Two Articles Published in Virginia Tech's Collegiate Times

I am a PhD student at Virginia Tech, a school firmly entrenched in the Bible Belt. Yesterday, our campus newspaper, The Collegiate Times, published a special Good Friday issue called The God Issue. As a member of the Freethinkers at Virginia Tech club (http://www.freeatvt.org/), I was genuinely surprised that they wrote a very positive article about our club in addition to giving me the opportunity to write an essay on a Freethinking topic. They also published a 2008 survey of 4,804 of our students that indicates that 19.7% of Virginia Tech students have no religious preference; this is up 0.8% from 2007. This is an encouraging direction for a campus with such a strong Christian tradition.

The article on the club is here: http://www.collegiatetimes.com/stories/13506. Of course, there is a lot more they could have printed that we said that criticized religion and explained secular humanism, but at least it is positive.

The essay I wrote: http://www.collegiatetimes.com/stories/13494. The editor changed the title from my original, "There Can Be Fruitful Dialogue between Believers and Atheists." It was not intended to be an introduction to Freethinking. But at least they printed it.

The other articles about religion in The God Issue: http://www.collegiatetimes.com/stories/13510

The results of the religious preference survey were only published in the paper, not online.

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To keep a record on my blog, I'm pasting my article below:

There Can Be Fruitful Dialogue between Believers and Atheists

“Truth springs from argument amongst friends.” – David Hume

The discourse between religious believers and atheists is once again publicly prominent, thanks to the “New Atheists” – Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, Daniel Dennett, and Christopher Hitchens – and their equally vocal religious counterparts. This discussion devolves too often into a rancorous exchange, and common ground seems hard to find when opinions are so diametrically opposed. However, I sincerely believe that this common ground can be found, leading to a new level of mutual respect between the debating parties.

I am a non-believer, but I grew up in an evangelical Christian home, participated actively in the Navigators and NLCF at Virginia Tech as an undergraduate, served as a missionary to Japan, Guatemala, and Florida, and led music in several churches. Many among my friends and family are seminary educated missionaries and clergy who are familiar with the best of Christian intellectual traditions. Although I left my faith through a long journey studying science, philosophy, history, and religion, I maintain one of the principles I held as a sincere Christian: I will believe only what is true. The Apostle Paul described the value of truth to the Christian when he said that if hope in the afterlife is untrue, “we are of all men most to be pitied.” As a non-believer, I espouse the related concept that if an idea is intellectually vacuous, it should be discarded. The religious and non-religious both believe that an idea is only as valuable as it is true.

Given this common ground, let me speak to the believers. (Forgive my generalizations; brevity extinguishes nuance.) I will momentarily ignore the fact that you believe that your God will torture me for all eternity in hell, and I request the same in return about my belief that your vision of God and a reward in the afterlife is mistaken. Let's call the offenses even and move forward to determine what the truth might be. When we come into this life, we have nothing and know nothing. Yet as unprepared as we are, the mysteries of life immediately surround us. Solutions are presented by the people closest to us: our parents, pastors, teachers, and friends. To discern the best choice from among the varieties of opinion, we need to learn how to think correctly; only then can we know what to think. We must adopt the attitude Aristotle had towards his beloved teacher when he said, “Plato is dear to me, but dearer still is truth.” We want the fishing pole – and we want to know if, why, and how well it works. We must not be satisfied simply by the fish given to us by others.

The differences between atheists and believers are rooted in our differing methods of discovering truth. My truth-discovering mechanism is the application of reason to the evidence presented to us by the natural world. Believers augment their reason with faith – faith in ideas revealed through holy books and religious traditions. Here begins the controversy. Freethinking non-believers assert that faith offers no means of evaluating the truth of any claim about reality. Faith might offer answers, but it cannot tell you if its answers are true.

If you have faith that the universe is young when others claim it is very old, we turn to the reason-based physical sciences to discern the answer. If a Christian’s faith says that Jesus died and was resurrected but a Muslim’s faith says that Jesus ascended to heaven before he could be crucified, they also turn to reason. Though neither can justify their position with direct evidence, both would point to reasons why their holy book is more reliable than the other’s. While I assert that reason supports neither miraculous account, the answer to the above debates is less important than the following question: what value does faith bring to either discussion if we all eventually turn to reason for justification? The initial faith does not provide a comment on the truth. Why, then, do we bother with the faith in the first place? A more intellectually tenable position is to believe only what is reasonable based on the evidence at hand. The remainder is a mystery yet to be solved.

