in communities. eBay is a pretty decent way of organizing a community to sell and buy stuff and empty garages, and it is doing a pretty fair job of it. MySpace, Friendster – never mind who owns, never mind what’s intended, never mind the pedophiles and all that stuff – it’s a pretty good way of dealing with an extraordinarily deep and important problem that most societies have to cope with, which is how to give old children becoming young adults some way of experiencing their independent identity in the world. How to give them a way to say, “Here I am. This is what I am. This is what I feel. This is what is going on in my life.” It has produced a lot of bad adolescent poetry. It has produced a lot of risqué photography and self-portraits in states of deshabille. But it is also dealing with a thing which has sometimes been known to cause suicide, and which shouldn’t be taken quite so lightly. It is not a small thing if you feel yourself to be a really isolated teenager living and working in a part of the world that doesn’t understand you at all to know that you can have tens of thousands of people all around the world immediately available to you, who know what you’re feeling and who can provide the kind of support that you need. That’s actually social service work of a very deep and important kind.

We are making communities that produce good outputs and other people are looking at them as business models where eyeballs are located. Up to a point that’s acceptable, and when the tipping point is reached it isn’t anymore. And that’s the kind of activity which is now our political challenge. To understand how to manipulate those processes – as we all can because we make the technology – how to manipulate those processes so as to gain the social benefit and reduce the possibility of power discrepancies developing that neutralize the very kinds of social justice outcomes we are looking for. This is possible to do. It is not only work for lawyers.

Mary Lou Jepsen’s inventions in connection with the display of the One Laptop Per Child box will turn out to be of enormous importance to the world. The One Laptop Per Child box (which I’ve spent a lot of time helping with this past year and which everybody in this room ought to be thinking about hard, because it’s a great moment in human technological history), the One Laptop Per Child box has a few requirements that are really important for computers in the twenty-first century. One: a child has to be able to take it apart safely. Two: you have to be able to generate electricity for it by pulling a string. Three: it has to be culturally accessible to people who live in a whole lot of different places around the world, speak different languages, have different world views, have different understandings of what a computer is or might be or could be or what this thing is that their children are holding. It has to be discoverable. It has to be a place for a child to explore indefinitely and learn new things in all the time.

I just want to concentrate on the first parts: it has to be something you can pull a string to power, and it has to be something a child can take apart safely. No existing LCD panel meets those needs, because every existing LCD panel in the world uses a mercury back-light which runs on high voltage which is dangerous and which contains toxic chemicals (the mercury itself of course). So how about a display which gives you transmissive color – beautiful color – indoors, and high-contrast black and white in full sunlight, so that it can be used in every natural environment, and which consumes per unit area one tenth of the electricity used by standard current LCD panel displays. How about that it doesn’t have any harmful substances in it, can be safely disassembled and reassembled by a child down to its components so that field replacement of almost anything can occur, and is in addition cheap to manufacture. So we’re going to give an enormous gift to all the cell phone and gadget manufacturers of the world out of OLPC – which is why Quanta, the largest manufacturer of laptops in the world, and the display manufacturers throughout the Pacific Rim are screaming to be first or second sources of the OLPC display. Because the patents in there are worth sharing.

In other words, the free world now produces technology whose ability to reorient power in the larger traditional economy is very great. We have magnets; we can move the iron filings around. We can also change the infrastructure of social life. That OLPC has every textbook on earth. That OLPC is a free MIT education. That OLPC is a hand-powered thick-mesh router. When you close the lid as a kid and put it in the shelf at night, the main CPU shuts down – but the 802.11 gear stays running all night long on the last few pulls of the string. And it routes packets all night long and it keeps the mesh. The village is a mesh when the kids have green or purple or orange boxes. And all you need’s a downspout somewhere, and the village is on the Net. And when the village is on the Net, everybody in the village is a producer of something: services, knowledge, culture, art, YouTube TV.

