"If you died today, you would probably go to hell"

 ChatGPT tells me: 

"The Mormon Church sees the Catholic Church as part of an apostate Christianity that emerged after the original church's corruption, though it respects Catholics as sincere believers in Christ. Conversely, the Catholic Church does not recognize Mormonism as Christian due to its differing theology, particularly on the nature of God, but values Mormons' commitment to family and morality, fostering cooperation on shared social issues."

Orson Scott Card is a practising Mormon, a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS Church). In his SF writing he wears his religion lightly, although his strong interest in ethics, values and morality shines through. In the Ender/Shadow series he portrays the recurring character of Sister Carlotta, a Roman Catholic nun who works as an agent of the Interstellar Fleet.

I won't give you the context of the following dialogue between Sister Carlotta and 'Bean' (Julian Delphiki) who is an amoral military veteran of Battle School currently on the run in Latin America: it would be too lengthy.

Amazon link

Instead focus on the theme here: Sister Carlotta speaking to Bean - who selfishly cares only for his own survival, meanwhile despising that very drive as mere mammalian instinct.

“You keep thinking that death is the most terrible thing that can happen to a person, but to God, death just means you're coming home a few moments ahead of schedule. To God, the dreadful outcome of a human life is when that person embraces sin and rejects the joy that God offers. So of all the millions who might die in a war, each individual life is tragic only if it ends in sin."

"So why are you going to such trouble to keep me alive?" asked Bean, thinking he knew the answer.

"You want me to say something that will weaken my case," said Carlotta. "Like telling you that I'm human and so I want to prevent your death right now because I love you. And that's true, I have no children but you're as close as I come to having any, and I would be stricken to the soul if you died at the hands of that twisted boy. But in truth, Julian Delphiki, the reason I work so hard to prevent your death is because, if you died today, you would probably go to hell,”

Shadow of the Hegemon: Book 2 of the Shadow saga, p. 95.

In Shadow of the Hegemon, Bean is approximately 9-10 years old. Despite his young age, he is intellectually far beyond his years, one of the smartest human beings alive due to his genetic modifications, which also contribute to his emotional detachment and existential nihilism.

A well-taken point about life and death, I thought, regardless of your religious proclivities.

"How I Joined the Resistance" by JD Vance

JD Vance being received into the Catholic Church

Some people find a 6,000 word essay a little daunting, so here it is distilled down to 250 words by ChatGPT.

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"On Mamaw and becoming Catholic

The author reflects on his grandmother, Mamaw, and her complex relationship with organized religion. She had a deep personal faith but distrusted religious institutions, often criticizing televangelists as corrupt while still watching them. Her faith was more about a personal connection with Jesus rather than formal worship.

The author contrasts Mamaw’s de-institutionalized Christianity with his own journey. He grew up with certain misconceptions about Catholicism, influenced by his grandmother’s ambivalence and Protestant anti-Catholic sentiments. Despite his initial skepticism, he gradually found Catholicism's historical continuity and balanced authority compelling. His transition included a period of atheism driven by a desire for social acceptance among elites and a flirtation with libertarianism.

His time in the Marines and subsequent education at Yale Law School prompted a deeper introspection. Encounters with intellectuals like Peter Thiel led him to question his pursuit of achievement over character. He began to see Catholicism as embodying virtues he valued: community, compassion, and a demanding yet forgiving Christ.

Overcoming his concerns, including the Church's scandals and the impact on his family, he converted to Catholicism. The process deepened his understanding of faith, emphasizing the importance of humility, community, and consistent practice. He realized that becoming Catholic was necessary to nurture the best parts of himself, particularly those related to family, patience, and forgiveness. The journey was as much about intellectual acceptance as it was about heart and community, leading him to embrace a faith that demanded personal growth and grace."

"Where is heaven, Father?"

Some seven or eight years ago I attended a Catholic event with Clare at the church in Andover. I think it was a lecture on some theological issue or other, or maybe a talk on the Missions. In any event it was a dark night and the church was packed.

At some stage in the evening the priest, an elderly, kindly man with a poor public speaking style, took questions from the audience: a kind of 'ask me anything'.

A quavering voice - evidently an elderly Irish woman - piped up from behind us: "Father, where is heaven?"

My jaw dropped: in this day and age?

The priest was, however, up to the job. He explained that previous orthodoxy had held that heaven was beyond the sky. However, NASA had sent a great many rockets and heaven was nowhere to be seen up there. However, modern physics was very strange with quantum effects between the atoms which no-one understood. Possibly it was here that heaven was located.

There was no follow-up question.