Though we may diverge in methodology, let us discuss our differences while remembering our shared ideal of honesty in our search for truth, discarding the prejudice that either the religious or the non-believer is stupid, immoral, or dangerous. I have experienced this kind of friendly debate with my family and friends, and I sincerely believe it can take place on a larger scale in our society. Let us, with Thomas Jefferson, “question with boldness even the existence of a god,” while taking it upon ourselves at Virginia Tech to seek the answers with an attitude of mutual respect.

Hell

I am in the middle of reading "The Language of God" by Francis Collins. Like Ken Miller's "Finding Darwin's God", he accurately represents science, so the differences between their positions and mine come down to philosophy and faith. The thought that keeps striking me is how much I share in common with them: science, history, etc. The major difference is that they make assertions about what exists outside the universe (God, the supernatural), and I profess agnosticism about it due to lack of evidence. The further thought that has dogged me lately is this: why does that simple difference carry such gravity? In the end, the answer to this question is not the existence of God, nor is it life after death. In the end, the answer is the doctrine of hell.

With no hell, it does not matter if we believe in a god or not. A God without a hell is one that recognizes the limitations placed on our knowledge and does not punish us for not recognizing him in this universe. This God is also not so petty as to take offense at the musings of men. With no hell, it does not matter if miracles happen or not (like Collins, C.S. Lewis, and Miller conjecture). These three would have little difficulty with a person voicing disagreement about supernatural intervention into the natural order if they did not believe that such opinions led to the damnation of one's soul. With no hell, the presence or absence of any other kind of afterlife is also a neutral question. The assertion of heaven, reincarnation, or eternal nothingness would be questions of much less offense if people didn't believe in hell as an option. Ultimately, it is hell - not God, not the supernatural, not Creationism, not Biblical inerrancy - that is the most damnable doctrine, since it is the one that stands in the way of rational discourse about all of the others.

Dover Beach

So I'm probably the last non-religious person in the world to have found Matthew Arnold's poetry, but his 1867 poem "Dover Beach" is beautiful:

The sea is calm to-night,
The tide is full, the moon lies fair
Upon the straits; -- on the French coast the light
Gleams and is gone; the cliffs of England stand,
Glimmering and vast, out in the tranquil bay.
Come to the window, sweet is the night-air!
Only, from the long line of spray
Where the sea meets the moon-blanch'd land,
Listen! you hear the grating roar
Of pebbles which the waves draw back, and fling,
At their return, up the high strand,
Begin, and cease, and then again begin,
With tremulous cadence slow, and bring
The eternal note of sadness in.

Sophocles long ago
Heard it on the Aegean, and it brought
Into his mind the turbid ebb and flow
Of human misery; we
Find also in the sound a thought,
Hearing it by this distant northern sea.
The sea of faith
Was once, too, at the full, and round earth's shore
Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furl'd.
But now I only hear
Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar,
Retreating, to the breath
Of the night-wind, down the vast edges drear
And naked shingles of the world.

Ah, love, let us be true
To one another! for the world which seems
To lie before us like a land of dreams,
So various, so beautiful, so new,
Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,
Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;
And we are here as on a darkling plain
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,
Where ignorant armies clash by night.

April 16

It is once again April 16th, a day that will never be the same for any Virginia Tech Hokie. The kind comments of people who read my reflections from that day helped me a lot in my grieving process. I sincerely appreciate those other bloggers who linked to my article. That drove a lot of traffic to my little blog and enabled me to have conversations with lots of web friends. It was healing to know that people were listening.

I took the day off work and school to attend the memorial services and vigils on campus today. I don't know how the day is going to affect me. I can't imagine what it's like for the families of the victims to see the news once again recount the horrors of that day.

Reading List and What I've Been Up to When Not Posting Here

I haven't posted much here in quite some time. I've been busy largely with three things.

First, work has consumed most of my time as of late. I recently won a large research contract, and working to win it, negotiate its contract, arrange the personnel, and prepare for kicking it off has killed my time and energy. This has left little time for my dissertation, too!

Second, I've been concentrating on losing weight, and living a healthy lifestyle takes time! I'm down about 30 lbs so far - finally in the healthy range. I've been on SparkPeople, a free weight loss website, and I highly recommend it.

