thinking big

first terri schiavo's death after so much controversy and now it appears that the pope has at most the weekend... it's a crazy week in the universe.

regardless of the arguments presented about schiavo, it saddens me that we live in a system that will allow a citizen to starve to death. this article on msnbc interested me... it shows actual brain scans from 3 years ago and evidence of what percentage of terri's brain had degenerated since her heart failure in 1990. regardless of whether she would have wanted to live in the state she'd been in, in a country where it's illegal to starve animals, our legal system made it legal to starve a 41 year old to death. it doesn't matter if she could feel/process it completely or not; it wasn't "letting" her die, it was "making" her die. i can understand michael schiavo's arguments and i can understand terri's parents feelings; i can understand that there's a lot of gray area in this case and that it was not possible to ascertain terri's wishes directly. it's not the same but i kept thinking back to when my grandma had a feeding tube put in. at first she didn't want it, but the pastor who visited her commented "when God's ready for you to go home, He'll take you, feeding tube or not... in the meantime, i'd let your body decide, and not force it by not allowing yourself to get the food you need" in other words, if it were a respirator, or something keeping organs going fine; choosing to deprive someone of food, moderately ridiculous. regardless of the court's decision (and given i don't know enough of the specifics to know why they decided as they did), i think there are much more humane possibilities to have been considered. starvation i think, is wrong.

re: the pope -- wow, what a time to be living in. my dad was just commenting over christmas that he always watches midnight mass at the vatican when we get home from candlelight christmas eve service at our lutheran church... "same old pope all these years" he commented, and about how much he likes him. living with colleen (who is catholic) this year, i've heard a bit more about the pope's writing and positions on various things and my respect for him has grown; the world will miss him.

re: other things... eric and i had our big "chat about the universe" this afternoon... in case you have no intuition about which of my friends says which kinds of things, the question i posted last night was his, which i think is a wonderful question. he took lots of notes about things i said so that i figure he didn't think my commentary was completely ridiculous :-P my response to his question from last night? (what would an ideal religion accomplish for you?) was "well, it's a parallel construction to your answer, but i accept the axiom that God exists, so a religion i accept needs to (1) tell me about who God is, and (2) help me understand my relationship with Him"... eric asked me if i think mathematics is created or discovered (my 11th grade pre-AP pre-calc teacher's phrasing of a question eric went a much longer way around to addressing), because he argues that mathematics is a constant and even more fundamental in structure than the universe, i.e. there could exist different plausible universes, but there could not exist mathematics other than it is... when my answer (after much pondering) was "i think math is created by God and discovered by us", eric was thrown for a slight loop... eventually i concluded thought that i understand science to be the exploration of God's creation and if math isn't God's creation, it's firmly intertwined with God's creation and so by studying it, you're still studying an aspect of God's creation no matter how you put it.... we talked about absolute justice (i think it exists but while it's clear from the context of God's perspective, it's often hard from our perspective to see it in all situations; eric thinks it's an unnatural concept and that there's too much gray in the world for it to exist)... eric also argued that he thinks people come up with theorems and then form axioms to back them up, and i argued that that isn't always the case (e.g. he thinks i was taught at some point that absolute justice exists and therefore i choose to believe in axioms that support that, while i countered that my belief in the existence of absolute justice is a result of my understanding of who God is and His plan for the world... in other words, in his diagram of implications in his notes he was taking, i told him to turn his homology statement of my beliefs into a cohomology statement and he laughed at my mathy phrasing :-P)... finally, i made the point that i think that while science, by it's very nature of systematically studying how the universe works, is built on axioms and theorems and corollaries and lemmas and the like, you can *maybe* axiomatize some of the existence ideas of religion, but since religion is also about people in relationship with God, it can't all be quantified by the same methods and criteria (nor could i axiomatize my friendship with eric... relationships between living creatures are too dynamic to be completely formulated scientifically), and broken down into axioms.

so yeah, it was a highly quality chat. when we talk about God and religion and the universe it sounds so scientific :-P i'm glad he respects and trusts me enough to sit down and talk about such things; i think it's interesting to dissect how deep you have to go to get to the differences in our beliefs..... i.e. we come to very different conclusions about many things, but it's not because one of us is crazy -- it's because we have some very different fundamental assumptions about the universe, and the resulting philosophy we each hold seems to be the best fit for what we each hold to be true... example? i believe that God exists and that He exists outside time and outside space, while being able to interact with time and space as well. Eric has issues with understanding how a being can exist without a time-space frame of reference, because his definition for "exist" has to do with those. i think i get as much out of our chats as i apparently give him to think about (taking evidence as what crops up in future chats and what i see him take notes about).... after all that rambling, any thoughts from anyone else? or have i used sufficiently many math words to scare you all :-P?

so yeah, that sums up my afternoon -- lots of chatting about the nature of being and the structure of the universe -- aren't you jealous?

oh! and i think i came up with a bijective proof of something that's never been proved bijectively before :-) dr.z. will be proud of me again next thursday... he's also known for practical jokes, and i'm beginning to think an email he sent to our class this morning was one such joke, but it caught a lot of us at first... i'll post it when i know for sure if it's real or not; if it was a joke, it was a good one.

now, leigh and i are off to see "bride and prejudice", review of that later :-P

night y'all