AKMA’s Random Thoughts

Truth raises the stakes, and very many people would prefer to stick to penny-ante living, where our dumb ideas and deceptions and careless talk and our self-interested actions don't make a difference.

They do make a difference, though, whether we say so in the name of "mindfulness" or "authenticity" or "tzedekah" or even, perhaps, "endeavoring to walk in a narrow way that leads to salvation."

I really like this. Thank you also for your comments on my site; at times like that I can see "walking the walk" in action.

I look forward to the next installment!

Tell me you're kidding about your opinion about conservative worship, please. Please??????

Okay, I'm there with you about complex Truth vs. simplistic anecdotes. But I can't see why people might not be "preaching the gospel" (which I understand from this to be something deeply related to to "speaking Truth") whether they know it or not.....

There's a midrash that says that when God gave the Torah on Sinai, God translated it into 70 languages, so that "all the nations might hear." Moral: there are a lot of Torahs floating around, and only one of them is written in a language I can understand. One question this drash raises, of course, is "how do we know when somebody else is teaching Torah?" Because not everybody is (even if they use the language of the Torah, natch). And the answer, I think, is that it has to line up with the Truth of which you were speaking.

So then the bigger question is, is it possible to tap into the Truth--relationship with the Divine, a visit from the Holy Spirit, whatever your language is--without doing so in a way you recognize as gospel? I think of some (atheist) artists or composers, for example, of whom it might be said, they're preaching hard, whether they know that's what they're doing, or not.

Or perhaps I'm misunderstanding the question. *shrug*

I don't really understand why you need to circumscribe truth from a Christian perspective from truth more generally. It is one thing to appropriate another's message by claiming it is just a translation of your own (spiritual empire building), but quite another to respect the uniqueness of that message while trying to find connections with your own practice.

The comment from Danya goes directly to this, and in a way displays a truly old statement of the core of postmodernism. If God speaks Truth in many ways, and in many languages, and humans are in no position to reliably decide what is and is not God's word, then what do we turn to as a reliable guide? Ok, so the handing down of the Torah at Sinai authenticates the source, but how do we prevent distortion from entering later.

All you have is multiple truths with each grounded in a community of practitioners. This works pretty well with domains of academic knowledge, as the community of practice can actually validate the results produced in a different time and space, but the way I see it, most spiritual communities do not attempt to validate anything experiencially. Not to say it doesn't happen, just about every major religion has a reflective, meditative practice where the individual attempts to contact deeper layers of meaning in direct experience. On the other hand, this sort of personal spiritual explorations isn't considerred reliable or encouraged by many "church fathers".

It took me a long time to get the "conservative worship" reference. If I may, you are saying that the Truth is not ideological. It is beyond left/right politics. What I'm really curious about is what are "the things you really do have to believe", or is that not really what's at issue with the Truth? (I would claim that beliefs are overrated, faith is really the issue).

When Batman went home at the end of a night spent fighting crime, he put on a suit and tie and became Bruce Wayne. When Clark Kent saw a news story getting too hot, a phone booth hid his change into Superman. When you're programming, all the variables you juggle around are doing similar tricks as they present one face to you and a totally different one to the machine.

When compared to the Stack, the Heap is a simple thing to understand. All the memory that's left over is "in the Heap" (excepting some special cases and some reserve). There is little structure, but in return for this freedom of movement you must create and destroy any boundaries you need. And it is always possible that the heap might simply not have enough space for you.

Let's take a moment to reexamine that. What we've done here is create two variables. The first variable is in the Heap, and we're storing data in it. That's the obvious one. But the second variable is a pointer to the first one, and it exists on the Stack. This variable is the one that's really called favoriteNumber, and it's the one we're working with. It is important to remember that there are now two parts to our simple variable, one of which exists in each world. This kind of division is common is C, but omnipresent in Cocoa. When you start making objects, Cocoa makes them all in the Heap because the Stack isn't big enough to hold them. In Cocoa, you deal with objects through pointers everywhere and are actually forbidden from dealing with them directly.

When the machine compiles your code, however, it does a little bit of translation. At run time, the computer sees nothing but 1s and 0s, which is all the computer ever sees: a continuous string of binary numbers that it can interpret in various ways.

To address this issue, we turn to the second place to put variables, which is called the Heap. If you think of the Stack as a high-rise apartment building somewhere, variables as tenets and each level building atop the one before it, then the Heap is the suburban sprawl, every citizen finding a space for herself, each lot a different size and locations that can't be readily predictable. For all the simplicity offered by the Stack, the Heap seems positively chaotic, but the reality is that each just obeys its own rules.

These secret identities serve a variety of purposes, and they help us to understand how variables work. In this lesson, we'll be writing a little less code than we've done in previous articles, but we'll be taking a detailed look at how variables live and work.