The Unification of Catholic Orthodoxy with Social Justice: The unique opportunity Cardinal Burke's new position presents to the Church

‘Master, I knew you were a demanding person, harvesting where you did not plant and

gathering where you did not scatter"

In my experience Catholics who actively practice their Faith tend to fall into one of two camps.  There is the Orthodox crowd who tend to devote most of their energy on the spiritual needs of people, and then there is the social justice crowd who tend to focus more on people’s material needs.  It is not uncommon to find people with a strong zeal for one or the other camp.  It is almost impossible to find someone with a strong zeal for both.  Mother Teresa was one such rare person.  She had great concern for the poor, but she ran her order with salvation as the highest goal.  People who can integrate both into their thoughts, emotion and action do exist, but they are very uncommon.  It is also worth noting that these two camps often do not trust each other.  To a more orthodox person, social justice persons often look like they are overly permissive and embracing of relativism, while social justice persons often paint the orthodox as heartless, legalistic and cruel.  This schism in thought does not have to exist, and I think the Church may have been presented with a unique opportunity to heal the divide. 

As of roughly yesterday Cardinal Burke was named the Patron of the Sovereign Order of Malta.  For those not familiar with the Cardinal, he is currently considered a strong defender of orthodoxy and is quite highly respected in those circles.  He has also become a very visible Cardinal in the sense that it is not unusual for the media to broadcast his views.  I have been trying to figure out exactly what the Cardinal’s new position in the Order of Malta entails, and as far as I can tell he is basically the chaplain for the order.  I am not familiar with the Order of Malta, but from their website it appears they focus on working on taking care of the poor and elderly.  They also appear to run medical, humanitarian, and diplomatic missions.  My understanding based solely on what is reported in the media is that this is a position that comes with very few formal responsibilities compared to his previous positions.  I for one hope and pray that he leverages these unique conditions to the advantage of the Church – this is an environment that is ripe to unify Orthodoxy with Social justice.  If this type of thinking could be implemented in the hearts and minds of the Faithful it would truly be an earthquake in the Church. 

Cardinal Burke is in a unique opportunity to show to the world how to bring Orthodoxy back to social justice work.  Cardinal Burke is already a leader among Orthodox Catholics, he doesn't need a formal title as a defender of orthodoxy.  He is already well respected by many and has proven himself to be a staunch defender of the Faith.  He is man who has nothing to prove in that regard.  By placing him in a position that focuses on humanitarian efforts he has the potential to become a much more rounded world leader.  He is uniquely positioned to become an authority at implementing social justice work in an Orthodox manner.  This could potentially be huge since I would argue we have not really had a Church leader at the level of Cardinal with his international name-recognition who did this in my lifetime and I doubt in my parent’s lifetime as well.  Below are possible ways this appointment could benefit the Church:

Participation in Social Justice Work of the Church:

Lately I have found myself increasingly confused when trying to figure out which social-justice-type groups I should direct donations to because even those within the Church have faced scrutiny for their lack of adherence to Church teaching.  Whether or not this scrutiny is warranted is up to debate.   Regardless with Cardinal Burke in charge I feel like I don't have to worry about those issues at least with regards to the Order of Malta. 

Orthodoxy on Bioethical Issues:

The order of Malta seems pretty involved with medical care. I would love to see Burke take on all the ethical challenges that have been coming up in the day-to-day life of medical providers.  Examples include immigration, stopping the spread of AIDs and other communicable diseases, addressing the right-to-die crowd, artificial contraception, abortion, ethical challenges associated with modern health care directive documents and protocols and conscience rights.

