Tag: mailvox

Mailvox: an easy choice

Jamsco asked me to consider presenting an argument for supporting Tebow and the Broncos versus an argument for supporting the Vikings. I rejected that because there is absolutely no chance I would ever support any team against the Vikings. I find The Miracle of Tebow to be even more entertaining than the Tarvaris Jackson Experiment, and I wish the young man well in general, but against the Vikings?

Never. The only circumstance in which I might consider supporting another team against the Vikings is if one of my children was playing against them. And even then, I’d probably hope for an excellent individual performance in defeat.

However, I can say that seeing the Vikings lose to Tebow and the Broncos on Sunday would be less painful than most historical Vikings defeats. I rank Vikings defeats on the following 10-point pain scale:

10- Dallas Hail-Mary game. Pearson absolutely committed offensive pass interference.
9 – Oakland. Super Bowl XI.
8 – Atlanta. 38 in 98. This was dreadful, but unlike the other two games, I didn’t actually cry. One of the guys at the bar in Florida did, however.
7 – New Orleans. NFC Championship aka The Greased Pig Game. This probably would have been an 8 if I was younger and was still capable of feeling normal human emotion. Also, New York 41-0. People tend to forget the Vikes were actually favored. Total disaster from the get-go.
6 – New England. The 28-27 game. How do you lose when you’re winning 27-0? Pittsburgh. Super Bowl IX. I didn’t expect the Vikings to win, but I still hoped. Washington. The Darren Nelson drop in the 1987 NFC championship. We would have crushed Denver too.
5 – Any loss to the Packers when the Vikings are favored. And pretty much any loss to the Lions. Not that the Lions are a rival, it’s just that it’s so unexpected.
4 – Arizona. 18-17 in 2003 to knock the Vikings out of the playoffs. Or any playoff loss in a year when the Vikes clearly aren’t good enough to compete.
3 – Any loss to the Packers when the Packers are the better team. Losing then isn’t surprising, it’s just annoying. As are the Packer fans. Or losing after leading by 10 or more in the third quarter. Or any loss in the second half of the season after starting 6-2 or better.
2 – A regular season loss.
1 – A preseason loss.

I would say that a loss to the Broncos would probably be about a 1.5, not because I’m cheering for Tebow, but because the season is shot anyhow and I’d just as soon see Frazier go. I see no reason to have any confidence in him. The Vikings run defense isn’t as epic as it was a few years ago, but it is still a top-10 run defense giving up only 99.6 YPG, which should slow down the top-ranked Denver running attack. The Vikings should win, even without Adrian Peterson, since their weak and wounded pass defense, (missing both starting corners and ranked 29th), should be capable of rising to the challenge posed by Tebow’s arm, and because the Denver defense simply isn’t as good as many casual observers imagine.

By the way, I always support the NFC North team in the playoffs. Bears, then Packers. I hate the NFC West. I don’t hate the NFC East, but I hate the way the media spends half their coverage on the NFC East and the other half on the rest of the league. And the NFC South still strikes me as a nonentity, the Saints one Super Bowl notwithstanding.

Anyhow, I’m looking forward to tomorrow’s game. You can always judge a player better when you see him play against a team you know well. I do wish Winfield wasn’t on IR; it would be fascinating to see if Denver could run his way or not… I’m betting not, but we won’t be able to find out.

Mailvox: two questions

DW asks about overpopulation and marital submission:

I’m a fairly new reader of your blog and a big fan. I have two questions. Some of my friends are scientists—a biologist, a chemist and a biochemist. They all tell me that the world is overpopulated. I don’t believe them. Do you think the world is overpopulated? Also, since you’re a Christian, do you believe the stuff Paul wrote about a wife being submissive to her husband? I’ve been… trying to figure out how to argue for the traditional Christian view that the husband is the head of the wife and that women shouldn’t hold authoritative positions in the Church in today’s world.

I think some parts of the world are overpopulated, which is to say the parts of the world that cannot manage to feed or maintain civilized societies without external support. It is absurd to be sending vast quantities of food, medicine, and money to third world nations that cannot provide for themselves while simultaneously permitting third-world immigration. This is actually a monstrous policy that not only ensures devastation throughout the third world, but throughout the civilized world as well.

If you consider that the Nigerian city of Lagos alone has 1.6 million more Nigerians than there are Swiss in Switzerland, it should be readily apparent that Europe’s money, technology, and medicine has helped expand the African population to quantities it can no longer reasonably support than America’s money, technology, and medicine could support China.

