Andrew Jackson, the guy on the $20

I recently completed reading "The Passions of Andrew Jackson," a biography of the 7th President of the United States, and the hero of New Orleans, written by Dr. Andrew Burstein.

While I had hoped this book would be a straightforward biography of this controversial president, I was somewhat disappointed. I will give Dr. Burstein his due: this well-researched work does exactly what the author outlines in the beginning of the book, proving the thesis that Andrew Jackson was a man of many passions, someone who did not like or dislike people, but one who loved or hated.

As such, this book glosses over notable events in Jackson's common history, such as the Battle of New Orleans, and even his second term as president. Many more pages are dedicated to the spite he held for dueling opponents in his youth and his correspondence about them. Thus, this book drags along painstakingly examining Jackson's feelings and tempers. Undoubtedly, a basic biography can be found elsewhere, and one of limited knowledge of this president wishing to know more about him would do well to start there. I would reserve recommendation of this work for Jackson enthusiasts well versed in his life and times who actually want to know about his fiery correspondences.

I found a series of videos on youTube provide an overview of Jackson's life. This includes interviews of various authors and historians, including Dr. Burstein. This can be found here.

Head First SQL

Head First SQL is a textbook outlining basic concepts and tools of Structured Query Languages and general database design. I picked this up about a year ago, found the first several chapters enjoyable but not a lot of new information.

The Head First series uses campy images from the 1950s and changes the captions to make them pertain to whatever technology the particular book is discussing. As such, the first several chapters explaining what Select and update statements do were much more entertaining than the average text.

Learning quite a bit about SQL on the job, I had hoped this would reinforce what I have learned and expand upon it. Just now getting back to it, I found that there is much I already knew about SQL that could be found in this 600 page book.

Later chapters were interesting in their explanation of concepts I had used but didn't fully understand, such as view, checks, and joins. The discussions of benefits were good, but I could also raise objections from what I had seen in practice. For the most part, finishing this book was a good thing as it allowed me to asosciate terms to practices. I've been using noncorrelated subqueries and natural joins for years but didn't know the nomenclature.

I'd recommend this book to developers that have limited knowledge of databases and what to know more. The information is presented in such a way as to make learning about Structured Query Languages, dare I say, fun?

Matt

The Shack

The important thing to remember with The Shack is that it is a work of fiction. There is no 100 pages of end notes in the back of the book like a scholarly nonfiction text. There aren't even many Biblical references within the story, which some would say, "Aha! Its clearly not a good book!" I would say lack of citations would make it a poor scholarly artifact, but that isn't what the author is trying to pass this off as. It's fiction!

Because the Shack is fiction, one would do well to build their theology elsewhere. It presents some interesting ideas and may be helpful in one's Christian walk, but at the end of the day, it is a story, and that is how this should be graded. Take the book's ideas with an open mind, but not an empty mind; that is: read the ideas presented but discern them, don't accept the book's ideas as truths just because they're in print.

All that is said to say, the book is powerful. It has a gripping emotional story arc and this draws one in. It makes for a good read, and the controversial ideas posed challenge preconceptions of what God is and how He operates. It is easy to see why these components make the story both compelling and appalling, depending on one's outlook on Christianity.

My copy of the book is plastered with positive endorsements, and it doesn't take much digging to find contrarian views of the book. It occurred to me that theologian Dr. Greg Boyd's teachings seem to be reflected in large part in this book. His positive review can be found on his blog here. Chuck Colson, founder of Prison Fellowship posted a review admonishing people to "Stay out of the Shack."

For my money, I liked the book and it's controversial ideals provided opportunity for discussion about them. Opening dialogs about Christianity is not a bad thing. I don't buy into all of the ideas posed, but do recommend it as a good read. My advice: discern for yourself if this is a good book and whether any of its precepts are worth shaping your life with.

Living in God's Love

Living in God's Love: The New York Crusade

This short work consists of the three nights of services held in 2005 for what will likely be the final New York Crusade the Reverend Billy Graham will officiate.