The week that Rodney King was beaten in Los Angeles, I was on the telephone with a friend of mine who does police brutality cases in Dallas, Texas. And he said to me, “You know what the difference is between Dallas and Los Angeles?” And I said, “I don’t know.” He said, “Fewer video cameras.” That was a long time ago. There’s no place on earth with too few video cameras anymore. The gadget makers took care of that. Now what is journalism like when every village has a video camera and is on the Net? What is diplomacy like? What does it mean if the next time somebody starts some nasty little genocide in some little corner of the Earth the United States Government would prefer to ignore, that there’s video all over the place all the time in every living room. What’s it mean when children around the world are networking with one other over the issues that concern them directly without intermediation, everybody to everybody, saying, “Do you have what we need? How come you have what we need? How come we can’t do what you can do? Because your father’s rich? Because we’re dark? Because we live down here?”

Globalization has been treated up ‘till now as a force which primarily puts ownership in the saddle. Maybe. Maybe. But the One Laptop Per Child seems to me to consolidate some of our strategic gains, which is why I’m in favor of pressing hard for it and things like it.

Now let me come back to the stuff we have in common in this room. Community, I have said – not an original thought – is powerful. The network makes community out of software. But some software is better at producing community than other software. GCC is a really useful thing. But it doesn’t produce community. If anything, GCC has been known to produce the opposite to community. This is not a joke about compiler guys either. The Perl interpreter, which is a fine thing, produces rather little community too, and the community it produces is, shall we say, a little inward-looking. There are other kinds of software which produce community in a very different way – and you know what that’s like because you work on one of those corners. The problem that I have with content management systems is that they’re systems for managing content, which is not very important. Community-building software, however, is very important.

I’m trying to do a little thing this year called making GPL 3, which is actually more about having a lot of discussions with a lot of very different people around the world about what they think free software licensing ought to be like and why they don’t like Stallman. The latter is not the subject I go out to talk about, it’s just what they talk about no matter what I do about it. It’s an attempt to create a kind of broad global community of people who care about a thing they all take very seriously. And they do take it very seriously: you understand when guys fly from Germany to India to participate in their second international conference on GPL 3, you know they really care.

So I’ve been talking to a lot of different people in a lot of different forms, some of them like IRC, some of them produce formal documents, some of them are telephone types. That’s all held together by Plone. That’s many different overlapping communities held together by software for making communities. It’s related to voice over IP through Asterisk, which changes my life as a lawyer completely. Those of you who haven’t discovered what free software can do to IP telephony, you have a great discovery headed your way. And we made a little bit of software of our own for dealing with a thing it turned out there was no existing tool for that we really liked – namely some austere simple interface for marking up one document in a very very very multiplicitous way with tens of thousands of possible commentators, so that everybody participating can see what everybody else has done in some manageable way, and can intervene in the process in a thoughtful fashion tied to some particular word or phrase or piece of a document that concerns them.

Before we started this activity I read lots and lots of commentary that said, as soon as FSF tries to do this it’s going to dissolve into a flame war. As soon as anybody attempts to do this it’s just going to become Slashdot all of the time. It wasn’t like that. It hasn’t been like that. Even Slashdot hasn’t been like that. That’s not the way it went. Of course there was lots of stuff said that I regret; some of it was said by very big people; much of it was said by Forbes[?]. But that wasn’t the problem. The coherence of the community – a community which includes Ubuntu users in Soweto as well as IBM, includes developers in Kazakhstan as well as Hewlett-Packard, includes people who have thousands of patents as well as people who don’t know what a patent is – that conversation has gone, I think, remarkably peaceably and quite constructively for a period now of about ten months.

Twenty years from now the scale of our consultation over GPL is going to seem tiny. The tools we use are going to seem primitive. The community we built to discuss the license is going to seem like a thing a six year-old could put together without taking more than a couple of breathers around it. And yet, that’s only going to be because our sophistication in global coordination of massive social movements is going to be so good. You do not see Microsoft out conducting a global negotiation over what the EULA for Vista should say. And even if they were minded to do it, they couldn’t. Because they’re not organized for community, they’re organized for hierarchical production and selling. I have heard a lot of stuff from people who thought that Richard Stallman was a problem. But ask yourself this: if the GPL process had been run by Steve Ballmer.