So, the world is overpopulated in parts and the consequent idea of substituting immigrants for natives – or electing a new people, as the Democrats are now explicitly doing with their creation of an “Obama Coalition” – will turn out to be even more disastrous than the attempts to industrialize the uncivilized have been.

As to the second question, yes, there is no shortage of historical and scientific evidence in support of the Biblical concept of female submissiveness in marriage. It should not be necessary to argue this at all with fellow Christians, as the Churchian concept of mutual submission is not only illogical, it is outright anti-Christian.

In light of the Biblical analogy, the concept of mutual submission requires the belief that Jesus Christ submits himself to his church. I would no more accept a nominally Christian authority that taught “mutual submission” as being legitimate as I would one that taught one should pray in the name of Obama instead of Jesus Christ.

Mailvox: atheists are thankful too

MD drops a note:

Although we don’t have thanksgiving here, I admire the sentiment so I must give thanks to you for (although often infuriating; & even just sometimes plain wrong) relieving the tedium of the working life. Although I disagree with you at least as much as I agree with you, you are at least (& rarely for most of the media) both clever and interesting and free-thinking. Anyway, us Brits don’t do love-ins, so that’s enough til next year.

Clearly someone needs to set him straight about this being an atheist-hating, anti-science echo chamber of stupid Christards waiting for Round Two…. The truth is that I’m always glad to see intelligent and well-educated critics participate in the discussion and challenge my views, either privately or publicly, so long as it is in a straightforward and intellectually reasonable manner. I don’t expect anyone to agree with me on everything; my family and my best friends never have, so why would you or anyone else?

No one gets it right all the time. Certainly not me. Religion doesn’t claim to contain all the truth – now we see as though through a glass darkly – and any honest scientist is open about the limitations of science. How can we, who are mere mortals, possibly think to either know it all or even possess a proper understanding of what “all” means?

But I would encourage MD to give thanks to God rather than to me. Even if he doesn’t believe in Him… especially if he doesn’t believe in Him. After all, if He doesn’t exist, then what could be the harm?

Mailvox: the dangerous Ron Paul

The cognitive dissonance at work in N’s email, written in response to yesterday’s column, is remarkable:

I like Ron Paul but I don’t like him closing all our bases around the world and bringing our army back home. This isolationist view is DANGEROUS and will only empower and embolden our enemies and actually bring us closer to WORLD WAR, this time right at our DOORSTEPS!

Is that what you want???

If Reagan said America was that “shining city on the hill”, dimming it around the world with an isolationist view will only make stronger the darkness of this world. We need to keep shining that light shining everywhere, bud. The cost of peace ain’t cheap, but war is a hell of a lot more expensive!

Yes, that is precisely what I want. All military bases closed, all American troops back in the USA. To argue otherwise is indicative of a shockingly stupid perspective which is not only illogical, but blatantly ignores both the historical record and the observable reality of present U.S. foreign policy.

First, the argument about “the cost of peace” is a non-starter. America is presently engaged in military operations in Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia, and Iran. (Don’t kid yourself, there are already CIA and most likely special forces in Iran right now.) It may still be active in Libya. That is hardly peace.

Second, the USA is bankrupt. It can’t afford ANY military operations at all. Thanks to the expected failure of the Congressional supercommittee, automatic defense cuts must be made. As the global economic contraction continues, the U.S. military will have to shrink.

Third, it is American military operations that have not only brought enemies to our DOORSTEPS, but have brought them into the country. The Saudis who attacked the Two Towers on 9/11 were angry about the U.S. military bases in Saudi Arabia and were “studying” in the United States. There are far more Somalis in the USA than there were before U.S. troops invaded Somalia and more Iraqis than before U.S. troops invaded Iraq.

Isolation is not dangerous. American strength and wealth waxed during its isolationist period and has declined steadily ever since, just as both the Roman and British empires declined once they started attempting to police the world. As I wrote in the column, the irony is that the one Republican presidential candidate whose policies would strengthen the American military and best protect American interests is constantly attacked by stupid and ignorant Republicans who wrongly believe that the more troop deployments that take place, the stronger the nation is.

No wonder they also fall for the Neo-Keynesian argument that the more money you spend, the wealthier you become.