While the book is concise, it is by no means unimportant. The brief speaking points outline fundamental truisms that have been a staple of Billy Graham's ministry over the years.

1) Everyone has sinned and needs to be forgiven. Even if you're religious and obey God's rules, you still need forgiveness. The example of Nicodemus in the Gospel of John is cited as an example of a religious man who needed forgiveness.

2) God came to earth in the form of a human in the person of Jesus of Nazareth, known as The Christ, a Greek term meaning the Messiah, the one God promised to send to the Hebrew people. Jesus died in our place. With his death we are forgiven of the sins for which we are all guilty.

3) Even if you don't believe it, you are forgiven. God loves you and wants to know you, one needs only accept this free gift that will change your life. God's love if the missing piece so many people are looking for in life.

Graham also comments on his own mortality. Getting along in age in 2005, he said we all die. Every last one of us. So much is the case that wars do not in fact cause more death, just the manner and timeliness is altered. I was a little puzzled by that assertion, made not once but twice in the book. One might take that a step further and say that war prevents death as many soldiers who die before having families, resulting in less people, resulting in less death. I don't think that's Dr. Graham's point. Rather, I think his commentary is one that he is prepared for death, and since we will all die sooner or later, we too should make ourselves ready.

Overall, I would say this book is a good refresher on the key components of Christianity.

Matt

Splinter of the Mind

I recently read the book Escaping the Matrix, written by theologian Greg Boyd and counselor Al Larson. I know what you're thinking: "A book about the recent Matrix movies! How timely!" The original Matrix film was released in 1999, its sequels in spring and fall of 2003. To be fair, the book was written in 2005 and I'm reading it 4 years after that. Still, one might have hoped the release of the book would be prior to or coinciding with the release of the film, as John Piper did with his book "The Passion of Jesus Christ", which came out a month and a half prior to the film it played off of: "The Passion of the Christ", all the way back in 2004.

So back to the question at hand: why on earth am I reading a book about a movie that came out 10 years ago? I mean, it was a good film, but aren't there more relevant books to read and things to do? Probably. But my interest here concerns the cosmological argument of the existence of God.

Okay, if you're still with me, I'll summarize that argument: Basically logicians determined that you can't get something from nothing. The chair in your kitchen wouldn't exist if someone hadn't built it, and that someone had the tree to construct it from. Now, there may have been machines and tools involved, but someone had to build them too. Something must come from something else. Scientifically, you can posture the First Law of Thermodynamics here:
"Energy can be transformed (changed from one form to another), but it can neither be created nor destroyed."

But the Conservation of energy isn't the question here; we're not asking if the chair used to be a tree so much as who or what caused the chair. Presumably, a human constructed the chair using wood from a tree. But where did the human come from and where did the tree come from? Science tells us that man evolved from primates who evolved from decreasingly complex organisms. Believe that or not, bear with me. The tree, likewise, (scientifically speaking) was originally a seed that grew, and the seed fell off another tree, and this goes back through time were less complex plants.

Science holds that one goes back in time long enough, and all these simple plants and organisms are wrapped up in an earth that was shot out of a cannon filled with all of the energy in the known universe, all of which contained in a space the size of a pinhead. This is the Big Bang theory. Everything was in this tiny space...everything. At some point, something initiated a massive explosion which kicked off everything we now know in the universe.

The Big Bang theory is widely accepted as the beginning of our story. But like any story based on science that takes place in the vacuum of outer space, the people want a prequel, even if they aren't good and have Jar Jar in them. So one might ask, "where did the pinhead come from" and "what caused the pinhead to explode." While some have speculated, the consensus is, we just don't know. It just was and it just did. For my inquisitive mind, this isn't good enough. Something caused that pinhead to be there, and something caused it to explode. I suspect that something was more than the vinegar getting to close to the baking soda in that pinhead.

