Why Do Bad Things Happen to Good People?

Thien,

I know you are having a rough time dealing with your family's bad health. I really do wish that your family would come into better health. I hope that your mom will get well soon, whatever it is that is wrong, and I am very sorry about your dad and will be here for you whenever you need a shoulder to cry on.

However, despite the fact that your family is in bad health at the moment, I want to assure you that you are not "cursed". God has not set his sights on your family as victims He intends to torture. I know I am going to sound strange talking like this to you because your beliefs are not firm, but if you suspect that God is behind this then I must explain to you a little bit of theology. Why do bad things happen to good people such as your family? Bad things happen because there is evil already present in the world.

First, if you believe in creation, you know that God created the world and Adam and Eve. At first, everything was utopia. There was nothing wrong with anything. There was no sin, disease, or death. I believe that if creationism is true, God created mankind for company. We would not be a very interesting race if we all mindlessly followed what he said because we have no choices or decisions to make, no alternatives to take.

God put in the garden a certain tree and told Adam and Eve that they were not to eat from it. This way, if Adam and Eve chose to follow Him, it would be because they actually love Him instead of just a lack of options.

Satan was able to convince Adam and Eve to bite into that fruit, and was therefore successful in his attempt to become an influential force in this world.

Second, if you believe in evolution rather than creation and still believe in God, you should believe that the diversity of creatures is randomly created by evolution. We humans exist not because we live in a perfect world, but because we're good enough to survive as a species. Unfortunately, the human body isn't perfect. Viruses also still exist, and our stem cells can develop into cancer.

Either way, God did not put you into this world just to torture your family. God loves you and put you into a world that is full of beauty despite all of the evil and imperfection that fills it.

You ask why do you suffer from the consequences of the wrongdoings of Adam and Eve? Why does your family, in particular, suffer from sickness when they don't deserve it? Whether creationism is true or not, evil and imperfection already exists in the world. It's like an avalanche that's already started falling, and there's no bottom to its mountain. There's just no stopping it. You were born after it started, and it's nobody's fault. It's just there, terrible as it may be.

You ask why God doesn't just make the world perfect. Is He not powerful enough? Why doesn't he fix what's broken? I believe that if He were to remove all of the evil that already exists in this world, it would be the same as killing us all. We really wouldn't be living anymore. We'd all already be in heaven. He'd have defeated the whole purpose of creating us at all or for our little link in the chain of evolution. We'd just be pawns, and life on earth wouldn't have any meaning. I'm not saying that your life only has meaning because your family is sick. What is happening to you is terrible and shouldn't happen to anyone. It's more evil and bad fortune than your fair share. I know that.

Satan does enjoy spreading pain and suffering. If you believe that you are being intentionally put through these hard times, and you believe some higher power is causing it, I believe that is the one towards which you should point your finger.

Thien, I realize that you must be going through a really tough time. I also realize that I probably cannot comprehend exactly how sad you must feel, since I have not gone through the same situation. I want you to that despite that, I would do anything reasonably within my power to make you feel better. I am here for you. I am praying for your mom's health. I am praying for a miracle for your dad. The world really sucks for you right now, but I'm here for you. Know that I love you. I wish there was more I could do.

Holiday Happiness?

Christmastime. People seem to either love it or hate it. I'm one of those people that has always been generally joyful around the time of Christmas and New Years. It's a time for me to see my family, give and receive gifts, relax, and wallow in my nostalgia.

It hurts me, though, to see so many other people that can't stand the holidays. They either feel completely stressed out because of traffic on the road and in the stores, grumpy and Scrooge-like because giving of gifts is nothing but needlessly throwing money away, lonely because no one is (seemingly?) there with which to share the joy of the season, or something like that.

Whether their reasons are justified or just a baseless by-product of the seasonal atmosphere, I wish I could infect them with my own happiness.

I am in Texas with my family. I have graduated from Virginia Tech after way too many long, hard semesters. I will be spending time with my girlfriend in less than a week. I don't have school to go back to. I have freedom. For the time being, I can sleep in. I have coffee. I have beer. I have good food. I have people that love me. I have happiness.

My girlfriend is feeling gloomy for no reason that she can figure out. I want her to feel the same happiness that I do. I want her to be comforted. I want to see her smile.