Mailvox: ah, innocence

Evil Kirk has a touching faith in the technocrats:

Evil Kirk: 11/21/11 6:47 AM:

The crash already came and went. If you view crashes in the 1929 sense or the “It’s a Wonderful Life” sense, you’re out of date and just worrying over a bogeyman. You aren’t going to wake up tomorrow to bank runs and general panic. We are largely in a post-radical economic discontinuity age. Too much is known, temporary technocratic leadership is too readily accepted, and people in general are too savvy and suspicious to tolerate radical discontinuity.

I just had to post this publicly to ensure it was on the record. It is indeed amusing and indicates the mindset of someone who I suspect doesn’t track a single economic statistic, let alone the ones I do. And here I’d thought the public mocking of the concept intrinsic in Reinhart and Rogoff’s best-selling book had finally killed off the theme “this time it’s different”.

Mailvox: thinking Tebow through

castricv is skeptical that the Veer can work in the NFL:

Tebow is a great person, a stand up leader, and will always give his all. However, there is no way he is starting for any team past next year and though he may remain as a great backup or a pinch runner/QB, he will never be able to keep pace with the Brees, Brady, Rodgers of the league.

I said much the same thing after watching the Miami game. And I still THINK that’s the case now that the Broncos are 4-1 with Tebow at the helm, compared to 1-4 when starting Orton. (So much for Coach Fox’s ability to correctly calculate his team’s chances to win.) But I’m no longer so certain it can’t keep working in the long term, because there is the possibility of a running-heavy game being very effective for a team in an era when the entire NFL has gone passing-mad for two very important reasons. Turnovers and game time.

The Broncos simply don’t turn the ball over in the Tebow offense. In six games, he has one INT and one fumble lost. That is absolutely huge in the day of the frequent pick-six. Let’s look at the three elite quarterbacks castricv mentioned. Drew Brees has 7 INT 0 FL in the last six games. Brady has 5 INT 1 FL in the same span. So, you have to factor in Tebow’s turnover rate of .333 compared to 1.16 and 1.0. Part of Aaron Rodgers incredible value as a QB comes from his low turnover rate of 0.333, the same as Tebow’s. I think this is an aspect of the position that analysts are leaving out of the equation and helps explain why the Broncos are winning despite everyone’s expectations.

Imagine if the Broncos acquired a very good running back to pair with Tebow, one that can break a stacked box like Adrian Peterson. The quarterback being a runner helps address the stacked box issue because there is an additional blocker. I’m not saying this definitely would work, I’m simply saying that I can imagine that it COULD work. And it has a lot more potential than throwing another mediocre quarterback with a turnover rate of 2+ like Orton out there.

The lack of turnovers is particularly significant since a running team reduces the number of possessions for both teams from 12 to 9. Since the average points scored in a game by one team is 21, the average number of scoring possessions is around 3. (Keeping it simple here.) An average NFL quarterback turns the ball over twice per game, so in normal game he’s got to lead his team on a scoring drive three times out of ten to give it a reasonable chance to win, but three times out of seven when playing Tebow and the Broncos. How many quarterbacks can be expected to score every other drive?

Tebow, on the other hand, only has to generate a scoring drive one out of every three drives. Throw in the field position advantage provided by the nearly two turnover advantage, and you can see why the approach might theoretically work so long as Tebow can continue to avoid turning the ball over. He’ll never be able to keep pace with Brady, Brees, or Rodgers, but then, he doesn’t necessarily have to. Remember, this is not all that different from the approach that Bill Parcells and Bill Belichick used to beat the superior K-Gun offense of the Bills in Super Bowl XXV.

The three things that struck me when watching the final Denver drive to beat the Jets were as follows:

1. Tebow has excellent vision and patience when running the ball. It’s really striking. This makes stopping him much harder than it looks. There must have been four or five times when a Jets defender would have had him if he hadn’t seen the opening and taken it at just the right moment. It also explains why he is so much more effective towards the end of games when the defenders are a little tired and slow.

2. His teammates have his back. Champ Bailey has been the most openly supportive, but after the last touchdown, when Tebow returned to the bench, one of the Denver cornerbacks, Cassius Vaughn, bent down, hugged him, and the microphone caught him telling Tebow “You keep turning it on! We love you, boy.” In the ultimate team sport, this is more meaningful than most spectators understand.

3. The coaches can’t believe what’s happening and really don’t know what to do with him or about him. There were more similarities than differences between the reactions of Fox and Ryan. After the touchdown run, Fox had his hands on his head, happy, but with a look of incredulity on his face. Ryan looked equally incredulous, but totally disgusted too.