Healing the “Conservative” and “Liberal” divide:

Roughly speaking the orthodox-social Justice dichotomy I mentioned earlier is very similar to the conservative – liberal dichotomy we see in American politics.  American Christians have basically ended up adopting this dichotomy and applying it to Christianity.  I suspect the reason for this has a lot to do With Roe vs. Wade.  Abortion is an issue that Orthodox Catholics cannot compromise on and tends to trump almost all other issues for them.  My assessment of this is that they have tended to align themselves with Republican-conservative thinking.  Democratic-liberal thinking is seen as suspect because the Democratic party supports access to abortion. There is also some interplay here between Capitalism and Communism.  Catholic social justice teaching is much easier to reconcile with a capitalist system than a communist system, and once again the Republicans tend to be more capitalist than the Democrats, so orthodox Catholics tend to align themselves with the Republican-conservatives.  The opposite tends to happen with social-justice Catholics.  What Orthodox Catholics have to remember though is that Republican/conservatives values are a compromise at best.  Catholic values are actually somewhat orthogonal to the conservative-liberal and capitalist-communism scales.  I am not sure a political system has ever existed that reasonably align itself with Catholic values. 

It is also worth noting that when you have a position with very few actual responsibilities it opens up the possibility of inventing your own responsibilities.  In some ways a position like this is similar to a sabbatical that a professor might go on to either write a book or explore new directions.  Cardinal Burke's time is cheap right now.  He is now free to attempt much more experimental, forward-thinking techniques to unify Orthodoxy with social justice.  The beauty of this is that he has very high credibility among orthodox Catholics.  Orthodox Catholics tend to be more conservative in their thinking, but they will probably entertain forward-thinking ideas or proposals Burke puts forth.  If in his social-justice role he can gain respect the respect of the social justice role we may finally find ways to mend social justice and Orthodox thinking that have been in existence for at least the last 50 to 100 years. 

Pope Francis has made no secret that he feels caring for the poor and outcast is his highest priorities.  It is noteworthy that he has placed Cardinal Burke in a position where he can focus on just that.  In some ways this opportunity allows for cross-training similar to that seen in high-level succession planning. 

My Approach to Meditative Prayer: A partial differential equation analogy

The latest Synod of the Bishops has been forcing me to think quite a bit.  It has been very challenging for me mentally and emotionally and spiritually.  I decided I wanted to write down some of my thoughts on how I view theological discourse.  Actually as I was writing this I remember what a priest in the Bay Area recently told me about meditative prayer and I came to realize that what I have really been engaged in is meditation.  The best way I can explain it write now is by way of analogy.  I feel like analogy is the communication technology that has to suffice when the poetic skill is not present, or the language/cultural technology is not in place to describe an idea.  It may be a little lacking in impact, but since I am too impatient to come up with a poem right now, and I do not think the required figures of speak or words or concepts currently exist in our language/culture analogy will have to do for the time being.

The way I often find myself pondering the mysteries of the universe and engaging in novel theological discourse can be communicated by using an analogy based on partial differential equations.  Now I know not a huge percentage of the population has even heard of a partial differential equation, but I am going to proceed anyways because I think the analogy is very clean.  Hopefully later I will be able to find a more accessible analogy.  So with that let's being.

If you have ever used a partial differential equations to model a system you know the process involved a couple of different pieces of information.  First, you have the governing partial differential equations themselves that describe the physics of how the state of the system evolves through time and space.  You also tend to have boundary conditions and initial conditions.  Boundary conditions are essentially constraints on the space that is being modeled.  Initial conditions capture the state of the system at the beginning of the simulation.  The scientist or engineer might have some control over the boundary and intial conditions of the actual system being studied depending on the situation.  When you try to "solve" a system of partial differential equations, what you are essentially doing is trying to find a "solution," often in the form of a multi-variate equation that can be plugged into the partial differential equations, and will satisfy the initial conditions and the boundary conditions.  A couple of other concepts are worth being aware of.  The first is the "uniqueness" of the solution.  Uniqueness is the property that if you find a solution, it is the only solution to the system of partial differential equations.  You may have often been told in math class that there is only one correct answer.  Well it turns out this is not totally true.  It is possible for some sets of math problems to have multiple correct solutions.  If you have completed high-school algebra and trigonometry you will probably be able to think of a couple examples.  Another property a given solution has is it's stability. This is the tendency of a system to return to the solution state in the face of small perturbations.  For example, a simple pendulum has two equilibrium solutions.  The pendulum could hang down, or the pendulum could be in the 180 deg opposite position standing straight upright. The first solution would be stable becuase if you moved the pendulum a little the pendulum returns to its initial position.  The second solution is unstable, because if even the smallest disturbance is applied to the pendulum it will swing down and ultimately end up at the stable position that was previously mentioned.  Generally when we are modeling systems we have a bias in favor of stable solutions.  The reason being that they are more likely to actually be observable in nature.  When was the last time you saw a pendulum arm standing straight up?