So we are learning in very primitive ways within our community how to build large globe-girdling organizations for a special purpose for a short period of time to engage people constructively in deliberation, and we are learning how to do that despite vast cultural and economic discrepancies in the assets of the participants. That’s twenty-first century politics. Plone makes it.

But it isn’t what you have. It’s what you do with it. So we have some remarkable opportunities, all of us. We have a very special place in the history of the campaign for social justice. We have some very special infrastructure. We have new means of economic development available to us. We have got proof-of-concept. We have got running code. That’s all we ever need. But we need prudence. We need good judgment. We need the willingness to take risks at the right places at the right time. We need to be uncompromising about principle even as we are very flexible about modes of communication. We need to be very good about making deals. And we need to be very clear, absolutely clear, without any variance at the bottom line about what the deals are for, where we are going, what the objective is. If we know that what we are trying to accomplish is the spread of justice and social equality through the universalization of access to knowledge; if we know that what we are trying to do is to build an economy of sharing which will rival the economies of ownership at every point where they directly compete; if we know that we are doing this as an alternative to coercive redistribution, that we have a third way in our hands for dealing with long and deep and painful problems of human injustice; if we are conscious of what we have and know what we are trying to accomplish, this is the moment when, for the first time in lifetimes, we can get it done.

We do not need revolutions in which the have-nots dispossess the haves right now. But we’re under pressure. There are a lot of people in the world. There is not a lot extra to eat. There is not a lot of excess clean water to drink. Minds are being thrown away by hundreds of millions in a world where people are trapped in a subsistence crisis that is now avoidable, and their ability to think and create and be is stunted forever. The climate is changing beneath our feet, the air is changing above our heads, and as the fossil fuel system decays, the inequalities and power discrepancies and authoritarianisms that grew up around the oil business in the twentieth century are going to do us real harm. So we have great opportunities, we have great challenges. The upside is the highest it has been in generations and the downside is not too pleasant. That means there’s a great deal of work to be done. Oddly enough, it’s not painful. It consists of doing neat stuff and sharing it. You’ve been successful at it already beyond anybody’s expectations and beyond most people’s dreams. More of the same is a good prescription here. But a little more political consciousness about it and a little more attempt to get other people to understand not just “what” but “why” would help a lot. Because people are getting used to the “what”.

“Oh yeah, Firefox, I use it all the time.”

“Why?”

“Why, cuz Internet…”

“No no no no no. Not why do you use it, why does it exist?”

“Oh I dunno, some people did it.”

That’s the moment, all right, that’s the moment, that’s the one where that annoying Stallman voice should enter the mind, okay. Free As In Freedom, Free As In Freedom. Tell people it’s free as in freedom. Tell them that if you don’t tell them anything else. Because they need to know.

We’ve spent a long time hunting for freedom. Many of us lost our lives trying to get it more than once. We have sacrificed a great deal for generations, and the people who have sacrificed most we honor most when we can remember them. And some of them have been entirely forgotten. Some of us are likely to be forgotten too. And the sacrifices that we make aren’t all going to go with monuments and honors. But they’re all going to contribute to the end. The end is a good end if we do it right. We have been looking for freedom for a very long time. The difference is, this time, we win.

Thank you very much.

Godel proved in 1931 that if [Peano arithmetic] is consistent, then it is incomplete. He constructed a statement that was semantically true but that had no proof, by coding up formulas and proofs as numbers and then creating a formula with code n that asserted that the formula with code n had no proof.

Context

This quote is from my CS 245 course notes. Basically, it’s saying that given this set of axioms, the Peano axioms, it is possible to construct statements that are semantically true, but have no proof of it. That is, something can be true and it will be impossible to prove it. It goes on to say later, that you can axioms to prove that these Peano axioms are consistent and complete, but you can’t prove that those axioms you’ve just added are consistent and complete.

