11.06.2005

Crazy quotes from my insane roommate

"Plato is a dirty Pagan and, according to circumstantial evidence, probably burning in hell."
(after further debate)
"Or possibly freezing, or hanging from a rope."

"God is biased, God is arbitrary, God created everything, so guess what? DEAL WITH IT!
Oh, btw, all your base are belong to Him."

"Basically, everything I knew before was wrong. But now that I know I'm either predestined or not, I don't worry about it much."

11.01.2005

A Day in the Life of Sir Nicholai

Well, I got up today, and because it was 7:15 it was too late for Mass, so I decided to go to the 5 o'clock Mass. So I got my Latin book and went and studied on a little sofa in Albertus Magnus for an hour for the quiz I thought I was going to have today, and I saw Sasha and told her how the Latin test was going to rip out my insides and hang me out to dry with my innards blowing in the wind, and she said she'd save me from the Latin quiz, but she couldn't tell me how. And 5 minutes later Dunkel walked into the hall and asked me why i was studying so hard, and it turned out we just had a Latin story to translate, no quiz. So we translated the story, and I did pretty well, and then we played pictionary, and I got the word "Stealthily" and tried to draw a guy with a cloak and dagger, but they kept guessing gladiator, and imperator, so i tried to draw a guy sneaking around a building, and they couldn't get that, so eventually I just drew a ninja face (which all the girls though looked like and easter egg with the mask) but all the guy got ninja immediately, and then I had to get them to know it was an adverb, so I drew a sandwich (which usually stands to mean it a verb) with a plus sign in front of it, so they knew it was an adverb, and after all that they figured out fairly quickly that it was "stealthily" but they couldn't think of the word in Latin, so the other team got a point because they guessed it. And then Will pointed out that I should've just drawn a Stealth bomber, which would've been awesome.
The we had a crazy Theology class, with visitors staring in astonishment as we flirted with heresy of all kinds, including Calvinism and Pelagianism. It was a really hard class, because there was a seeming contradiction between Augustine and thee scripture, and we hadn't really sorted it out by the time class ended. Because of this contradiction (seemingly) people took sides, and there was alot of shouting and book-banging and table slamming. After all, there's very little that's more important to argue above than the love of God and why we go to Heaven or Hell, so the arguers for both sides were very vigorous.
Four of us stayed after class (me, my roommate will, our friend Dom, and the quiet class genius Gina) and talked with Doctor McArthur about the whole thing. it was great sitting there in a little group, asking him questions and listening to him expound on doctrinal questions. He's got such an amazing, penetrating intellect, yet he brings it down to earth in a way that few do, and explains deep thoughts in relatively simple terms with easily grasped analogies.
The main subject of today's class was really how we are saved. The Pelagians believe that we saved ourselves by performing good works. We've already seen that to be wrong, because it's clear that God promised to save us, and you can only promise things that you can do, so God is responsible for our salvation, not us. (this is actually very comforting, because personally I'd much rather have God in control of my salvation than myself, seeing as I'd mess it up very frequently). And so we looked at another position, where we choose God, and then He works through us in order to save us. We know that we are saved through faith in God, by which we are able to perform works (although it's really God who is responsible for the works, though we do use our free will to do them. Yes, this is complicated.) These people, once they saw that the Pelagians were wrong and that we couldn't earn our salvation, admitted that od working in our slavation, and gave us the grace of faith. however, what they didn't realize, is that we are unable to even choose the grace of faith on our own. What St. Agustine said happens, is that God conditions our will, so that we are able to see the good (because we always choose the apparent good) of faith, and then are able to accept it from God. This was a hot toipic of argument, because it is hard to understand that God conditions our will by working from the outside, inasmuch as He never forces us, which would be working from the inside, but He works from the outside through His providence, like what happens in our lives, whether we are properly chatechized and baptized in our youth, and things like that. So we still choose God, but without his providence we would eb copmpletely unable to do so. So God uses us to our own advantage.
Once we had this complicated puzzle of ow God saves us sorted out, then we delved into the even more hotly contested argument of how this could be, because according to this logic, whomever Go gives grace to is saved, and if someone is not saved, it's because God did not give grace to them. Which leads us to believe that God doesn't give grace to all people, because some people are not saved.
Some people said this would contradict the notion that God loves all men, inasmuch as Mr. Dunkel said so eloquently, "I don't know what kind of love would allow eternal damnation."
However, as we found out more after class, it became clear that once we left our democratic notions of love behind, and abandoned the idea that God loves everyone equally (an idea never found in the scriptures), it became clear that God loves different people in different ways, and that even though it does sound absurd at first, God does love the people in hell. We discussed how God loves things, becaue God does not love things because they're good, because that would make God subservient to goodness, when in fact He is goodness. So things are good inasmuch as God loves them. About the only goodness that the damned souls have is their existence per se, because existence is a good (and God as perfect good has perfect existence), but they only exist because God's love for them makes them exist, because God's love is a creative love.
The one thing we still didn't understand was why God gave the grace to be saved to some people, but not to others, but we didn't worry about this excessively, because St. Augustine says that that is according to the wisdom of God, and beyond the depths of our understanding.
After this invigorating talk with Dr. McArthur after class, I went and cleaned classrooms until 1.
Then I went to the computer lab from 1 to 2, and then studied Ptolemy till my Math class at 2:30.

My Math class was really cool. My Math tutor, Mr. Clark, is an amazing guy, with a fairly interesting past. *takes a break, then comes back later* Um...I just read about him on TAC's website, and I am now astounded. I highly reccomend going there and reading about him. It's just an amazing story...basketball player, hotshot lawyer, european opera singer, medieval historian...this guy's amazing. Mr. Clark's Profile
Anyways, he really likes teaching us math too.
We were talking about how the epicycle of Venus rotates around the mean sun as the mean sun rotates around the earth. It was really interesting learning about how Ptolemy's view of the universe explains (to the degree of accuracy he had) the motions of the stars and planets, even the apparent retrograde motion of Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn across the sky. (and the retrograde of Venus which he predicted, even though he couldn't observe it, and what we now observe confirms his predictions)
The funniest part was one point in the class, where Mr/ Clark wanted to illustrate the points of least, greatest, and mean passage (Ptolemaic system) so he had me stand on the middle of the table, representing the earth, and he walked around the table, representing the mean sun, and he walked around the table being the mean sun, and he asked Mr. Dunkel to walk around him, representing Venus, which gave everyone a good laugh...especially when Dunkel started winking suggestively at people.
Math class was really cool though, as usual.