Earlier this year / Later this year
For different reasons, both songs show the casual indifference to the meaning of words -- if not in their songs, then at least in the inspired and infallible Word of God.
One of them, some of the repeated words purport to describe God:
...This is who he is, he loves us;Did you catch that? They make a distinction between who God is in His essence ("love"), and what He does. I do not find this distinction in the Bible. You can tell a tree by its fruit: what it does (give off fruit) is inextricably tied to what it is. An apple tree does not give off oranges. "God is love" is in the Bible, two verses only, in the same paragraph, in the same chapter in one small book where the context is about doing good things to other people. All the rest of the Bible, "love" is doing Good Things to and for other people. But the modern American church is not run by people who read the Bible for what it says, it is run by, and for the exclusive benefit of (MBTI) Feelers, whose highest value is unearned affirmation. An abused woman will cling to her abusing husband because he tells her "I love you" (spoken affirmation), never mind what he does to her. Preachers will pray from the pulpit, "God we love you," followed by a sermon teaching (implicitly and/or explicitly) that God unconditionally forgives all our sins (past, present, and future), no change in behavior needed. Jesus taught that if we love him, we will DO his commandments, and God only loves those who do that. The Bible more explicitly teaches forgiveness upon repentance. Otherwise God would be obligated to invite the unrepentant sinner, still sinning, into His Heaven, and it wouldn't be Heaven for the rest of us, because sin is where other people get hurt. Please note that I am not saying that our repentance saves us; God's finished Work on the Cross saves us. Repentance is something the we want to do, and God's indwelling Holy Spirit enables us to do. It's all about God, but not if we don't want to repent and "stop sinning," as Jesus told the woman.
This is what he does, he saves us.
The other song's repeated line ("7-11" songs = 7 words repeated 11 times) is
Nothing is better than you [God]When I hear that, I think: There is Something, and then there is Nothing = the end result assumed by an atheist when he dies, and the song teaches that the atheist's Nothing is better than God. I don't think so. OK, the song is ambiguous. But song writers are all Feelers, to whom affirmation is more important than Truth, Justice, and Duty, so who cares about the word meanings? I care. God cares. God cannot lie. I once heard a pastor's wife laughingly say "I lied a lot," with no hint of sorrow or repentance. Truth is a Moral Absolute, and if a sentence can have two opposite meanings, which one is True? God cares.
The line prominently displayed on your July/August cover...>> "We hold these truths to be self-evident that all men [read as "people"]
>> are created [nonsensically read as "evolved"] equal..."...is obviously false (=religion, believing what you know ain't so) as understood by those who have it hammered into their heads in every school in the USA, so I call it "The American Kool-Aid" = patently false religion believed at one's peril.*
Although this line has its source in Christianity [Gal.3:28], the Bible does not teach this kind of equality, and I personally know that I was not created equal with the people where my father was a missionary in South America -- equal certainly in the number of brain cells, but not in the ability to use them fully: neither of us had any choice in where we were born and raised, I into a culture informed by 400+ years of being taught to read the Bible, and they hardly at all.
Only Protestants taught their lay people to read (and obey) the Bible, so only we understood the God-given obligation of moral absolutes like the Golden Rule, taught as binding on all people everywhere and in at all times by Jesus and Paul (multiple times) and Moses, and not in any pulpit that I ever heard, and certainly not outside the region of Christian influence. Those moral absolutes created wealth, instead of our natural inclination to destroy it, so that the culture where a significant number (perhaps not majority) of people obeyed it, thereby causing others to do so hypocritally (but still do it), giving opportunities to everybody (even the unbelievers) simply not available in the other 90% of the world.
That is an inequality we are born into, and very few of the people born outside ever get the opportunity to move in.
There are other inequalities: family wealth and even gender -- women have more connectivity between the halves of their brains, so they think different than men; men have more upper body strength than women, so their personal interactions are necessarily different, resulting in a different kind of leadership than females are capable of. I personally have experienced this difference because the only "sport" my father taught me was chess, and at whatever age it was formative, I had no peers inclined to fight, so now as an adult I cannot lead as other men do.
But I thank God for the unequal benefits I was created into, and as far as God has enabled me, I have done my best to Make the World a Better Place (= the Golden Rule), and I gratefully submit to those inequalities where I am not at the top, as commanded by God.
But the Declaration is simply false. "Let God be true and every man a liar."