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It made me think though. If heaven is nowhere to be found in this spacetime universe, could it really be found in Hilbert space? Perhaps in the primordial substance before spacetime geometry had ever congealed?

Let's ask Carlo Trugenberger: "Emergent 4D Quantum Geometry from Critical Space-Time Graphs".

"After a brief introduction to the problem of quantum gravity and the main solution approaches on the market I will focus on my new proposal of a quantum gravity model in which the fundamental degrees of freedom are information bits for both discrete space-time points and links connecting them.

"The Hamiltonian is a very simple network model consisting of a ferromagnetic Ising model for space-time vertices and an antiferromagnetic Ising model for the links. As a result of the frustration between these two terms, the ground state self-organizes as a new type of low-clustering graph.

"I will provide ample evidence that this simple network model has two critical points, an ultraviolet fixed point corresponding to fluctuating information bits and an infrared fixed point corresponding to an emergent geometric phase with space-time dimension 4.

"The model predicts that, at small scales, the space-time dimension decreases until space-time itself completely dissolves into a disordered soup of information bits.  The large-scale dimension 4 of the universe is related to the upper critical dimension 4 of the Ising model and to illustrate the dimension decoupling mechanism I will solve a toy version of the model in the mean field approximation.

"At finite temperatures the universe graph emerges without big bang and without singularities from a ferromagnetic phase transition in which space-time itself forms out of a hot soup of information bits."

So heaven might be 'a hot soup of information bits' (but perhaps that's the other place). Perhaps we could link this idea with Eternal Inflation to get a contemporaneous theological ontology.

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How do we know that our current universe has three spatial dimensions? Because Clare needed a minimum of three strings to deploy her self-made bird feeder (two pie dishes from Poundland).

Three strings = three spatial dimensions

The designer shows her grasp of string theory

As I carefully explained to her, the argument works best in polar coordinates.

Nativity Crib Festival

A visit to the Nativity Crib Festival at St. Cuthbert's Church in Wells, Somerset this afternoon.

Alistair Glanville's Model Village (video below)

Angels at the Altar

Some of the Cribs from surrounding churches and individuals

More Cribs

The Crib from the local Catholic Church - St. Joseph and St. Teresa

The presiding minister

And here's a video of Alistair Glanvile's Model Village - it's quite impressive to watch the village come to life.

The Catholic Christmas Bazaar in Wells

Today's piece of family trivia. After yesterday evening's excitement, this morning found us at the town hall supporting the local Catholic Church Christmas Bazaar.

Clare is way too pleased to hang out with Santa

Our wreath bought here

Town Hall view of the Wells Saturday Market

Alex and Adrian on their way to the mulled wine bar

Black Saturday Waitrose on the way back. Rarely has it been so busy - middle-class passive-aggressive trolleying trumping chav wrestling and fisticuffs.

A joy to be home.

Doves in the Church

Those kind, committee-minded ladies at the Church are apparently organising events for those poor unfortunates in the Calais Jungle. Never mind that it has been reported that:

"A crisis relief charity chief is set to pull the plug on aid to the Calais ‘Jungle’ camp after discovering most people there are economic migrants ‘without any reason’ to leave their home country. The Bradford-based Human Relief Foundation has been running a project to help the ‘refugees’ at the makeshift camp and previously claimed they were all ‘fleeing war and significant atrocities.’ But a visit by a team led by Kassim Tokan, the HRF deputy chief executive, discovered a totally different picture on the ground, with unwanted clothing and food being ‘dumped and burnt’ by the migrants. Instead of vulnerable families fighting for survival he found the camp – dubbed the Jungle – was ’95 to 97 per cent’ adult men.

"The discovery has prompted the charity – which sends relief aid to people in desperate need around the world – to change its aid policy in respect of the Calais camp where around 4,000 people are living. They found chaotic conditions with no organisation where aid was being distributed randomly and unwanted items later discarded in piles on the ground. Interviewed by ITV’s Calendar News, Mr Tokan admitted he was surprised by what he found. Asked if his charity would withdraw support for the camp’s inhabitants, he said: ‘Most likely, yes.’

"He said it would be better to help people in genuine need in Jordan, Lebanon and Turkey rather than ‘healthy people here.’

The 'Calais Jungle' in action

I'm reminded of the iterated hawks vs. doves scenario in evolutionary game theory. You have this kind of payoff matrix.

If everyone is a dove, then they all cooperate in harmony and everyone gets a steady one unit of reward. If a hawk should chance along - with an angry sense of entitlement, shall we say? - the hawk takes but does not reciprocate. The hawk gets a reward of 2 units while the dove gets ripped off. The hawks steer clear of each other - when they meet, things get violent and abusive and they each reap damage of -2 units. Eventually, there are no more doves and the whole setup collapses. A metaphor for consistent Christianity, you might think.

