I went to church today. Ok, so I did it to get out of mowing the lawn. I think Jesus would approve.
I wrote a letter and a couple notes I would like to develop later. The preacher made a fairly interesting few statements about relative morality. His metaphor was the brown cow in winter, white cow in the grass thing. You know, the cow looks white in the summer until it’s surrounded by snow, then it looks brown. One of his vignettes was the idea of our sins nailed to the cross along with Jesus, which has a lot more significant meaning than your typical NIV youthcamp Christian understands.
Above the head of those executed during certain periods of the Roman empire there would be nailed a bill of the offenses of the person. So Paul meant that little thing in a lot more literal sense than it may seem. I’m sure the visual was much more shocking and effective for the people of Collosse.
Anyway, he stood up next to a white projector screen telling all this and it occurred to me that he may be playing into a greater truth than he understands.
I think there’s always an albedo effect with any moral code. Which is good news in that you are lost against that white screen and the perfection of the form is retained though you really suck at it. It’s in everything from frat pledges to the Army’s NCO Creed. There has to be something in any discipline to not live up to for it to be valid.
There is also another point I’ll develop later. I expect it to be a major theme in my writing for a while.
In the art of shooting, the worst thing you can do is sit and prepare. The faster you can get a steady stance, establish sight picture, and fire, the better your group will be. It takes me three breaths to shoot an inch or smaller group at 300 meters. If I take longer, I end up changing sight picture or breathing wrong or adjusting stance. When dealing with hypotenuses 300 meters long, all of that factors in and makes huge differences. In other words, do not do that.
So then, how does faith vs. method factor into that art?
It seems to me that an argument could be made that the scientific method as a means to nail knowledge targets is less likely to get the job done because you spend so much time and effort preparing the shot. If you’re planning a cold bore sniper shot, then all that is fine, but if you’re grouping, then you need to practice a more efficient and faster method. Faith may be that method. If you applied the SM to every single decision of your day, you would never get anything done. And it sort of makes sense not to puzzle deeply on cosmological questions that will, in highest probability, never be answered.
That’s all Devil’s Advocate stuff of course.
On a side note:
My M16 broke and was jammed in a non-designed-for fully automatic mode. It was fun, though it ruined my qualification yesterday. The range sergeant was very curious as to how I managed to blow through two full clips before I figured it out.