But the NFL has to be loving the situation. A mediocre Denver team has somehow become must-see TV for NFL fans around the nation. Not only was the Denver stadium shaking with the chanting of the fans, but I have seldom heard the TV commentators more intrigued with the last five minutes of a 13-10 non-playoff game. They were actually laughing after Tebow scored. The whole drive was so awesome and ugly that I had to watch it twice. Make that three times.

Now, I can’t see it happening. I honestly can’t. I could see Denver winning the AFC West and perhaps even upsetting New England in the playoffs, but I can’t see them beating Pittsburgh or Baltimore. But just for the fun of it, can you imagine how utterly insane it would be, how totally nuclear the sports media would go, if Denver were to face Green Bay in the Super Bowl?

Mailvox: answering the inevitable response

Some atheists appear to view homosexuals as comrades in the great struggle against Christianity. In light of this, MD wonders if Christians can be similarly considered to harbor disproportionate inclinations towards pedophilia on the basis of the Catholic priest abuse scandal:

Hmmm. Wonder what proportion of Christian clergy molest children cf general population? . . . Conclusion: Christians more likely to molest children?

To some extent, the answer depends upon your definition of clergy. But in the end, the inescapable conclusion by MD’s metric is not only that Christians are less likly to molest children than the general population, but that gays should not be permitted in the clergy. Now, there are three significant caveats here which I will point out afterwards, but consider:

Clerical abuse
– 4,392 priests and deacons were accused of engaging in sexual abuse of a minor between 1950 and 2002.
– The Jay Report stated there were 10,667 reported victims of clergy sexual abuse younger than 18 years during this period. The RCC victims per abuser rate was 2.43
– The 4,351 priests who were accused amount to 3.97% of the 109,694 priests in active ministry during that time.
– There were 28,700 active priests in 2005. The historical/current rate is 3.72.

Teacher abuse
– It is reported that 290,000 students experienced some sort of physical sexual abuse by a school employee from 1991-2000.
– This indicates an estimated 1,508,000 cases of school children being abused by school employees between 1950 and 2002.
– There were 3.8 million school teachers in 2010. Multiplied by the 3.72 historical/current rate, we estimate 14.1 million teachers active from 1950.

Dividing the 14.1 million historical teachers by the 1.51 million victims, then dividing by the 2.43 victim/abuser rate, this means school children have a 4.4% abuse per teacher rate compared to 4.0% per Catholic priest.

Now, the three problems. The first is that this includes the abuse by school employees who are not teachers without including the non-teachers. Currently, teachers only make up half of the PUBLIC school employees in the country, but that number was historically much lower. Nevertheless, we can safely assume that teachers historically made up about three-quarters of the school employee total, which would lower the teacher abuse rate to 3.3 percent. However, we don’t know if teachers have a higher rate or a lower rate of abuse than janitors, counselors, and administrators. I suspect it is higher, due to low average teacher IQ and the larger amount of contact with children intrinsic to the job, but I simply have no information on this.

Second, the RCC abuse numbers include the victims of priests and deacons, but don’t include the number of permanent deacons. This is because there were only 41 deacons accused of the 12,500 ordained during the period concerned. This gives a total of 122,194 clergy and reduces the RCC abuse rate to 3.6 percent.

And the third problem. 81 percent of the RCC victims were male. All of the abusers were male. This is an astonishing statistical outlier, since in the general population, girls are sexually abused three times more often than boys. The heterosexual abuse rate was therefore 0.7 percent for the clergy compared to 2.5 percent for the teachers.

The conclusion, therefore, is that Christian clergy are 3.6 times less likely to abuse children than the general population unless they are homosexual. The larger part of the clerical problem is not the Church, but Teh Gay. In fact, four-fifths of the sexual abuse committed by Catholic priests could have been avoided simply by barring homosexuals from the clergy, just as Christian doctrine has always deemed necessary. And the increasing restrictions on homosexual seminarians is the obvious reason why the rate of clergy abuse has been significantly dropping since the 1980s.

However, due to the increased embrace of homosexual clergy by the Episcopalian and Lutheran churches, we can safely conclude that the chickenhawks will be gravitating to these organizations as well as to other gay-friendly institutions that are actively involved with children. It should therefore be no surprise that the Sandusky scandal took place on a college campus and concerned a children’s organization; twenty years before, Sandusky might well have decided he was “called” to the priesthood instead of setting up a “children’s charity”.

Mailvox: is God on our side?