Third, I've been doing a lot of reading. I have recently finished:

• Carl Sagan's The Varieties of Scientific Experience
• Sam Harris' Letter to a Christian Nation
  
• Richard Dawkins' The God Delusion

I'm terrible at reading one book at a time, so I'm very close to finishing the following as well:

• Daniel Dennet's Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon
• Dan Barker's Losing Faith in Faith: From Preacher to Atheist
• John Polkinghorne's Faith, Science, and Understanding

On my list to start on next (or, more likely, before I actually finish the above texts). Many of these, I've actually already started:

• Annie Laurie Gaylor's Women Without Superstition: No Gods - No Masters
• Kenneth Miller's Finding Darwin's God: A Scientist's Search for Common Ground Between God and Evolution
  
• Francis Collins' The Language of God: A Scientist Presents Evidence for Belief
• Victor Stenger's God: The Failed Hypothesis
• Robert Price's Incredible Shrinking Son of Man and The Pre-Nicene New Testament
• Carl Sagan's Demon-Haunted World, Pale Blue Dot, Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors, and Billions & Billions
• Bart Ehrman's Misquoting Jesus, Lost Christianities, and The Orthodox Corruption of Scripture
  

Rather than write individual reviews of the books I'm finishing up now, if I have time, I'd like to write an omnibus review of all of them, then move on to what's next on my list. If anyone has a comment on a book on my past, current, or future lists, I'd like to hear them. Plus, if you have a recommendation for a book I should put in the queue, I'm all ears.

Theology

Theology, as a system of thought, is so far removed from any reliable method of evaluating truth claims that its value is entirely questionable.

Concert for Virginia Tech

Last night, still getting over my cold, I went with my wife to "The Concert for Virginia Tech." Dave Matthews put together a show that also included John Mayer, NAS, and Phil Vasser. What a moment. Our Blacksburg community is still raw from the horrific events of 4/16, and any opportunity the school has to get together in one place is a chance to lift our collective spirits. I have been to every memorial service held on the campus as well as the gatherings at football games -- and now this memorial concert. We're trying to heal, and it is not easy. Each commemorative event brings with it the rush of emotions of the terrible day, but with each new coming together, we find strength.

At concerts, chanting and cheering is usually reserved only for the musicians. At this concert, with 45,000 in attendance at our football stadium, every break in the show was filled with "Let's Go, Hokies!" -- a chant rooting for ourselves and our revival. Dave Matthews is a good man for organizing this event and giving us a chance to listen to music, dance, and put our minds on happier things for a while.

Thanks are due to all the artists, none of whom were compensated for their time.

Oh, yeah -- the music! Amazing. I'm not a big John Mayer or Dave Matthews fan, but they are spectacular musicians. As a guitarist, I was wowed by Mayer's blues riffs. I wish more of his bluesy music would get played on the radio, because it's a lot better than his pop! The Dave Matthew's Band is one of the greatest collections of musicians on tour now. They jam over every piece. In concert, the Dave Matthews songs you hear on the radio become just the theme, and it is in the innumerable variations the band discovers in their live shows that the magic happens. A great show.

A Good Question about Faith

This week, I was listening to the "Faith and Freethought" podcast, one of the Triad of Reason podcasts most famous for the "Infidel Guy" show by Reggie Finley. On this particular episode, there were three friends, including the host, who had attended a Christian college together -- where they each had lost their faith. During the discussion, they brought up a question they had asked their professors, but one for which they had never received a response! I think it is worth pondering:

How can faith be used as the basis of an epistemological framework when it does not provide a means of discerning true claims from false ones?

This is just a paraphrase, but the gist of it is there.

In other words, faith itself does not distinguish whether what one has his faith in is true or false. If by its very nature, faith offers no insight into truth, why should faith serve any role at all in our pursuit of truth? I welcome responses while continue I think about the question as well.

Heaven and Hell

The Washington Post has an interesting online panel article about Heaven and Hell. The panelists were asked:

"Do you believe in heaven or hell? If not, why not? If so, who's going there and how do you know?"

Samples of the interesting entries:

Lisa Miller, the Post writer and organizer of the panel, sets the tone nicely:

In a world devoted to truth, science and skepticism, these may seem like silly questions, or, at best, late-night mind-benders at a sophomore beer party. But let’s look at the question of heaven another way: 81% of us say we believe in it and all of us are going to die. Wouldn’t it be worth applying some of our intellect and curiosity to this widely held belief so that when we do answer in an affirmative to the Gallup pollster, we’re certain we’re talking about something more important and more transcendent than the North Pole, home of Santa Claus?