* An example of the detrimental effects of The American Kool-Aid is that we have no such thing as nobility, so we Americans have no idea what the word "Lord" in Rom.10:9 really means. A much better translation is the modern word "boss": to say somebody is "boss" means that we acknowledge their right to boss us around, and we must obey. That's what Paul's Greek meant, and that's what "Lord" meant in England in 1611 and up to a hundred years ago, but not today (because The American Kool-Aid is infectious), and certainly not in the USA ever, except in the minds of a few Christians who read their Bibles in the spirit of 2Tim.3:16 and Luke 6:46.
Since the theory cannot be supported by the math, the top-level academic institutions doing "AI" research have nothing to research, so I see no publications on the theory. Lower-level universities like South Carolina and small Arab countries with more dollars than sense don't bother with the theory, but accept at face value the lies promoted by the "AI" vendors, and their published "research" in lower-level magazines line ComputingEdge is primarily speculation about how an actual intelligent machine would work, if it could work, without the added qualification.
Such a piece is "The Rise of Agentic AI" in last month's ComputingEdge. Large Language Model "AI" was clearly explained by the developers and their academic lapdogs before they monetized it, and I see no evidence that the underlying structure has changed much. So-called "Agentic AI" came about after they closed the doors, so I have never seen any explanation of how it works, but it's not hard to imagine how to build on top of the LLM engine, a larger engine capable of reading sensors and issuing commands to control other machines. All you need to do is define a finite set of English-like phrases describing the reported states of each sensor, and English-like commands to drive the functions of the machines to be controlled, and then construct a set of reasonable (text) scenarios describing how to use those phrases to control the controllable machines based on various combinations of sensor readings, and then feed that text into the LLM AI engine as training data.
The LLM engine has no intelligence of its own, it simply memorizes the entire training data -- with Trillions of internal parameters, that is very feasible, and completely explained by how the engine works -- so memorizing the (text) operational scenarios is just more of the same, and when prompted to do something intelligent to control the output machines based on the input data, it simply reproduces the relevant portions of its training data, exactly the way the bare-bones LLM machine does with facts and explanations, all completely without any understanding at all of what it is saying. It is intelligent, but only as intelligent as was encoded in the training data (written by intelligent and not-so-intelligent humans, whose creative text it reproduces verbatim), no "artificial" intelligence involved at all.
The simplest well-rounded academic could and should know all that, but
perhaps they are so bamboozled by the claims (and apparent actuality) of
"intelligent" behavior -- or maybe the universities don't teach the theory
any more -- so nobody bothers to tell us that The Emperor Has No Clothes.
The bubble will eventually pop, just as Skinnerian psychology (which the
LLM models fairly closely) did not quite a century ago, and was already
old news when I took psychology as an undergraduate at Berkeley in the
1960s..
The premise is some college kid invented a device for sliding around among parallel universes. The whole idea of parallel universes is pure fiction, not a hint of scientific evidence for it. The idea was invented as a way to explain why the universe we live is finely tuned for human habitation, and mostly because the atheists choose not to believe in a Good Creator God. If He is Good, then His commands are binding on all people everywhere, because that is Good for them, as atheist Richard Dawkins now admits. Also, if He is Good, then this is the best of all possible worlds (except for the effects of sin), and parallel worlds -- all of them necessarily flawed more than ours -- would not be habitable. This TV series unwittingly makes that point. I don't think they intended to, but a world without evil is boring to tell stories about.
One of these alternative worlds, everybody had oil gushing up from their back yards, "We're all millionaires." TV being lower quality that it is, nobody bothered to notice that if everybody has all the oil they need, then nobody is willing to pay for (petroleum) products, and you only get to be a millionaire if you have a product to sell that people are willing to pay money for. But TV writers are either too stupid or too lazy to figure that out. So each episode picks out one good thing in the world we live in, then imgines a world without it. It gets boring pretty quick.
Although they included a "professor" who (presumably) knows all the
science, this is really more "fi" (fiction) than "sci" (science). Most
notable is the "butterfly effect" which says that when a butterfly flaps
its wings in China, big things can happen over here in the US of A. Everything
is big and complicated, and (from our perspective) on the edge of chaos
so, apart large numbers and averages, scientists -- let alone lay people
-- can know very little about what's going on in the world. Case in point:
the parallel worlds in this show have all the same people with the same
names, they just do things differently according to whatever the difference
is. But the appearance of people is largely controlled by their DNA, and
the particular set of DNA genes a person gets from their parents is a random
collection of half of each parent's DNA. There are millions of different
combinations possible, and which of the millions of different sperm approach
and mate with the mother's egg (which itself is one of millions of different
possible DNA combinations) can depend on timing and mood and gastric disturbances.