Now let us make the analogy to theology.  I tend to think of the law of the universe (e.g. natural law, physical law, God's law, etc) as the governing partial differential equations.  They determine how a system will evolve through space, time, as well as any spiritual/supernatural dimensions that may exist.  Next, I think of Church doctrine, truths revealed by Faith, and things mandated by obiedience as the boundary conditions.  They basically put constraints on the system as well as define it. They also in some sense define the boundaries of limitations of the solutions and specify over what range a solution is valid.   Now I want to make a comment on a statement that is often heard when learning about differential equations.  That is that a solution is valid as long as it satisfies the constraints when it is plugged into the system of differential equations regardless of how it is arrived at.  So if I somehow made a machine that consisted of a cage full of monkeys playing scrabble that occasionally threw out solutions to partial differential equations their validity would not be questioned as long as they met the constraints when they were plugged into the governing equations.  Furthermore, it is very possible that there is not a single unique solution to the problem.  So it is also possible that the monkeys could throw out two totally different solutions to the system of differential equations and they would both be equally valid as long as they met the boundary conditions when they were plugged into the governing equations.  With this being said I imagine it is possible to come up with two different solutions to a practical religious ethical problem and both could be valid.  This would particularly be true in the case of deciding pastoral solutions to problems as the Bishops involved in the Synod have been discussing.  You could now apply questions to the proposed solutions of a similar nature to the stability question.  Does the solution display empathy and justice and mercy?  Is the solution practical in the current economic/social/political/technological climate?  Is the solution going to lead to the positive growth of the body of Christ and lead to the continued spreading of the Gospel?  These are all solutions that are similar to the question of the stability of a solution.

When you start learning about differential equations you learn "cookbook" procedures to find solutions to highly understood classes of partial differential equations and work out the algebra to make the solution work for that particular case.  When you become more advanced you deal with much more complicated systems of equations, you learn techniques to build solutions that can be scaled, and you start cooking up solutions to more complicated systems based on intuition.  I tend to think a similiar thing occurs in spiritual development.  When you start out there are some basica procedures or thought processes you use to discern the spiritual merit of different courses of action. An example of this is the type of guidance that is given to young people on questions like, "how far is too far?"  However as these people become parents they have to deal with much more complex, nuanced situations and they have to use their best judgement to come up with acceptable solutions.

Why do I bring this up?  There is often alot of romantic language that says that as a person becomes more spiritually mature they can shed certain constraints on method.  The problem is that I find in practice many people do not focus on creativity in the method, but instead shed the actual constraints and simply exchange God's boundary conditions for their own boundary conditions.  This is wrong.  This is basically what Cardinal Kasper is trying to do with his proposal for providing a path for divorced and remarried Catholics to receive communion.  In this case it does not matter if dice throwing monkeys made the solution, or he had some kind of epiphany in prayer.  The solution does not meet the boundary conditions so it should be thrown out.  Furthermore this solution also quickly runs into stability-like problems.  It leads to other implications that cause the whole system to fall apart.  So for that reason it is also not an attractive solution in addition to just being invalid.  With that being said, it is possible that poor solutions can be a stepping stone to valid good solutions.  Considering why failed solutions did not work, or what the implications of various types of failed solutions are can lead to the intuition that provides a valid stable solution that is workable.  This is basically what happens during brainstorming and in committee meetings.