Applying his "intellect and curiosity," Cal Thomas came up with:

Scripture repeatedly teaches the existence of a literal Heaven and a literal hell. Whether you believe depends on whether you think God is telling the truth and His Word is reliable. Waiting to find out for sure is too late. Tickets are “on sale” now. Choose your destination. Both are one-way journeys. The trip to Heaven is a free gift that has already been paid for, but like any gift you have to receive it. The trip to hell you must pay (and pay and pay) yourself.

Without the same trite analogy, Chuck Colson used hell the ways its inventors intended -- to keep us in line:

God doesn’t send anyone to hell. He gives us the clear understanding of how we are to behave and how we may have faith in Him and therefore be saved for eternity.

To the deep discernments of Cal and Chuck, Bob Edgar, General secretary of the National Council of the Churches of Christ in the USA, added ALL CAPS:

If God is love then God’s heaven is dwelling in that love. Hell is being on the outside of God's love, looking in. Fortunately, that never has to be the case, at least as far as God is concerned. The welcome mat is always out. God's persistent and ever-faithful message to humanity is: I LOVE YOU AND THERE IS NOTHING YOU CAN DO ABOUT IT!

Such unsupported Christian thinking is chastised in a sense by the unsupported thinking of another panelist. I hope when Christians read Anthony M. Stevens-Arroyo's mystically preachy response about the "spirit world" they begin to ask themselves what the difference is between their unjustified rationalizations and his:

A thinking, rational person is hard put to deny evidence of spirits. In my opinion, the reality of such spirits is more proximate than the existence of God. Consider these three factual sources of evidence. First: the history of humankind shows that most people over the 40,000 years or so of our species’ existence have contacted spirits. ... Second: the reported pattern of spirit behavior is consistent through history and across cultures, converting denial of spirits into a denial of empirical evidence. [Sounds like an apologist's argument for God based on the universality of belief!] ... Third: people who communicate with the spirits are not stupid.

I know Christians who would laugh about the last one unless you replaced "spirits" with God or Angels.

For good measure, the lone Mormon respondent, Kathleen Flake, also lays bare the empirically justified tenets of her beliefs:

Latter-day Saints believe the playing field is leveled by provision of a two-stage process in the afterlife: the first, called the “spirit world” allows for further preparation for the second (the degrees of glory) and the demarcation between the two is marked by God's judgment. Those who did not, in mortality, hear of Christ will be taught and have the choice of whether to be baptized. In the next world too, faith is an act of free will and not required for resurrection. Once all have had the chance to make an informed decision, they are judged by God and inhabit the degree of glory commensurate with their choice.

Again, how do you differentiate the mere assertions of one holy book against another? Remember, the charge here was to be "certain we’re talking about something more important and more transcendent than the North Pole, home of Santa Claus." Thus far, the respondents' replies to the "how do you know?" part of the question have not transcended Santa's legend.

Some Christian responders, such as Gardner Calvin Taylor, Senior Pastor Emeritus of Concord Baptist Church of Christ, replied more cautiously about their faith:

I believe heaven is the immediate presence of God. I believe hell is the total absence of God. As to who will be in heaven, I plead a reverent agnosticism.

As an elderly Christian, Taylor reminds me in his response of Billy Graham's gradual lifelong change from a fiery Christian preacher to a more reflective older man. They still cling to the promises, but enjoy the divisiveness a bit less.

A few replies made me cringe more than others, since they attempt to lure people in with a modicum of scientific thinking. Thomas J. Reese, Jesuit Priest, puts a Catholic spin on a Sagan-esque question:

Meditating on our place in the universe as taught to us by science should make us humble. We live for a brief time on a small planet spinning around a sun that is one star in a galaxy that is only one of the millions of galaxies in the universe. How insignificant we are. As a result, I sometimes think that the hardest act of faith for a modern person is believing that God cares about us.

How does he resolve this crisis of faith? With faith itself (of course!), a bit from Matthew 25, and the conclusion that "anyone who loves can go to heaven." It is just this kind of inanity that embarrassed me when I was a Christian and these guys purported to represent my thinking.