The other side of the coin, the Creationist view, would hold that God created everything. This leads to the same questions though. Before the heavens and the earth came into being, and God was just there, where did God come about from? Using the same human logic, something must have evoked God into being, right? No, my religious friends are just as obstinate about this as my scientific ones. They say, no, God just is. His scale of time does not coincide with ours, that He also was and is, and is to come. He is the beginning and the end. What? This is just as unhelpful in my question as saying the pinhead just one day deciding to explode into the known universe. The question being, if God started all this....where did He come from? Is there some uber-god that created Him into being, and if so, that's the guy I want to be looking for. But then the question is, where did that uber-god come from? The same logic would hold that he had his roots with somebody else. Maybe the forerunners of God have died off or are on vacation in some tropical region of the multiverse, leaving God in charge. Don't miscontrue my questioning for irreverence; Jesus implored his disciples to have the faith of a child, but anyone who has spent time with a small child knows that they like to ask 'why'. This is me believing, but also asking why.

Detractors of the cosmological argument assert that the argument stops at God. Everything has an explanation for being except when we reach God's level, then He just is. This would seem to be an exception from which the whole logical argument is based on; I would attest that the argument makes sense if we continue the logic. Where did God come from? "You will never know" they tell me, "God is an incorporeal entity for which the laws of space and time are irrelevant and inapplicable." Perhaps we cannot be able to understand this. I can't help but think that there must be some inkling of comprehensible explanation that we could derive about God's purposeful existence.

This leads me back to one of the precepts of the Matrix. Throughout the movies the idea of existing in a sort of Russian Nested Doll structure, where one goes inside of a slightly larger one, which goes inside of an even larger doll. Just as electrons spin around a nucleous to form an atom from which humans are comprised, perhaps we humans are but tiny electrons "spinning" around the nucleous of the earth's core. From there you could equate the earth itself being one of the planetary "electrons" orbiting the nucleous of the sun, making our star system one of many 'atoms' that make up a much larger galactic something. That galactic structure might well be spinning around some focal point in the universe, and our universe may be orbiting some point of reference in the multi-verse, if you are inclined to step out so far.

So I picked up the book "Escaping the Matrix" hoping that it would touch on this concept of the Russian dolls as it pertains to we the people, as this might illuminate some of the concerns I have with the formation of an almighty God. This book has nothing to do with that.

Escaping the Matrix is however, good on its own merits. The concept here is that in the mind we have structured a matrix of how we perceive memories, good, bad and otherwise. The Bible indicates that Christ imbues us to renew our minds, and break out of conformity to the nature of the earth. The authors posit that in a fallen world with powers and principalities abounding, we are given to misinterpretation through these matrix structures of our minds. This is where phobias and other psychological issues derive from as it pertains to minimal but poignant past memories. We construct them in our minds as being a certain way and this hinders our lives. As we control our minds, we have the power to reshape our memories; re-construct them slightly differently such that they are not as detrimental to us. The example is given of a woman with a phobia of insects. By reshaping the memory which instigated this phobia she was able to overcome it. How does one reshape a memory? By changing it, the way a director would put a yellow color filter on the lens, or use camera 2 for this scene, putting different music in the memory, things like that. There are lots of interactive exercises in the book, and these suggestions are very plausible.

Think for a moment about a happy time, but focus on it, noting all the senses - sight, smell, taste, touch, and sound, and what emotions you might have. Focus on each one of these senses briefly. Now continue focusing on that same memory, but change the senses. Change the camera angle of the memory...instead of looking through your eyes, you're in 3rd person, or the other way around. If you hear something, change it; put happy music into a bad memory, and the bad memory doesn't seem as terrible; things like that. Its an interesting concept, based on biblical teachings which, the authors indicate has been able to produce results in the people they have helped through this technique.

So Escaping the Matrix was good, but not quite what I was hoping for. I mean, it was really really good, and I'd recommend reading it. The church Greg Boyd pastors, Woodland Hills church hosted a seminar back in 2005 surrounding this idea and they have audio files from that event on their website here. I haven't listened to these, but I'm sure they are similarly profound as the book was. But, it looks like I'll have to keep searching for my answers.