JH wonders:

I have read your coloumn faithfully for years, and have come to admire your level-headed and logical approach to the problems you present.

I have a question. Most social conservatives declare that life begins at conception, thus concluding that all abortions are murder. If you take this stand then you must conclude that America has the blood of 50 million innocent lives on her hands.

What right do we have then to drop bombs on ” ragheads and goat herders ‘ and the like if this is so, and how can we possibly think that God will bless our troops in foreign wars when we can’t possibly be on HIS side?

It is so. And America has no more right to bomb the goat herders of the Middle East than Rome had to invade Pontus, Armenia, and Parthia. Nor does America have any better reason to believe that God will bless their invading troops than the Romans or the National Socialist-era Germans did. Gott war nicht mit der Wehrmacht, their belt buckles notwithstanding, and there is absolutely no reason to believe that a nation whose government increasingly denies and rejects God, a nation that has slaughtered more of its own children behind closed clinic doors than the Moloch-worshipping Canaanites ever threw into the fires, enjoys divine favor.

America was founded on predominantly Christian principles, but she no longer lives by them. She is profligate, gluttonous, murderous, and repressive. She can no longer be reasonably described as either the land of the free or the home of the brave, but rather the land of the fat and the home of the indebted. I concluded some time ago that America was already finished in the historical sense, but it may take some time for most Americans to realize it or for America’s foreign policy to reflect that reality. This is entirely normal, few Britons understood that their empire was in decline until the sun had already set upon it.

It would, of course, be deeply ironic if the neocons were to get their way and America were to eventually learn of her loss of global superpower status not too terribly far from where Marcus Licinius Crassus lost his seven legions and met his death at the hands of the Parthians. Interestingly enough, Crassus, rather like Bush and Obama, failed to abide by the legal forms of making war before launching his ill-fated invasion.

Mailvox: what am I missing here?

Speaking of interlocutors, one of my occasional atheist emailers sent this in response to yesterday’s Mailvox. MD wrote:

‘ . . . the moment they decide to attempt to convince others that they are correct, they become targets.’

Never has there been a greater endorsement of the ‘new atheist’ movement than that last sentence! You’re cleverer than saying weak stuff like that.

I genuinely do not understand the point he is making here. The idea would appear to be that the New Atheism has made targets of Christians and other evangelical theists because they are incorrect. But I don’t see that this is the observable case at all. It seems to me if that X is attempting to convince others he is correct and Y decides to make X a target in response, the onus is therefore on Y to show that X is incorrect.

So, where do Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, or any of the New Atheists ever attempt to show that Billy Graham or John Wesley or Thomas Aquinas are incorrect? They very seldom attack anything that is even remotely recognizable as Christian theology, preferring instead to take on what appear to be poorly remembered Sunday School versions of it. The Courtier’s Reply of PZ Myers – which, to be fair, other New Atheists besides Richard Dawkins cannot be assumed to endorse – outright attempts to justify atheists knowing nothing about what they are so ineptly criticizing.

I even remarked on this bizarre failure to actually address the most basic Christian theology in TIA: “While Harris doesn’t once cite minor Christian intellectual figures such as Tertullian, Ambrose, Jerome, Gregory the Great, Thomas Aquinas, John Calvin, John Wesley, G. K. Chesterton, or even C. S. Lewis, he does find it relevant to provide one reference to Tim LaHaye, thirteen references to Hitler, Himmler, and Hess, and six whole pages dedicated to Noam Chomsky. Because, after all, no one is more suited to explain the Christian faith quite so well as an elderly author of pop religious fantasies, a trio of dead Nazis, and a left-wing Jewish linguist.”

Now Dawkins does mention Aquinas and the Five Proofs in The God Delusion, but he does little more than cry “infinite regress” and demonstrate that he has missed the point of them. (I did like his point about the natural terminator, although it doesn’t actually serve to refute any of the Five Proofs since they concern beginnings rather than ends.) He also shows that he has never actually read the Summa Theologica; it is telling to note that Dawkins immediately proceeds from his cursory glance at the Five Proofs to the Ontological Argument without realizing that Aquinas rejected it more than 700 years ago in Part 1, Question 2, Article 1 of the Summa.