The Old Testament is the way to go. As you will no doubt recall, in tournaments trialling different interpersonal strategies tit-for-tat tends to win out. Tit-for-tat is really an 'eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth', as explained in the diagram below, albeit one which is quick to forgive on repentance.

It's important to recall that the specific Hawk-Dove payoff matrix (or Prisoner's Dilemma, or Chicken - they're all variants) logically comes first. It's that which determines cooperation to be good, mutual defection terrible, but defection when dealing with a cooperator best of all.

If the world presents a situation with that kind of payoff matrix, then we can discuss what strategy to adopt. Unconditional cooperation - let's be brutal - means you're a sucker. Unconditional defection is just brutal, and worse, leads to terrible outcomes when not dealing with unlimited suckers. Tit-for-tat generally and robustly comes out top: start nice, punish cheaters but be prepared to forgive.

You may have noticed that in interpersonal matters, women have an instinctive psychological knowledge of these game-theoretic truths*. And those Church women, what's that all about? Trust me, those very pleasant women will never meet a single person from the Jungle face-to-face,

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* Men sometimes organise themselves into a hierarchical pecking order (the threat of physical aggression can play a part in this - think Mafia) where you can defect down but have to cooperate up. Short of running away, which is usually not possible, you're stuck with it: you play dove-up and hawk-down. The society of women is, arguably, often more egalitarian.

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Here's the video tutorial for Hawk vs. Dove (just under 10 minutes). Best viewed in conjunction with reading this Wikipedia article.

Cataracts - bah!

Busy day today. Started with the opticians for an eye test: they were very thorough. It appears that my eyes have degraded yet again - new specs! - and that I have early-onset cataracts. The effect, apparently is to make the lenses of both eyes rather misty rather than clear and transparent. Here are the typical symptoms.

• you may find it more difficult to see in dim or very bright light
• the glare from bright lights may be dazzling or uncomfortable to look at
• colours may look faded or less clear
• everything may have a yellow or brown tinge
• you may have double vision
• you may see a halo (a circle of light) around bright lights, such as car headlights or street lights
• if you wear glasses, you may find that they become less effective over time

I'm told to expect the operations (both eyes) in 3-5 years (just like my parents). Genes, huh.

After that excitement I joined Clare, very delayed, to hoover the church. I do this in a spirit of solidarity with my idiosyncratically-observant wife and for the exercise. I currently lose the hoover detritus but am open to offers from any spies who wish a DNA bomb to deliberately false-trail scene-of-incident genetic evidence.

Then I hit the gym to put it all behind me!

A recent post bemoaned my indecision as to how to use my spare time .. and Adrian's now-vacated bedroom as a study. I have decided to write some AI programs in JavaScript (calm yourselves - it's become a proper language these days!) which I can use to cheer up this very blog. Don't hold your collective breaths!

The Tramp in the Church (redux)

We've been here before.

As Clare led the way into the church this morning, she spotted him occupying the pew just before the back one, the one where we usually hang out on the right hand side of the aisle.

"Where would you like us to go?" she whispered back to me.

"On the other side," I replied, meaning the other wing of the church, the one facing the Holy Land rather than the north-facing wing where we currently were.

Clare mistook my meaning and we continued to the rear pew on the other side of the aisle, where I was able to keep watch on the somnolent tramp from the corner of my eye. With no little schadenfreude I kept count of latecomers, who were forced by overcrowding into the empty pews in front and behind him.

During the service he stayed crouched down, occasionally turning in one direction or another. Finally we approached the part of the Mass where the congregation make the "sign of peace". I didn't think he would venture as far as me but I had prepared a little script involving bowing to him and whispering 'pax vobiscum' in a detached kind of way. Hopefully that would save me from having to use Clare's wet-wipes afterwards.

In the event, as the moment came, he enthusiastically shook his dirty mitt with the family in front and the young man behind, then he scuttled across the aisle and shook hands with a lay official of the parish, just in front of me. Like a wave which reaches its limits amidst the pebbles, this marked the culmination of his efforts and he retreated back to his lair.

"We dodged a bullet there," I confided to Clare.

During the sermon the priest, Father Philip, confided that Mass yesterday evening had been disrupted by a man who walked up to the altar, started swearing and disrobing, and claimed to be Jesus Christ. Apparently the services of burly parishioners - and possible the police - were required to restore normality.

The priest's take was focused on the virtues of taking your medication: I had no idea that such excitement occurred in sleepy Wells. I looked at the tramp again, this time in a wholly new light, excited by the possibilities.