CCF Winter Retreat

CCF Winter Retreat was fun and cold. Fun because it’s the first retreat I’ve been at with my new fellowship and cold because the heat was broken. It was also fun because UWCCF alumni know how to cook and it was tasty. It was also cold because every last person got snowjobbed.

It was also my first time serving at Waterloo. I was asked if I wanted to help out with A/V and I decided I’d might as well start and see what happens. As it so happened, the place had nothing so we had to rent everything. By we, I meant that me and my friend had to learn how to rent everything too. No more just having everything magically appear and fiddle with knobs.

Housing

Looking for housing was an interesting experience, particularly in the final stages. Let’s just say that it was very trying to work with some people and I’m kind of disappointed in the way things turned out. But, I did end up scoring with a good house, with a good location, at a good price, with a good bunch of roommates.

Coop

So as we all know, Jobmine was kidnapped by ninjas, and for four days, no one was a bad enough dude to rescue Jobmine. Once it came back up, I applied for a total of twenty jobs, mostly web design and testing. There are some development jobs, but I think I’m still way too noob to actually develop. As for location, I thought I really wanted to come back to Toronto for the summer, but as it turns out, a lot of the interesting jobs are in Waterloo. We’ll see how this plays out.

I may spit out a few more posts later on about various things like things from Jesse’s messages at Winter Retreat or WoW.

Something I’ve been wondering about for a long while is Bible translations. To see what I mean, open up your bible to the front, where it tells you the publishing details. You’ll probably find something like this:

The ESV text may be quoted (in written, visual, or electronic form) up to and inclusive of one thousand (1000) verses without express written permission of the publisher, providing that the verses quoted do not amount to a complete book of the Bible nor do the verse quoted account for 50 percent or more of the total text of the work in which they are quoted.

And so on and so forth. My question is why?

Think about what the publisher is saying. Crossway (or Zondervan, or Tyndale, or any other Christian publisher) is basically saying “We own the rights to this work, and we’re going to allow you to use portions of this work under these conditions, where ‘this work’ is ‘the Word of God’.” See the problem I have with it now?

I am essentially suggesting that the publishers should free the modern translations of the Bible. Of course, you may be wondering why I believe that it is absolutely necessary. I hold the same beliefs about other currently copyrighted material. This is not to say that copyright is bad, just that the current “protection” that copyright entails is currently immensely excessive.

Quoting

You may argue that the publishers are quite generous to allow us to quote a thousand whole verses for whatever purposes we may want. Yes, a thousand verses is a lot and I may never quote a thousand verses in a work. The publishers aren’t hurting anyone. Sounds familiar.

I believe that it’s wrong in principle for these publishers to be putting limits on how many times they allow you to quote the Bible. That’s a tad absurd, don’t you think? Oh no, I’ve quoted Jesus too many times in my book, and now Zondervan is going to sue me for copyright infringement!

KJV

Of course, we have one English translation that is currently in the public domain: the King James Version. We can copy the KJV to our hearts’ content. The problem with that is that most people today don’t particularly enjoy reading the KJV. The point of alternative translations is to make the Bible more accessible, and the fact that the KJV is the only English translation that is free does not help that cause.

Derivatives Works

There’s a great open source program called SWORD. It’s meant to be used as a Bible study tool that’s free for all and can be run on all platforms. The only problem is that it can only use the KJV since that’s the only free translation. As a result, its usefulness decreases sharply when prospective users find that the NIV is locked. A great project with a great goal becomes irrelevant.

Money

Translating the Bible costs money. Yes, it does, but just because a translation is free doesn’t mean that the publishers won’t make any money. Publishers can still sell books. Just look at the KJV, even without any extras and just the text, people still buy it. Publishers can free modern translations and still sell Bibles. The only reason for publishers not to release translations is because other publishers will publish them. In my mind, that is not a good enough reason to keep the translation locked away.