“OBJECTION 2: Further, those things are said to be self-evident which are known as soon as the terms are known, which the Philosopher (1 Poster. iii) says is true of the first principles of demonstration. Thus, when the nature of a whole and of a part is known, it is at once recognized that every whole is greater than its part. But as soon as the signification of the word “God” is understood, it is at once seen that God exists. For by this word is signified that thing than which nothing greater can be conceived. But that which exists actually and mentally is greater than that which exists only mentally. Therefore, since as soon as the word “God” is understood it exists mentally, it also follows that it exists actually. Therefore the proposition “God exists” is self-evident.

REPLY TO OBJECTION 2: Perhaps not everyone who hears this word “God” understands it to signify something than which nothing greater can be thought, seeing that some have believed God to be a body. Yet, granted that everyone understands that by this word “God” is signified something than which nothing greater can be thought, nevertheless, it does not therefore follow that he understands that what the word signifies exists actually, but only that it exists mentally. Nor can it be argued that it actually exists, unless it be admitted that there actually exists something than which nothing greater can be thought; and this precisely is not admitted by those who hold that God does not exist.”

So, it seems to me that far from being the greatest endorsement of the New Atheist movement, my statement demonstrates its impotence, its ignorance, and its intellectual dishonesty.

Mailvox: it’s not about the interlocutor

AA wonders why it’s so hard to convince atheists of anything:

I’ve been debating atheists on message boards for about 5 years now and while I’m getting better at writing, I don’t think I’m seeing a lot of results. I’m just wondering, do you think there’s a place for people like me to debate on forums and then just read your blog to get ideas and material? Or is it better to carry out debates on blogs? Also –I don’t know if you have an adderall habit or what but I’m amazed at how often you post — do you do something for your attention span and work ethic?

The quote from Bartleby’s sums it up:

“He that complies against his will
Is of his own opinion still.”
~Samuel Butler (1612-1680)

It’s a tautology. Most atheists don’t believe in God because they don’t believe in God. If you listen to their stories and read their books, it is readily apparent that most of them became atheists between the ages of 10 and 17. There are various theories concerning why this happens, but the observable fact of the matter is that their atheism is actually less rational and less based on any reasoning than the average college student’s political party identification. All the appeals to science and so forth are nothing more than ex post facto rationalizations.

Hence all the false claims about Biblical knowledge and the attacks on Sunday School theology. What passes for their knowledge is usually the dimly remembered childhood church indoctrination. I can’t think of a single atheist who has ever been able to tell me the structure of an argument from the Summa Theologica, much less the actual content of any of the 610 arguments contained within it. And the next atheist I meet to have read Tertullian or any of the Latin Fathers except Augustine will be the first. Their ignorance isn’t merely limited to Christianity either, as they seldom know anything about the sacred works or theology of other religions except perhaps a little Greek and Norse mythology.

That being said, I am entirely open to hear other explanations for why an atheist remains an atheist after having his purported reasons for becoming an atheist destroyed from actual atheists.

The reason for combating atheism isn’t to convert the atheist. You will never see any such results. That simply isn’t going to happen because no atheist will ever cease being an atheist simply because all of his rationalizations have been shown to be factually incorrect, logically fallacious, or otherwise irrational. And that’s completely fine. The reason for shooting them down over and over again is to neutralize and counteract their effect on the weak-minded, who are even less inclined to think than the average evangelical atheist. I seldom intentionally attack atheists who make no attempt to convince others that gods and the supernatural do not exist for precisely this reason; I don’t care what they believe or do not believe. Their lack of belief has no effect on me or anyone else.

But the moment they decide to attempt to convince others that they are correct, they become targets. So, my advice is to keep doing what you’re doing, keep refining and improving your arguments, and you will likely prevent dozens, if not hundreds of people, from falling for the false arguments and incorrect logic being presented by evangelical atheists.

As for the frequency of my posting, I simply make a habit of it by sticking to a schedule. Two posts per day, period. Usually, that ends up meaning three or four on weekdays. It takes very little time; the average one probably takes between 10-15 minutes, so 2-3 posts is like watching one sitcom per day. That’s not a lot of work. I’ve recently taken the same approach to my writing and it’s been very effective. In 102 days since I started writing the first novel in the Arts of Dark and Light series, I’ve written 84,269 words, leaving me exactly 2.3 days ahead of an aggressive schedule. Only another 210,731 to go…. As for adderall, I’ve never heard of it. My only drugs of choice are cappucino and vino rosso. Three cups of the former and one or two glasses of the latter daily is my limit.

As Ecclesiastes reminds us, it’s all vanity. But one hopes that even so, some of it may be useful to others and will ultimately prove to be to the glory of God.