Matt

C.S. Lewis on Scripture

"We may observe that the teaching of Our Lord Himself, in which there is no imperfection, is not given us in that cut-and-dried, fool-proof, systematic fashion we might have expected or desired. He wrote no book. We have only reported sayings, most of them uttered in answer to questions, shaped in some degree by their context. And when we have collected them all we cannot reduced them to a system." - CS Lewis in Reflections on the Psalms, p. 95.

C.S. Lewis, widely regarded thinker on all manners of Christianity, is the focal point in this short book written by Michael J. Christensen. The text conveys Lewis' rationale behind a number of issues is modern Christianity, including the inerrancy of the Bible. The book projects that while liberal theologians are apt to dismiss the Bible as being largely inaccurate and written by man, fundamentalists view the Bible as 'divinely inspired' with some, such as Calvin, regarding the process of being one of divine dictation.
Lewis, aware of these devisive camps, falls somewhere in the middle. His rationale was one of his scholarly pursuits in literary legends. Finding that the Bible is in part literature that conveys the ideas God wanted to tell mankind, Lewis also makes room for several numerological discrepancies between different accounts of the same stories. These differing accounts do little to undermine the message being conveyed. Thus, Lewis viewed the Bible as one consistent with the life that Jesus lead - he wanted to tell the people how to live, but left a lot open to interpretation.

Webpage Relaunch

Hey Everyone. Just wanted to let you know that I've redesigned and relaunched my home page in a more sleek and less cluttered format. Enjoy!

Matt

http://www.geocities.com/matthew_alfson/

The Pearl

The Pearl, the last short story in my collection of John Steinbeck works, is a parable of a poor man who finds a treasure which ultimately changes his life, but not for the better.

Upon finding the majestic pearl, the protagonist seeks to improve his lot in life by selling it for much wealth, moving to a big house, having a proper wedding in a big church and sending his infant son to school one day.

However, the pearl buyers will not afford much for what is obviously "The Pearl of the World". This is due much to their colluding which has for a long time cheated the poor pearl divers.

Obviously this is worth much as the others in the village take notice and try to steal it. This causes much trouble for the protagonist.

Steinbeck contends that it is only natural for man to improve his lot in life; wishing for a bigger house and a proper education for the child is common to man. Desire to improve on what we already have in life is what distinguishes man from animals, who are much unchanged since the beginning of time.

This philosophy of common strife for improvement runs afoul of the philosopher Albert Camus' contention that wanting something better in life than what we have not only leads to dissatisfaction, but it also detracts from enjoying what we do have. Camus might look at this work and find that the poor pearl diver should have been content with all he had, accepted the pearl as nothing special, sold it to the pearl buyers at their cheap price and in the process improving his lot a little. As it is, the diver sought to improve his station in life by great measures and thereby lost all he had.

While Camus' version might be a more beneficial outcome, Steinbeck's tale is ultimately more interesting. Good read - highly recommended.

Matt

The Red Pony

Okay, so today's blog involves yet another John Steinbeck story, "The Red Pony." (I have collection of short stories...stand by for "The Pearl".)

The Red Pony is basically an anthology of four brief tales of ranch living concerning the same family and their ranch-hand Billy Buck. Some of the stories are filled with the strife so focal to Steinbeck's rural masterpieces. Yes, this also takes place near Monterrey, California, Steinbeck's most favorite place in the world.

The work's protagonist is a young child, Jody and the lessons he learns through the troubles of life, and sometimes death.

Well worth the short time it takes to read.

Matt

The Moon is Down

John Steinbeck's 1942 novel "The Moon is Down" is a brief work about an unnamed occupied country and its likewise unnamed conquerers. Plainly the connection is the German army holding a country in northern Europe, probably Norway.

The story entails the troubles the occupiers have with keeping order and the frustrations of the conquered people.

The army in charge doesn't have any particular animosity for the locals, they just want order so that coal can be extracted from the mine. The locals, in turn, just want the oppressors to go home.

This is a powerful interest story of the people in a war overtaken land. The piece itself inspired resistance during WWII. While short, it has depth.

Matt