It gets worse! Jim Cooper of Trinity Church, New York, takes the cake:

If Einstein is correct and energy is neither created nor destroyed, we have energy and therefore in some basic way we continue.

Just like the crystal healers, Jim conflates the scientific concept of energy with the mystical, life force energy concept. But he said it with a collar on, so he will be believed by many a Christian ("Wow, Einstein believes what I believe?!").

There were a few dissenting voices on the panel. Wendy Doniger fatalistically observed:

I can’t believe in heaven, because I no longer believe in the possibility of justice; I cannot even imagine a world in which there is perfect justice.

Most insightful was Susan Jacoby, who turned the discussion towards the way the very ideas of heaven and hell are responsible for people denying their own reason in favor of illogical and immoral actions:

Oh, for heaven's sake. This question irritates the...inferno out of me. Of all the pointless, utterly childish notions associated with traditional religion, belief in eternal bliss in heaven or eternal damnation in hell surely tops the list.

Religions that have allowed themselves to be modified by secular knowledge downplay orthodox ideas of heaven and hell for the very good reason that such beliefs have been used throughout history to justify the most evil earthly acts imaginable. Christians slaughtered Jews and Muslims during the Crusades precisely because they believed that they were earning themselves a place in an all-Christian heaven, hemmed in by restrictive covenants.

In recent years, radical Islamists have embarked on suicide murder missions with the absolute conviction that they will be rewarded with a place in a Muslim paradise. The 60 percent of Muslim Americans who, according to a recent Pew Poll, do not accept the fact that the 9/11 terrorist attacks were carried out by Muslim Arabs, are deluded. Like the Christian Crusades, Islamist terror attacks are deeply involved with a form of religion that forsees an eternal reward for dastardly crimes against humanity.

I know that indignant readers will claim that none of these crimes have anything to do with the "real" Christianity or the "real" Islam. They don't have anything to do with modern, moderate forms of Christianity or Islam, but they have everything to do with retrograde expressions of religions that preach, among other things, the doctrine of eternal damnation for unbelievers and infidels. And these retrograde religious forms are on the rise in the world. They are every bit as "real" as religion based on earthly, loving kindness--something that promoters of religion as an unqualified good never want to admit.

All of these articles allow comments. Thankfully, hers generated the most discussion by far.

(There were many others who posted. Among these most notably was NT Wright, who used the question as a means to get into a theological discussion about the difference between heaven and the Bible's prophesied New Heavens and New Earth. His entry does not break down to a sound bite easily, but it shows the distance than can emerge between Christian theologians who are examining the same texts and finding markedly different points of emphasis -- resulting in a different conclusion: "God's new world will not have in it 'a concentration camp in the midst of a beautiful landscape', as some earlier visions of 'hell' have supposed, but rather the celebration (1 Corinthians 20.28) that 'God will be all in all'." )

Reflections on Mourning for Virginia Tech

At least half of the mourning process after an event of this magnitude involves convincing yourself that it is real. I do not think I have comprehended its reality, in spite of having spent every moment I could since Monday on campus, desperately trying to bend my mind around this horror.

For the last 9 years, I have been a Virginia Tech Hokie as an undergraduate and graduate student, and now as a part-time PhD student. On Monday, I was working my day job, which takes me about 40 miles northeast to Roanoke. I first heard of the tragedy from my wife, who is a graduate student. She was driving to school that morning, and decided instead to stop at Starbucks for coffee. She was there when the town went on lockdown, and I raced home to be with her. By the time I left, ambulances were already racing north on Route 81 to the hospitals in Roanoke; I raced south, my small Prius flanked by news vans. All the way south to Blacksburg, family and friends were calling, trying to determine if anyone we knew had been killed.

These buildings mentioned in the news – Norris, Ambler-Johnston (AJ), Torgerson, Harper – all have significant and special meanings to me. I park every Tuesday and Thursday in front of Norris Hall to go to my office in Torgerson. I usually arrive about 9 AM. Norris is where the worst of it took place, at about 9 AM but on a Monday, and Torgerson was cleared out twice last week by the shooter’s bomb threats. As an undergraduate, I lived in Harper Hall, where the shooter lived. Most of my friends, however, lived in AJ. I spent an inappropriately proportioned amount of my undergraduate career playing video games, drinking, and just hanging out there. These buildings are the sanctuaries of my Virginia Tech experience.