Bread

And so we face, in the twenty-first century, a very basic moral question. If you could make as many loaves of bread as it took to feed the world, by baking one loaf and pressing a button, how could you justify charging more for bread than the poorest people could afford to pay? If the marginal cost of bread is zero, then the competitive market price should be zero too. But leaving aside any question of microeconomic theory, the moral question, “What should be the price of what keeps someone else alive if it costs you nothing to provide it to them”, has only one unique answer. There is no moral justification for charging more for bread that costs nothing than the starving can pay. Every death from too little bread under those circumstances is murder. We just don’t know who to charge for the crime.

We live there now.
Eben Moglen, Software and Community in the Early 21st Century

“It is written, ‘Man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that comes from the mouth of God.’”
Jesus, Matthew 4:4 (ESV)

Right now, I could download the entire text of some translation and fill my 250 GB external drive with copies of it and it would cost me nothing but my computer and the few minutes the script would run. The cost to reproduce any sort of information now is so low that most of us could probably generate a few hundred in a day if we tried.

So why is the most important book ever kept under the control of a few publishers?

1. They had only one service, while CFC had three to choose from. Choices, choices.
2. CFC looked huge (in terms of the number of people).
3. I couldn’t find any TJCAC people.

Essentially, those two points meant that I was more likely to see people that I at least met, if not knew. So I headed over to the V1 stop after having breakfast at the SLC. I see other people approaching the area too, so at least I knew I was in the right spot.

I’ve mentioned before how interesting it is that among Chinese Christians, everyone knows each other or are connected in some way. In university, the effect is much greater than in high school, because of all the people who don’t live in the same city that get together at a university and go back home and spread their new connections around.

So yes, I met some people. I met someone who was on my TC team and someone who was related to someone in my CC group. I also met this guy that I ran into randomly when I was going to CCF and a guy in my class, which in engineering means all my classes. That was pretty cool. I need to make friends.

Anyway, about KWCAC. I found KWCAC very much like TJCAC, but slightly smaller and slightly older, with about 90% univeristy students. I recognized the pastor there, Pastor Tim, from some other places before, like FX, the new student reception, and the first UWCCF meeting. I like it there, it’s kinda cozy.

So the theme was love and we had Western’s ACF councillors, Pam and Roger Shuttleworth, speak to us. I’m glad that God used them to speak to us. Pam shared in our small group time that there was a point when she asked herself if she really loved God. I’ve found myself asking the same question a few times before too.

I really enjoyed small group time. Magically, most of my group was from Waterloo, with the exception of Cat, who later went on to help with another group, and Pam. Apparently, they drew names out of a hat for small groups. I’m so glad that there’ll be people watching out for me in scary not-Morningside Ave-land.

Let’s begin with Lebanon and Israel right now. Hezbollah kidnaps Israeli soldiers, hoping to exchange them for the release of political prisoners, and Israel responds by immediately blowing up the entire country. Basically. They destroy pretty much any way for anyone in the country to get out and take out power and communications. Hezbollah responds by firing rockets into Israel, lather, rinse, repeat.

There are some interesting questions that arise from this situation.

First of all, I don’t understand why there isn’t more pressure to stop Israel. Lebanon isn’t like Afghanistan, where they were harbouring terrorists and were a despotic regime. And Israel is just pounding Lebanon, who really doesn’t have the power to stop either Israel or Hezbollah. I really think that Israel is just jumping on this as a chance to attack Lebanon, whether to provoke the other countries in the region or as a chance to occupy the country again.

Next is the question of Canada. We know that for some reason, Bush and the Christian Conservatives love Israel. We also know that from recent events, Harper is trying to get on Bush’s good side. And yet, with 40000 Canadians in Lebanon and seven killed by Israel, I find it incredible (in the bad way) that Harper still stands by Israel. I agree with his critics that he knocked our credibility down a few rungs in trying to be America’s best friend again.

And so about Canadians in Lebanon. I read through some of the comments at the Globe and Mail and I was quite surprised to find comments saying how it wasn’t the government’s responsibility to get those people out of there and how those 40000 probably aren’t even real Canadians. I mean, I think it would quite difficult to get out of the country without assistance when the Israeli military has bombed the roads and airport, don’t you think?