From my perspective a triumph of the Synod would come from the Bishops developing alternative solutions to the problems they have been faced with that satisfy the doctrinal boundary conditions when applied the governing equations of the universe.  The solutions should also meet some type of "stability" requirement in the sense that they are practical and lead to growth of the Body of Christ, etc.  Doing this is intellectually difficult work, but it is what must be done.  On the other hand removing doctrinal boundary conditions and throwing out solutions that meet these new constraints is not really that difficult intellectually nor does it provide any useful insight or a plan to move forward in any kind of realistic way.  This is a form of false-intellectualism unless it is being used as a thought-process tool (i.e. thought experiment) that leads to solutions that are actually valid.  I feel like this is what Kasper is doing.

If you want to learn more about meditation you can see this excerpt from the Catechism of the Catholic Church:

II. MEDITATION

2705 Meditation is above all a quest. The mind seeks to understand the why and how of the Christian life, in order to adhere and respond to what the Lord is asking. The required attentiveness is difficult to sustain. We are usually helped by books, and Christians do not want for them: the Sacred Scriptures, particularly the Gospels, holy icons, liturgical texts of the day or season, writings of the spiritual fathers, works of spirituality, the great book of creation, and that of history the page on which the "today" of God is written.

2706 To meditate on what we read helps us to make it our own by confronting it with ourselves. Here, another book is opened: the book of life. We pass from thoughts to reality. To the extent that we are humble and faithful, we discover in meditation the movements that stir the heart and we are able to discern them. It is a question of acting truthfully in order to come into the light: "Lord, what do you want me to do?"

2707 There are as many and varied methods of meditation as there are spiritual masters. Christians owe it to themselves to develop the desire to meditate regularly, lest they come to resemble the three first kinds of soil in the parable of the sower.⁵ But a method is only a guide; the important thing is to advance, with the Holy Spirit, along the one way of prayer: Christ Jesus.

2708 Meditation engages thought, imagination, emotion, and desire. This mobilization of faculties is necessary in order to deepen our convictions of faith, prompt the conversion of our heart, and strengthen our will to follow Christ. Christian prayer tries above all to meditate on the mysteries of Christ, as in lectio divina or the rosary. This form of prayerful reflection is of great value, but Christian prayer should go further: to the knowledge of the love of the Lord Jesus, to union with him.

http://www.vatican.va/archive/ccc_css/archive/catechism/p4s1c3a1.htm 

"Faith and Reason," an irrelevant topic

Catholics love bringing up the question of the relationship between "Faith and reason." Today I heard a Catholic lecture on how rational "scientism" was threatening to take over the world. It would remove aesthetics, and render values of all types as arbitrary and meaningless. I sat there thinking to myself that this is clearly not true.  All you have to do is read the news and look at what people are spending money on.  Aesthetics are taking a much bigger role in life. Google just bought an eye-pleasing thermostat company for billions of dollars.  The supposedly superior design of Apple products is what allows them to charge what they do.  Alot of work goes into interface design and marketing.    People pay extra for organic food. The reality is a rational-philosophy was tried by secular society during The Enlightenment and ultimately there was a backlash resulting in the Romantic period. It seems secular society learned it's lesson.   Time has shown that human nature will not tolerate a purely rational society.  There must be a blending of some kind with human emotional requirements.  Secular society has embraced this lesson.  It is clear to me there is no danger that art, music, culture, vegetarianism, architecture, sports and dance will not be leaving us anytime soon.  Our secular society today has converged on a rational/romantic hybrid philosophy where empathy is being used as a fill-in for virtue. The question of Faith and reason is kind of outdated.  To even discuss the question of Faith and reason at this point seems to ignore the state of society as it is and to disregard natural human experience. Any informed secular thought leader today knows that life is bigger than rational concerns - and they have been learning how to address these concerns.  This can clearly be seen in product design.  To be relevant the contemporary question of decision-making integration needs to at a minmum also address emotional needs of humans.  But even this is just reactionary - We can do better.

Questions/topics that keep me up at night wondering

Recently at of of our young adult meetings the person in Charge of Adult formation asked what topics would be useful to have speakers come in and give discussions on. I have been thinking about this the last couple weeks and I have assembled a list of the topics that keep me up nights wondering. Many of these things are what I would think of as the practical paradoxes of our Faith. I hope one day I can meet a person who I can pray with and who can help me discern through these types of issues and other issues that emerge as time goes on. 