As I arrived in Blacksburg, I pulled into Starbucks. My wife met me as soon as I opened the door and we embraced. The whole restaurant had been sharing stories. She sat with a family who was here to tour the campus. Their son had just been accepted, and Virginia Tech was his first choice among VT, Georgia Tech, and Northwestern. At one point, the door burst open, and a woman flew through it to embrace her husband. He worked in Norris Hall on the second floor, and he had been late to work that day, due to sleeping in. His co-workers had already told him of having to step over dead bodies as they fled.

After we went home, we turned on the news. We watched in horror for a few hours. It was too much for me – I had to be on campus. The news reported that there was a vigil planned Monday afternoon on the field in front of Lee Hall. When we arrived, the news was incorrect. Instead we just walked. We walked to AJ. We just stared, the monumental, 450-room dorm just loomed large, its Hokie stone exterior unmoving. We walked to the drillfield and gazed across at Norris.

I felt a need to be close, so we walked. A few walked with us, keeping a respectful distance from the active police. The wind gusted to 40 MPH, nearly tipping us over along the long trek across the drillfield. The wind had picked up a what looked like a few small items of trash, blowing them like tumbleweeds in front of us. As we approached, we realized what was really floating through the air. They were surgical gloves, blown from the triage centers on site.

The entire area around Norris hall was cordoned off by police tape, at least a full acre. Every square foot inside the tape was covered by a police car or armored personnel carrier. As we walked, about 6 in the evening, the armed-to-the-teeth police force was unloading their M4 and M16 assault rifles. Looking at this, I was overcome by a feeling of futility. Here we had an army with assault vehicles, helmets, rifles, jackets. This army was available on a moment’s notice, and still, one lone shooter can fly under the radar and inflict this much damage. We trust, in this country, in the goodness of our countrymen and guests. What makes us great also makes us vulnerable.

I say none of this to fault the response of the school. I am not one of those calling for the resignation of our university president. In his defense, there had never been a school shooting in history that started with signs indicating a domestic dispute. At the time the shots rang out in Norris, the police were interviewing the person they thought was the prime suspect. In retrospect, of course, events like these will lead in the future to an immediate lockdown, but we must remember the information available to the university at the time.

Yesterday, Tuesday, we attended the campus memorial events. We came two hours early for the convocation in Cassell Coliseum, our basketball arena. There was already a line of people four-wide, stretching at least a mile, all people waiting to get in. There were residents of Blacksburg and students, and people from around the country were already arriving.

The line stretched by the Baptist Student Union and Latter Day Saints outreach centers. The BSU had a big sign out reminding us that God is real, hears our prayers, and is able to move to heal us. Apparently, He is simply unwilling to move to save us in the first place. I am an atheist with respect to every god I’ve met in religious literature, and an agnostic on the concept of god in general. This kind of event seems more explicable as a person’s response to something horrible in his finite, physical mind and taking action in a finite, physical world. What is the alternative? A demon torturing his soul, and an all-powerful God who lets the innocent die? A God who is willing to clean up the mess by healing the survivors, but would not intervene to save those killed?

Getting to the end of the line, I realized that we were probably 30,000^th in line for a 10,000-seat arena. About that time, they announced overflow seating in the football stadium, where they would show the convocation on the jumbotron. It was good just to be with other students. The entire field was filled with Hokies, and about a third of the 65,000 seats were occupied.

You all watched the service. I appreciated the ecumenical approach, including Muslim, Buddhist, Jewish, and Christian clergy. I will count the psychologist director of our counseling center as speaking the atheist perspective on healing. I did, however, have the thought that one of the professors killed was Indian, and most likely Hindu. I hope his family was able to find some solace.

Nikki Giovanni, a faculty member whose eloquent poetry is always a welcome addition to our engineering-focused school, captured our feelings best:

We are Virginia Tech.

The Hokie Nation embraces our own and reaches out with open heart and hands to those who offer their hearts and minds. We are strong, and brave, and innocent, and unafraid. We are better than we think and not quite what we want to be. We are alive to the imaginations and the possibilities. We will continue to invent the future through our blood and tears and through all our sadness.

We are the Hokies.

We will prevail.

We will prevail.

We will prevail.

We are Virginia Tech.