Speculation on Life and Artificial Intelligence

Around a year ago (before The Prestige was released), I was studying for my Artificial Intelligence class when some strange ideas wandered through my head. In order to preserve them, I wrote them down on a sheet of notebook paper. I was just going through my notebooks when I stumbled upon these notes again.

Life
What constitutes a soul or an awareness? I can be certain that I exist presently because I am currently thinking and aware. I believe even Descartes can agree with that.

When I go to sleep, I lose consciousness. I am no longer aware. Am I the same person when I wake up? Does the same consciousness pick up where it left of, or does the old one end and a new one take its place? I have read that when we sleep, the section of our brain that is used for long-term memory is shut off. Perhaps when we sleep, we are still conscious, but we simply can't remember much of it when we awaken. I once heard that a person might consider his life just a collection of his memories. That definitely puts sleep and dreams in a strange classification. Is a life defined by a combination of a person's stream of consciousness and his collection of memories?

The same question gets stronger in circumstances such as a brain transplant. Or teleportation. If all of the molecules in my body are disassembled and then reassembled in a new place, does the same consciousness get transferred, or does one person die while a new, identical one is reborn, completely oblivious to the fact that his old consciousness has "died".

AI
A being has a thought cycle. What occupies that thought cycle at a given time is determined by things such as the being's interests and "interrupts" (as in computing) from its senses. I wonder how it breaks its thought cycle to remember something it needs to do.

A being might be given a set of instincts, which is behavior the being is urged to do in a given circumstance. Whether or not the being follows the instinct is up to its decision-making process. After repetitive behavior, that behavior should become more and more instinctive. I wonder how.

I wonder if a being that is given a strong desire to learn and a given set of instincts might be able to find its own instincts strange. I wonder if a being modeled in a human image might find a modified set of instincts foreign.

A being could be created to dislike boredom as a method to gain a desire to learn and gain interests. I wonder how it could discern from a topic that is interesting and one that is not.

Boredom could be a state of mind where there are no current interests or activities to occupy its thought cycle.

Semester's End

Wow, I can't believe the semester is almost over. I can't wait until graduation. I'll be finished with school in 2 more days.

Originally I planned on staying here in the spring to take a computer security course and Internet programming, but the Internet programming one is major restricted, so I might just end up not going to school.

All in all, it's been a pretty enjoyable semester. Not much time to get bored. Had a ton of projects that were difficult to get through, and I felt miserable when I was in the middle of them, but I made it through.

I made time for some fun, too. I went to Busch Gardens for a weekend, spent a couple of weekends at Thien's family's place, and I spent the most of Thanksgiving break at Ralphy's.

Wow, I can't wait to get home and see my family. I can't wait until Christmas and the smell of pine and sugar cookies and egg nog. I can't wait until New Year, when Thien will visit me and I will be able to relax and not have to do any schoolwork, and I will know in my mind that I will not have another semester in January.

I'm pretty happy. I think I am going to take a nap in a minute.

Fall 2k6 - Fall 2k7

I guess I should start where I left off. The snake died. It was just a baby one, so it must not have been healthy or something. I thought I took pretty good care of it. Oh, well. In order to make use of the cage and equipment my roommate and I bought, we went to the pet store and bought a new pet. It is a Western Collared Lizard. We named him Clint Westwood. Right now he's living with my family in Texas since my new apartment does not allow pets.

At the end of the fall semester, it turns out I concentrated more on passing my other classes than on AI, and I had to retake AI. I'm doing that now. *sigh*

Something funny about Mr. Westwood. I was going to get him some crickets in January. It was a cold day, sort of misting outside. The roads seemed fine when I started driving. However, when I went over a bridge (I wasn't even really aware that I was on a bridge, actually.), my car suddenly fishtailed. I had run into a patch of black ice on the bridge. The corner of my rear bumper hit the cement rail on the side of the road, which really disappointed me. My dad fixed it up pretty nice this summer, though. Still, I wish it hadn't happened.

Oh, I did mention I got a new apartment, right? Well, I wanted to renew my lease back on Houston Street. However, the apartment had recently been acquired by Olty, LLC. The manager, David Chapman, asked me if I wanted to renew, and I confirmed that I did. However, my roommate was uncertain, so we didn't sign a lease right away. He gave me a lease, and never contacted me again about it. I never knew a deadline to find a new roommate or renew or anything. So in February, I get a call from the place letting me know that my place had been leased to other people. No one even came to look at the apartment... At least to my knowledge. Weird.

