Bill's Notes

That's my summing up of 2005. A hard year, the most difficult since the first Peace Corps year. I won't recount the difficulties, either of that year or the past one, except to say that I worked my ass off, and accomplished most of what I set out to do, and at least ended the year with a two-week vacation. (All that applies to both 1993 and 2005, for those obsessed with parallel structures.)

Have you all have a great New Year, especially Super G., who wished me a Happy New Year in the comments.

I'm turning in early tonight. I'm in a hotel in Petersburg, Va., and will finish driving home tomorrow. Probably six or seven hours, more if I stop in D.C., as I sometimes like to do.

Pax Christi.

10. Aliens will finally arrive, with great fanfare, on earth. After a thorough examination of our society, they will pronounce Islam the dumbest, most patently false, most obviously self-serving religion in the history of the universe.

9. The Democrats will win the midterm 2006 elections by keeping quiet, flying under the radar, and allowing the GOP to self-destruct.

8. Andrew Sullivan will be miraculously healed of his homosexuality, and, in the confusion of his new heterosexuality, will propose to the first woman who sleeps with him. It'll be Maureen Dowd. She'll turn the proposal down.

7. The Palestinians will announce free elections, elect moderate politicians, and seek accommodation and peace with Israel. "Terrorism is so 2001," one Hamas official will say.

6. The New York Jets will get Reggie Bush, somehow, and be on track by year's end to make the playoffs. The Iggles will rebuild. The Cowboys will move to LA. The Houston Texans will improve. New Orleans will still be underwater.

5. Jenna Jameson will show up at my front porch, having given up her career and converted to Roman Catholicism, and announce she wants to settle down and begin a serious relationship. With me. I'll say, "Friends first."

4. A confession will be found in Mecca written by Mohammed, in which he declares he made the Koran up to justify doing whatever he wanted to do at the time. The body of Jesus of Nazareth will be found in a well-marked grave in Jerusalem. The Ark of the Covenant will be found, and it will turn out that there was an asterick after the first, fourth, sixth and seventh commandments. After the asterick on the bottom of the tablet, it said, "Just kidding. Actually, I liked the Egyptians better."

3. People will start throwing away their cell phones, declaring, "They're just too rude." Many people will start walking everywhere. Time Magazine will proclaim a trend in a cover story, "The New Walking." No one will notice.

2. Somewhere in the world, a woman will spontaneously and without prodding apologize for wrongdoing against a man.

1. IndustrialBlog will finally get linked by Instapundit. I won't post for three weeks afterward, until the instalanche is gone.

While reading Sam Harris' The End of Faith, I began to wonder about a few things. The first is, even though I'm a Christian, I agreed with the vast majority of what's in the book. When he discusses the nature of faith, I began to really wonder ... and get a little confused.

It seems to me there's faith and then there's faith. Confusing, yes. But by that, I mean we mean different things when we speak of faith.

Faith is a powerful process. And as I learned in AA, you can access that power by having faith in anything. "Just believe in a Higher Power," we were told, incessantly. I had problems with that, but I couldn't argue with the results. People believed, with all due sincerity or not, in all sorts of nonsense. The Big Book (that is, the manual of AA) was the word of God, for example. "The lightbulb is my higher power," is another. People constantly told me about the importance of faith, about people who got out of insane asylums by believing in an angel on their shoulder (seriously, a guy told me that he told a person in the nuthouse that he was placing an angel on the crazyman's shoulder, and the crazy guy got better).

There was a deeper, Joseph Campbell-esque conclusion to be drawn as well -- that God was everywhere, and you could access Him by having faith, and that His presence informed all world religions, well-known or made up. And that it was all about your own intentions, and what you chose to put your attention upon. And of course this meant that there was a religious experience to be had in all faiths, and the real enemy, according to Campbell, was the dogma that great up around it.

Anyway, these different definitions of faith are part of the problem. There is simply the power and happiness that comes when you stop questioning and just get on with your life, secure that you're on the right path. There is also (potentially) a power that comes merely from having faith in God, as God makes Himself known through His various masks (or in the Catholic sense, through His grace in different traditions). But when I speak of faith, I'm also talking about a third thing. And that's a belief in the actual truth of the spiritual propositions because there is evidence of such, not complete evidence, more like an incomplete picture. I'm a Christian not because I believe that Christianity is a way that man has found to experience God, and God has gone along with it, ignoring its dogma, but because I believe that God has sent Christ into the world to save it. My faith is based on spiritual experiences, yes, and scripture, and by testing my beliefs against what I see in the world.

Okay, to back up. There's the faith I have because I self-identify as a Christian, and because I have a personal investment in that identity, and because I want to be right about it. This faith is a mental trap. Sam Harris tears this kind of faith apart, and I agree with him. Then there is a faith that produces results, regardless of its truthfulness or falsity; this is the AA experience, and it's more or less a mental trick designed to allow us to get on with our lives. This is faith is useful, but can also lead to the mental trap above. Then there's faith that's really about holding fast to the memory of experiences, learning to trust in the truth of propositions formulated by evidence, and holding to them even when it's difficult.

I dunno. More on this later.

Inter-species marriage in England Israel.

CORRECTION: The bride is a British Jew, and they married at the Eilat dolphin reef on the Red Sea, in Israel. No word if the dolphin is Jewish. Thanks to Harry for pointing it out. The story appears to be real.

My Web host, PowerBlogs was out yesterday, but PB's intrepid leader, Chris Lansdown, managed to regenerate everything. Better known blogs Dean Esmay and Volokh Conspiracy were out, too.

But we're all back up good as new and back to blogging.

Whew! They don't have a patch for blogging, you know.

I won't be seeing Munich in the theaters.

I haven't been tagged, but I thought I'd answer this meme of fours anyway.

Four jobs you’ve had in your life: Cook, lifeguard, professor, editor.

Four movies you could watch over and over: The Two Towers, Superman II, Office Space, Blackrobe.

Four places you’ve lived: Toms River, NJ, Manila, Philippines, Franceville, Gabon, Cranbury, NJ.

Four TV shows you love to watch: Boston Legal, House, NCCI (or something like that), Fox football.

Four places you’ve been on vacation: Quebec City, Sao Tome, Paris, Cebu City.

Four websites you visit daily: Dean Esmay, Mark Shea, Eternity Road, Resurrection Song.

Four of your favorite foods: Ribs, Chicken, Steak, Ring Dings.

Four places you’d rather be: Paris, Franceville, San Diego, St. Thomas.

Four albums you can’t live without: Darkness on the Edge of Town, The Jukes, Nevermind, Wish You Were Here.

I tag Paul B.