The vigil that night is almost to close to me now to describe. People absolutely poured onto the drillfield. I signed the VT memorial that President Bush signed, so filled now with signatures that I had to sign on the back. I can mourn this tragedy with Bush, even if my politics lead me to dislike him. Politics seem so far away now. I left notes on the big poster boards set up. After about an hour, there must have been 50,000 or more people on the field. I’m no expert at estimating crowd sizes. The only reference point I have is our football stadium, at it seemed we had at least a football-sized crowd.

I am not an externally emotional person. I have cried infrequently enough in my adult life that the act of so doing serves as a marker to my rational brain that something significant is happening to me. Until Tuesday, it had been fewer than three or four times. Now I don’t know how to count it, when I cried on and off all day. I’m tearing up just writing this. It happens at odd times. I broke down in the shower, just getting ready for the day yesterday, and I sobbed into my towel. Every time we sang a school song or chanted “Let’s Go Hokies!” I had to sit out until the final refrains to clear my eyes and throat. When I met people who had traveled to Virginia Tech from Texas and New York, I was choked up again.

Talking to friends as we gathered, we heard from people who knew the fallen. From the names released so far, I am not directly connected to any of the injured or killed. The closest connection to the names released so far is a biology-graduate-student friend who was teaching a class attended by Ryan Clark, the exemplary undergraduate who was graduating in May with a triple major. She had a one-on-one meeting with him scheduled for Friday to go over his semester project. Ryan was the RA killed in AJ. My friend is quite shaken. My pain is not as acute as those who have directly lost their loved ones, but this is my Hokie family. I have never felt a loss like this.

Prior to the start of the vigil, the silence alone was enough to break your heart. Just image being in the presence of tens of thousands, yet still having to converse in hushed tones to respect the reverence of the moment. Most silent of all were those standing near Norris, just off the drillfield. Sitting just a few dozen yards away were beautiful flowers, sent from universities around the country to make yet another memorial. Yet here at Norris, there were CSIs walking in and out, feet covered in cloth slippers, hands in green rubber gloves. It was too much, and both my wife and I lost it once again.

Which brings me to the press. I refuse to let my memory of the day be ruined by the vulturous photographers, but this should not go unsaid. There in the sanctuary of mourning outside Norris, a Reuters photographer stuck a telephoto lens not less than 18 inches from my wife’s weeping face and started clicking. One photo, I would have let it go. But he just kept shooting. Click-click-kik-kik-kik. In a hushed tone, I told him to leave, and to what little credit he deserves, he did. Nonetheless, the moment of mourning that he invaded so rudely made it to Yahoo’s picture feed. Sometimes we need to worry less about what posterity will remember from the day, and let us have a moment.

Worse yet were those taking pictures of the vigil. Cameramen stood atop the permanent stone podium in front of our iconic Burruss Hall, shooting directly down on the memorial itself. They were standing atop the memorial! This was where the student leaders were to speak! Finally, they were cleared out for a few moments to let the leaders speak, but as soon as the service was over and the prolonged moment of silence began, they invaded the podium like an army and the silence was broken by a machine gun fire of cameras. They blocked so much of the area behind the podium that our Corps of Cadets could not line up there as they planned, and they instead went into the crowd of students. The cameramen ignored the pleas of students who asked them to clear away from the memorial and give us 15 minutes before shooting again. The members of the corps who stood at parade rest in silent vigil, guarding the memorial, had cameras a foot from their faces to capture every last somber tear. Suffice it to say that I’m upset, but let’s not remember the day for the actions of the press.

More impressive were the thousands upon thousands of students, Blacksburg residents, and Hokies and supporters from around the world who showed solidarity in the face of tragedy. No photograph or video I’ve seen since could possibly capture what it was like to see candles raised above heads and people shouting “Let’s Go Hokies!” It seemed odd at first to shout as we do for our football team, but the cry now means so much more. I’m pushing two meters, so I had a good panoramic view of the small flames that stretched endlessly in the black night, each flickering light a person who will miss the fallen, who will never forget their memory, and who will rebuild this university stronger out of this adversity.

We are the Hokies.

We will prevail.

We will prevail.

We will prevail.

We are Virginia Tech.

My Campus (Virginia Tech): Worst Shooting in US History

I cannot believe what I am seeing. The worst shooting in the history of the United States took place at my school, Virginia Tech, today.

Everyone I know so far is OK, but with 31 so far confirmed dead and 29 others injured -- and the shooting taking place in an Engineering building -- I have the horrible feeling that someone I know is dead.