David Chapman says that it was a misunderstanding and that he tried to tell my roommate that he needed the signed lease back. I wish he would have contacted me instead of my roommate, since I was the one that was going to renew. Whatever. A huge annoyance (moving) that could have been avoided by better communication skills on his part, but I can sort of understand what happened.

However, when I move out during the summer, I have the electricity turned off. I come back this fall and tidy up the place a little bit so that it is not a dump. I haven't damaged the apartment at all. When I first moved into the apartment, I had to do a lot of cleaning, and I had to turn the electricity on, so I figure the best thing to do is leave it how it was when I got there. In the lease I signed with Olty, it doesn't say anything about needing electricity on or paying for professional cleaners. However, when David comes to check the place out for damages, he tells me that I'm required to have electricity on and that cleaners will be coming. I am to be charged for emergency electricity switch on and for the cleaning. I tell him that it's not in the lease.

We get into a huge argument about the charges, even though I'm right. Finally, this past week I receive a check with most of my security deposit. They charged me for carpet cleaning and a couple of light bulbs, but I don't think that's worth fighting over. They were going to pretty much deduct my entire deposit. They also gave me only my half of the deposit instead of the full one. I'm pretty sure they're banking on my old roommate not wanting to fight to get his half of the deposit back. What slime balls. I almost went to court with these people. Ugh.

Anyway, you've probably heard enough about the happenings that transpired here at Virginia Tech on April 16th, so I won't go into too much detail. I was on campus at the time of the shootings. As a matter of fact, I was right next to Norris Hall at the time of the second shootings. The police were not even at the scene yet. I was in my morning class when a person interrupted us and told us to evacuate the campus because of the first shootings (which had happened two hours earlier). I was about to walk out the door and right by Norris when a some people standing around the doors told me to get back inside because they had heard gun shots. I turned around and walked home the long way, avoiding campus.

I got home, signed on instant messenger, and started talking to my friend Steve that I met at MCS. The bad news just began to pour out the rest of the day. Eventually, Steve and his wife offered to come and pick me up. That's a 5 hour drive one-way, so they made quite a trip to come and get me. I'm glad I have such good friends.

Interesting thing happened on the way back to campus. I agreed to let a reporter follow us and get my perspective and thoughts on returning to campus the week after the massacre.

Over the summer I ended up with an internship at Verizon Business. My brother's girlfriend's father is a pretty important person there, so he pulled some strings to get me the internship. My position was SAP Basis, which is an administrative support position for a very popular (and expansive) ERP software suite. I basically learned how to make sure things ran smoothly on a bunch of computers without actually ever seeing the computers. I met quite a few new friends there. Jesus, Fareed, Carol, to name the ones I got to know the best. Good people. I miss them.

This semester started, and I move into my new apartment with the help of my old friend, Anthony. I get to know my new roommate, Vinh, a little bit before school starts by doing stuff like playing some softball, going to karate, going out to eat some, etc.

We ended up going to a movie with a couple of his friends, Anthony and Thien. I ended up really liking Thien. Even though I wasn't looking for a relationship at all...

So now I have a girlfriend. A great girlfriend. I guess will spare you from any further mushiness for this post, and just give you a picture:



Really looking forward to going to Busch Gardens with Thien, Steve, Stephanie, and Vinh next weekend. Hope everything works out well. Also going to go to Thien's family's place the weekend after that. Kind of nervous about that one, but I think I will end up having fun.

Other than that, right now I'm taking a bunch of difficult classes and trying my best to get a good enough GPA to graduate in December.

I think that's enough catch-up for now. It feels good to get that out of the way. Until next time...

Transfer from Xanga

Hello, Blogger! I have just moved all of my old posts from Xanga. I used Xanga mainly as an online journal. At first, I actually left trivial updates as often as I could. That will not be happening anymore.

Now, I expect to be writing three things here.

1. Random thoughts, opinions, observations, commentary, etc.,
2. Reflection on things that have happened in my life,
3. The occasional, longish autobiography-style journal entry.

The only reason for #3 is that I think the other two might not make as much sense without it.

That said, I have had to edit a few of my transferred Xanga posts in order to put them back into context. Also, I was subscribed to the semi-active-at-the-moment Xanga journals of Anthony and Larry.