The butterfly effect. Each person is named by their parents based on a
number of social influences -- including all the drastic differences that
made the different worlds in this show different. Small changes in the
social environment could mean that nobody has the same names, nor the same
faces. But TV screen writers cannot be expected to know all that. Their
expertise is not science, but promoting political correctness and the Established
Religion of the country on the ignorant supposition that that increases
the number of viewers more ignorant than themselves who will buy the sponsor
products. It's all about money, not facts or science (nevermind what they
say). The love of money is the root of every form of evil. I stopped watching.
The stuff being promoted as artificial "Intelligence" is no smarter than an earthworm -- far bigger and faster, but not inherently smarter. Computers are a mathematical science, and we can prove this mathematically. When you go to any of the "Large Language Model" "AI" engines and it spouts off something intelligent, it is in fact intelligent, but the machine did not invent it -- nor even understand it -- it only copied out the text in its training data, which is all composed by intelligent (and not-so intelligent) humans. The training data is so vast that no one person or group of persons can know more than a small part of it, so we do not recognize it as copies. Some people do, but they are so bamboozled by the vendors that they imagine it is intelligent creation that happens to look the same.
The author of this article is not a computer expert, he is a radio engineer. He designed a radio circuit tool that "learns" from existing radio-frequency circuits and (human-labelled) radio propagation data, and "designs" circuits that meet specified parameters and -- Big Surprise! -- these circuits perform better than human-designed circuits. He should not have been surprised. Optimization is easy code to write, perhaps slightly easier when you use an "AI" engine to do the grunt work. Humans design circuits as they were taught, with straight lines for circuit traces. His program was given a bunch of random pixelated circuits to learn from, and in the course of optimization, the pixellated circuited performed better.
If a human were to try designing with pixellated circuits, they would see the same effect, and do the machine one better by asking "Why?" I know a very small amount of radio, but one of the things I know is that at very high frequencies -- where the wavelength is measured in millimeters, like your G5 smart-phone -- the circuit traces act like radio antennas and the signal goes all over the place, cancelling out other parts of the circuit. The engineers know that, so they don't use straight lines any more. That's where the pixellated circuits came from, they were testing radio propagation on random circuits. The testing was incomplete, and they had not gotten to the Aha! stage yet. But if humans started with the same data the "AI" did, the human engineers would think inferentially, and probably find even better circuits than random pixels. The computer couldn't do that, because it's not intelligent, it only does what it's told.
Maybe now the human designers of this program will do some inferential
thinking, which, as I say, the "AI" engine in the computer is unable to
do, and start thinking up other circuit patterns for the engine to optimize.
And they will give the computer all the credit for the thinking that the
humans did.
The human categories (birds and reptiles and insects) are based on structural similarities unrelated to mode of travel (flying or crawling or swimminh), which is the thinking that went into Darwinism. If we stick to Biblical categories, Darwin is less tempting. We also don't need to puzzle over in-between creatures like archaeopterix or platypus (is it a mammal on the way to becoming a bird, or a bird on the way to becoming a mammal? Neither: both are God's created "kind" unrelated to birds and mammals and reptiles and not "evolving" to nor from any of them). Penguins walk on the ground (ice) intead of flying, but they swim better than they walk. They breathe air, but so do whales, which are clearly swimming things in the Bible (if they are mentioned at all).
I guess it's OK for us to define any categories we like -- perhaps Adam, who was given the job of naming the creatures, didn't care about structure -- but that does not give us permission to pontificate ancestry, other than "God made them" (which we are told, along with "the non-swimmers were on the Ark").
But I'm a zero -- nay rather a negative: if I make a positive recommendation,
everybody does the opposite -- so telling them (ICR)
of this particular insight would be counter-productive. sigh
-- And theologically dubious, in this case it is making a promise the singer cannot (or at least will not) keep, which God repeatedly deprecates in the Bible, among the parts never preached from the pulpit. Every person singing this song is an MBTI Feeler, whose highest value is unearned affirmation ("praises"), which they in good conscience dispense to everybody. There may be some Thinkers in the audience where this is sung, but they are there only to please their Feeler wives (which God tells husbands to do) because their highest value is Truth, Justice, and Duty (they wouldn't be there otherwise), and the song is a Lie, which is anathema to Thinkers.
Praising God is Good, and we should do it often, but "ALL my praises" is contrary to fact in the mouth of any Feeler, as well as anybody who wants to get along in today's Feeler-dominated USA, which includes any thoughtful, God-fearing Thinker (there are a few of us in the churches, unwelcome though we may be).
Furthermore, saying "I'm gonna give Him my praises" is itself nothing more than unearned affirmation, the words themselves mean nothing, and this in fact only says you are going to praise God, but does not actually do so (except in the mind of a Feeler, which God is not). Jesus told the Pharisees that God's highest values are "Truth, Justice, and Mercy," and elsewhere he placed Duty up there at the top. Love is never mentioned, except in a context where it clearly means "Do the Right Thing" (Duty). Those are Thinker, not Feeler, values.