And about Israel. From what I’ve read, it appears that Israel has been constantly stirring up crap in the region, trying to grab land and rebuild the Promised Land. Basically, the UN drew up borders for the new State of Israel, which was on some of the Promised Land, but not all of it. They evicted the Arabs who were there for the past while and shoved them into the Gaza Strip and West Bank. Then for the past few decades, the Israelis have been occupying land agressively, leading to several confrontations, and generally causing a mess in the area.

This leads to the reason why the Christian Conservatives are so worried about Israel. They believe that one of the conditions, so to speak, upon which Jesus will return is that Israel has control of the Promised Land or something like that. Of course, they seem to forget that God doesn’t need their help.

I’ll have more on what I think of Christians and politics later.

I’m glad I went to Campus Challenge. I wasn’t going to go because it was $165 and I’d already been spending a lot of money on things this year because it was Grade 12. Eventually, I was persuaded enough by my friends to go, to see what’s going on in university.

After TC there’s CC

The simplest way to describe CC is that it’s like TC for university students. Of course, that’s oversimplifying it. TC and CC have very different focuses. TC is about outreach and committing to Christ. CC is about ministry on campus.

Small Group

The first thing after the first session after getting there was meeting in our small groups. Small groups are probably my favourite thing about CC. Small groups are not like TC teams, where we compete against other groups and go running around Otonabee College screaming. Small groups are cell groups.

I loved how the small group could get to know each other so well. At TC, there isn’t really time to just sit around and talk. You’re always doing something at TC. At CC, we just stayed up until 2 in the morning just talking. We started off really deep and heavy and ended off with mundane crap like Kristen Kreuk’s SIN number and seven day LAN parties.

Social Justice and the Good News

This was a really good workshop. How does the Gospel change our world? This workshop was about working towards the Kingdom of God, where there is no sickness or sorrow. What’s interesting is that one of the presenters is working towards social justice by making free software for hospitals. That was really amazing and totally unexpected for me. I’m planning to e-mail him later on some time.

Colossians

CC this year was about Colossians. Colossians isn’t that big. I realized that when I first read through it last week. There are some pretty interesting points that Alison Siewart made. First is that when we follow Christ, our lives are hidden in Him. That is, we are invisible to the world. No one knows who we are.

Another thing that she mentioned was about Jesus. Arthur mentions this a lot, that the Jesus that we recognize today is a very sterilized one. The way we portray Him, he’s a very one-dimensional character.

Of course, this is contrary to what we see in the Bible. Jesus was dangerous and dynamic. He went to parties, hung out with gangsters and hos, started messing up vendors’ stalls, and told stories that made no sense. Look what happened, he was so dangerous, they had to go and crucify him.

Those aren’t the only things, just what I can recall so far.

Community

The most important thing I took away from CC was the importance of community.

A few weeks ago, I’ve come to the conclusion that focs this year was a bit of a mess. Before the school year started, we had this eagerness and energy. After a few meetings, I think we became a bit discouraged and as the year went on, we got busy and even more discouraged. It’s really been tough.

Part of the reason is because of our lack of direction. We had nothing to shoot for. We were putting together programs with no real purpose to them. I think it’s a kind of spiral we’re seeing. We don’t plan programs well and people end up frustrated and don’t come anymore.

Lately, I’ve been feeling that there’s this emphasis on community. In Aletheia, we’re doing the community thing. They’re doing it at softball. And now, CC is speaking to me about it. I think that the thing about our fellowship is that the community wasn’t there. I’ve been trying to push that lately, but I really don’t have enough time left in the year to really make much of a change.

Unfortunately, it’s going to be up to next year’s leaders to try and fix up what I’ve managed to mess up. I’m going to be sitting down with them sometime next week, because this week is completely messed up and crazy. I have about one and a half days of school this week.