Three times a week, I park in the lot where you see the police staging the raid of Norris Hall. I have class in the building next door on Tuesdays and Thursdays, and I have an office in Torgerson Hall, the building threatened with the bombings last week. I spent a good bit of my undergraduate career hanging out in Ambler Johnston Hall with my friends.

This is unbelievably horrible, and far too close. I'm at home with my wife now watching the horror on television.

Henry Morris and Virginia Tech

PZ Myers posts about owning an old copy of Henry Morris' The Twilight of Evolution.

Henry Morris was a professor and eventually the head of the department of Civil Engineering at my school, Virginia Tech, from 1957-1970. He wrote this book during his tenure here. (I'm currently a PhD student at VT in Computer Engineering.)

Yesterday, I went to a discussion group that was talking about Dawkins' The God Delusion. There, the topic of Henry Morris came up. There were several retired VT professors of Biology, Computer Engineering, and other sciences there that personally know both him and Ken Cumming, another VT professor who co-founded the Institute for Creation Research with Morris. It was fascinating to hear stories about what these guys were like when they were at VT.

Morris was apparently a top-quality engineer, but he evidently betrayed strong signs of knowledge compartmentalization from the beginning. One of the stories told was that in the middle of the night, he saw a vision or heard a voice from God telling him that He was going to divinely destroy Blacksburg, VA (VT's town) for its sins. Morris apparently immediately roused his entire family and walked the perimeter of the town, praying God's forgiveness on the town. God apparently listened, since Blacksburg is still around. BTW, Blacksburg is a not a big town, but it's no small feat to walk its perimeter... maybe they meant the perimeter of the campus.

I'll have to see if I can find these former faculty members again and get some more first-hand impressions of Morris in his early days. It could be valuable, considering Morris is the modern founder of the American creationist movement.

Hovind Sentenced

Kent Hovind gets 10 years. I don't take much pleasure in his prison sentence. Yes, it is justice; he broke the law. But as it relates to issues of science, those who side with him see him as a martyr, those who do not did not need convincing of his illogic. Yet he did leave us with one more insight into his character:

Hovind said the Internal Revenue Service, presiding judge and prosecutor broke the law by going after him, and there were things he could do "to make their lives miserable."

Comparing himself to a buffalo in a lion fight, Hovind's voice was heard saying "As long as I have some horns, I'm going to swing. As long as I have some hoofs, I'm going to kick. As long as I have some teeth, I'm going to fight. The lion's going to know he's been in a fight."

...

[R]ecordings, compiled by the IRS from phone conversations from jail, showed Kent Hovind was trying to hide assets from the government, Assistant U.S. Attorney Michelle Heldmyer said.

In one phone conversation played in court, Kent Hovind was heard to advise a business partner to put only "what you can afford to lose" in a church account.

So even after he was in jail, he was still making threats against the government, still evading tax laws.

After all this, take a look at the first user comment posted at the end of the article:

By the power of the Holy Spirit, Dr. Hovind will do to prison what he did to jail: Turn it into another "Paul the Apostle" experience, winning the lost inmates and guards to Jesus Christ, the Savior we must ALL have if we want eternal life. Dr. Hovind truly is an "ambassador in chains."

Hovind's wife will be sentenced March 1.

New Template

No new musings, but I have a new template! What do you think?

Taking a Break

I realized a few weeks ago that I am burnt out a bit regarding the topics on this blog. My passionate interest in the issues surrounding Christianity, atheism, agnosticism, creation, and evolution can only take the front seat in my life for so long. While I can never really turn off my desire to learn about these subjects, I can feel myself getting overwhelmed with the number of goals I've set for myself simultaneously. I am a full-time PhD student in Computer Engineering at Virginia Tech and a full-time computer architect professionally. This is enough to fill my time. The Blog and the constant interest in other blogs, books, and podcasts has got to be put down for a while. My dissertation is looming large, and I'm going to try to focus on it for a while.

After having decided to take this break a few weeks ago, I've found it quite refreshing. In the midst of class, work, and dissertation time, I've actually found the time to whip out my axe (electric guitar) and wail away for a while. Good times. Guitar is the other great passion of my life -- yes, in addition to computer architecture, science, philosophy, and religion. I don't know how long I'll be away, but I do know what I'll be doing: working, class, dissertation, and rocking out on my electric/bass/classical/steel-string gutars.