Me, I praise God a lot (perhaps more than most church-goers who are
too busy praising each other), because I came to realise a year or two
ago that the physics law of Entropy means that no human ever invents anything,
so it must be God doing all the invention, and He "gives it to all
people liberally, without scolding" [James 1:5, my translation]. Like when
it's hot, instead of complaining, I say "that's what God invented air conditioning
for." But humans can mess up the Good things that God does. Like air conditioning,
when I got this car some 36 years ago, I asked for "air conditioning, a
tape player, and power nothing." The A/C worked wonderful, they told me
(and I bought) an after-market tape player two blocks down the street was
cheaper and worked fine, and I had no problems at all with the rest of
the car, except every 130 thousand or so miles I need a new clutch, but
the third was installed by some fly-by-night repairman in God-forsaken
Portland, and it's being replaced as I write this after only 5000 miles.
I'm still better off than 90% of the world's population, and I thank God
pretty much every day for His Word in my language 400+ years ago that made
it possible (the mechanics of A/C was invented by an American in 1834,
my Japanese car was designed in the USA). Some fly-by-night repairman in
another state replaced the perfectly good A/C in this car with some shoddy
product that never did work well, nor did its two replacements, and now
I have no working A/C at all, and no way to get something that works. All
because of Gummit meddling and rules about freon. But (God be praised)
I have no reason to drive long distances any more, only a couple miles
on hot days from one A/C building to another, not enough to need cooling
in transit. Twice a week in summer; the rest of the year I walk (except
in rain). I got my fill of rain as a kid in the Amazon jungle, and it rains
here more than Calif, but not as much as most of the country, and (unlike
Calif) most of what I need is walking distance. God is Good.
One night I heard some yelling outside, and I looked out and saw some guy screaming at the top of his voice, but I couldn't make out any words because when you shout, the vowels get louder, but the consonants do not, so all I heard were vowels: "-ah-oh-ee-ah-.." Around the same time I was singing in a community chorus, and the director told us to enunciate the consonants. That night I understood why.
Flash forward to this year, I'm sitting in church and they play CCM songs before and after services. One they play rather often, but I can make out only the first three words in the whole song (and its repeats), the rest are just random noise, perhaps vowels. Maybe the first three are too, but they are spaced out: "Oo. Am. I..." Maybe the singers are untrained, or maybe they are just shouting. So this is what I hear:
Who am I [shout] [shout] [SHOUT] [shout] [shout] [shout]Last Sunday was the first time the praise team sang that song in church, and the words were every bit as unintelligible as the recording they played in background the week before. Maybe they listen to CCM on the radio and sing what they hear. Except the leader introduced it as about "gratitude" and I could barely make out the word "gratitude" in the tiny on-screen words. After a couple repeats -- this is a "7-11" song (7 words repeated 11 times) -- I began to hear the vowels "a-i-u" ("gratitude") about the same time as when that word appeared on the screen. I never did understand enough words to look the lyrics up on Google. Musically it was a monotone, except for that slightly louder word in the middle also went up a step.
[shout] [shout] [SHOUT] [shout] [shout] [shout]
...
I am thankful to God every day, but not for monotone unintelligible songs like this. Perhaps I should thank Him for this reminder that there is (was) good music -- and good church music, with words about God instead of Me, Myself and I -- in the world, and that I have had the priviledge to sing some of it. Maybe I should dust off some old records and play some.
Back to the here-and-now, I ask myself, "What's the point?"
Maybe the words (and melody) don't matter to these people. The American brand of Christian Relationshipism, their highest value is unconditional affirmation, it doesn't matter what you say, nor what the words mean, just so long as it is affirming. The other half of the American people, their highest value is Truth, Justice, and Duty, they are the ones who get things done in the world. The meaning of words is important to them, because you can't get anything done if you don't understand the meaning of what is being said. These people -- mostly guys -- never darken the door of any church. C.P.Snow called it "Two Cultures," and the difference has been around for decades, maybe centuries. I know, because I am one of them -- except my parents taught me as a young child that the Bible is the standard by which we must live -- and I later learned that it actually is True -- so I read the Bible, and what it teaches is not what you hear from American pulpits. But it also (sort of) says "Go to church" so I go to church. There aren't many people like me there, maybe a few husbands who come with their wives and sit in the back row, then leave immediately after it is over. Sometimes they drive separate cars. I know one like that in this church. There's not much for me and my kind in most American churches.
Oh well.
Earlier this year / Later this year
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