Waterloo

I’ve met a handful of Waterloo people around CC. I think everything I’ve seen about CCF has made me even more excited about next year. I’m going to be looking forward to Frosh Conexxions this summer.

It feels like I’m missing something so there may be a part two to this post.

Logo

I’m sure a few of you remember me posting about the logo contest. Basically, I wanted to design something cool for TC this year, and I cranked out a few designs. The one I submitted was actually the last one, which took the least amount of time to get right.

I think the reason that I didn’t win was because it was basically just a slightly modified vectorized photo. I guess that wasn’t original enough. See, I can’t draw, but I still like making good looking things. There are a lot of people that can draw, but not design. I’m not saying I can design or anything, but there is more to it than being able to draw, and I think that is where I find a lot of fault with a lot of TC’s past logos, that is, they’re good pictures, but they’re not really logos.

I think things would have been different if I’d just gone with my gut and submitted the first one, rather than second guessing myself.

Retreat

I was excited when I heard about the retreat. I’ve served on AV at TC three times now. Every time, everyone else is completely new. I’ve never seen anyone stay for more than once. The AV team always met just two weeks before TC, for the final media practices, so we’re not always that tight.

Leading up to TC

We had a few more chances to meet as a team. There was AV training. After that, there was the team meeting thing, where we decided what to do and shared a bit about ourselves. Then there were media practices and setup.

After setup, we decided to go out and eat before heading to the Concert of Prayer. Apparently, after the media practice the day before, they decided to go to Montana’s. That didn’t happen. Once we got to Montana’s, we decided to go to Henry’s house. So we went to Food Basics, bought some ground beef and Italian bread, and went, cooked, and ate really quickly and zoomed off to AFC.

TC2006

Honestly, I didn’t think TC had anything for me anymore. I’ve been there five times now. The first time was amazing and was where I accepted Christ. The second time was also amazing. Then the third time, I started to serve, and it was simlarly a wonderful getting to work with other Christ-minded people, and I returned eagerly last year. Each time, there was always something new that God would place in me, whether it was a fervent passion for God or being part of the Body. But each time, it was less and less different and more and more of the same.

But as we began to work and really serve together, it became so much more. AV is always boatloads of fun when stuff goes wrong. Everything is silent, and then out of nowhere, there’s an explosion of chatter over the walkie-talkies like “MUSIC! MUSIC!” and people on the balconies running between the computer and lighting panel. And we finally got around to making those cool shirts we’ve been talking about since December.

Not only did we serve as the AV team, but we also served together with worship and media. This year, we really made time to pray together and to pray with the people onstage. We really were serving as one body, the Body of Christ. Everyone bows their heads at the name of Jesus. Everyone shares in the same stupid jokes.

Yeah, there were a few things that really got on my nerves with some other people. That’s expected though. Not everyone will get along harmoniously and not everyone will fit in together the right way, but we’re always reminded that we’re all united in Christ.

[TEAM AMOS PIC GOES HERE]

Not only was serving awesome, but actual participating in TC was awesome too. I missed pretty much the first day of interactions, which made it kind of awkward when I showed up for rec. But when I did join my team (‘WE ARE TEAM AMOS AMOS.’), it was really nice. I didn’t get to meet everyone, but I did get to talk a little (really little) with my captains, who are really awesome people. We were also incredibly close to winning the spirit award.

And I don’t think I can not mention Mr. Electric Guitarist. I was wondering where he was during sound check, and then Lorraine mentions that he broke his wrist during worship. So he shows up at the end and we’re like whoa, that sucks. So, the next morning, Art gets me and we pick him and a few other people up, and he’s like “I was thinking I could probably tape a pick to my finger.” And at 7 AM on Thursday, we got to TCCC and he did that, and we were all like, whoa, and cheer. I think God used your amazing underhand dodgeball skills to move a few people.

Ultimately, God had a few things in store for me to learn. We are all united, with one desire, for one purpose: to worship and to magnify the glory of the grace of God and He used TC this year to really show me that. He reigns, He reigns.

Today, I decided to skip the rec presentation practices to go to my team’s interaction. That really made a difference for me at TC, in that it was much more enjoyable with a team. We really were incredibly close to being the most spirited team, I think. AV team finally made those cool t-shirts we were thinking about.

Final TC wrapup to follow in the days to come.

I’ve been thinking about volunteers at TC and teams. I know that they want all of us on teams whenever we’re not doing anything, but I don’t think it’s beneficial at all for us.

For me, being on AV, I’ve barely had any time with my team at all for the past two years. Whenever I have been with my team, it’s been awkward, because everyone is getting to know one another, and I just pop in and out because I have to go to practices and stuff. This year, I think it’s worse because I’m only with them during rec and I’ve missed all of my interactions today. I must seem like a random dude that just pops out of nowhere.

That’s why I didn’t join a team at Junior. It’s totally awkward and is only really to keep us busy.

The other thing is that it’s very demanding and tiring. After doing media or worship, everyone involved is probably ready to sleep. But, what do we have after media? Rec.

So yeah, I don’t think there’s any point in putting us onto teams unless we’re going to be there at least for some interactions. I think the volunteers benefit more from interactions with their teams than rec. Otherwise, I wouldn’t have them join a team at all.

On Saturday, someone made the observation that TCCC locks everything. It’s impossible to get anywhere because everything was locked. It was impossible to use anything because it was all locked. This has caused much frustration. Even the speaker, today, was like, ‘maybe we should put a few holes in their stuff after’ after much struggling to connect the laptop on the balcony to the sound system below.

It was quite busy until rec, at which point, we all floated around, doing nothing. I eventually planted myself with Jacqueline and Kim, since they, SMUs, were like us: they had nothing to do for two hours.

Like pretty much every TC I’ve been to, the first day was spent to get the energy going. And like pretty much every time I serve on AV for an event, there’s something crazy going on.

I must say that I like this year because the team has actually gotten together and are beginning to know one another. We also got together with media and worship and prayed and stuff, and on Sunday, we went out before Concert of Prayer.

More summaries after each day and one giant overview after everything’s done.

Whenever I came across a Charlie Hall song, it would always be on a Passion CD, with a few other worship leaders. When I did hear enough of his songs that I considered having a look at one of his CDs, I searched for “On the Road to Beautiful” and found that I didn’t recognize any of the songs. That stopped there.

Seeing things live is quite different from hearing or reading about it. Take universities for example. At one point, McMaster and UTSC were competing for the third spot in my application. When I actually went to Mac, I found I quite liked it there and promptly booted UTSC off my list. Later on, because I visited Mac, I had a look at their engineering programs, which are not bad. As a result, even though Mac is my third choice on my application, I would much rather go there than U of T.

Same goes for music. I’d listened to David Crowder Band’s “A Collision” before, at least a few times before Passion Toronto. But the songs I listened to on the CD were much different in real life. Take “You Are My Joy” for example.

The same thing happened for Charlie Hall. First, there was “Center”. Then “Marvelous Light”, the song on the Passion CD that I remembered. And finally, came that song that I didn’t know, which was because it was a new song, on “Flying Into Daybreak”.

Now Charlie Hall’s a bit different. A lot of his songs aren’t really for church worship settings, not really easy to pick up and sing like Chris Tomlin or Matt Redman. On the other hand, he’s not a crazy weird dude with weird songs that confuse people like David Crowder.

I wasn’t actually planning to buy “Flying Into Daybreak” or even download it to give it a spin as I usually do. Really, the only reason I thought about downloading it was because the album art was so awesome and colourful. After a few listens, I was determined to grab it once it came out at Blessings for $12.87 or however much New Music Tuesday is.

As a whole, I like this CD. There isn’t really any track that I hate on it and there are plenty of songs that I like. Those tracks are Micah 6-8, Marvelous Light, Song of the Redeemed, Bravery, Center, and Running With Your Heart. The bad thing is that Canada is stupid and Flying Into Daybreak is nowhere to be found. What happen?