1.    1.  Pierre Teilhard de Chardin – Why the last few Popes have praised his work, but the Church has issued a formal monitum.  Is there a path for rehabilitation and what is it?

1. 2   Hildegard von Bingen – A new Doctor of the Church. 
   3.       A big picture view of how Theological Research is conducted today vs. How it was conducted in the past.  How do you train the next generation of Theologians. 
   4.       Taking the novel work of one Theologian and drawing guidance from the Holy Spirit on learning to separate the wheat from the chafe.
   5.       Immigration
   6.      Universal Health Care and the Lack of Catholic Suggestions for a path forward.
   7.      Synthetic Biology, Transhumanism, Conscious Evolution and the Omega Point 
   8.      Global Security, Nuclear Weapons and Nonproliferation, a post Cold War world, policies of the players worldwide, and the path forward. 
   9.      The  Neocatechumenal Way – What is it?  Where is it going?
   10.  Lessons learned from the Legion of Christ situation. 
   11.  Sleep Paralysis and other Psychological Disorder Related to Spirituality
   12.  Prudence:  Catholic Politicians and guidance on the role of compromise in a heterogeneous society
   13.  The Leadership Conference of Women Religious – The perspective from the Bishops.  How did we get to where we are and where are we going. 
   14.  Misguided spiritual practices of the Saints deemed best avoided going forward. 
   15.  The philosophies of Anthony De Mellow and Richard Rohr.  Why the Church tolerates these types of ideas?
   16.  Embryo Adoption and Artificial Wombs.  The problems created by IVF, dealing with them, and relevant emerging technologies that will present moral problems of their own. 
   17.  Extroversion and Conscientiousness – Personality traits for success and the widening wage gap.  How does an individual’s personality affect social justice issues?
   18.  The evolving role of women in the Church
   19.  Psychopathy – a moral singularity?  A Catholic perspective on salvation for those born without the benefit of a conscience. 
   20.  What new light does behavioral genetics and personality research shed on the Catholic understanding of human nature.
   21.  How do we learn to be strong in the face of the temptation of corruption, lies and thievery?
   22.  What insights do breakthroughs in information theory, complexity theory, computer science and mathematics shed on the nature of God and the universe? 
   23.  A unified Faith, developing personal Harmony between Social Justice, and Dogma. 
   24.  How does the random measurement matrix in compressed sensing relate to the nature of God and the world.  How can so much information be extracted from madness? 
   25.  Cognitive Biases and Faith.'
2. 26  - Induced Pluripotent Stem cells.

The other day my boss was talking to me after I returned from a Catholic conference that occurred over the weekend.  He asked me what we did at these conferences.  He wanted to know if we discussed the emerging issues facing the Catholic Church.  Unfortunately I had to tell him no.  Generally all we talk about is things that are mostly very well understood.  At least for on the order of decades.  This was disappointing in a way for me since when we go to engineering and science conferences we do discuss recently emerging issues.  Unfortunately my opinion is that it is very rare to find a person who is secure enough in their Faith that they can question it, probe it, and be playful with it, while at the same time rigorously maintaining the constraints that are imposed by it.  I think we could learn a lesson from theoretical physicists because they are very comfortable doing a similar thing with the nature world.  Why so few people can do it with the supernatural world is a bit of a disappointment to me.  I am not sure I have ever met a person capable of doing this outside my Aunt who is a nun.  My Mom to a lesser extent can in a way do something similar but she does it in a more emotional way as opposed to an intellectual way.  I want to point out too, it is clearly very easy to think up very "progressive" ideas that clearly contradict the teachings of the Church.  There is no great feat of the intellect or morals here.  That is about on par with a person coming up with a perpetual motion machine.  There is no rigour, just wishful thinking.  

How to Lose Weight the Easy and Fun Way!

In talking to a number of people over the last year it has come to my attention that many people have a hard time losing weight.  I was sorry to hear about their troubles, so I have been promising that I would share my story and the diet I used to get closer to an ideal weight.  I hope people find this helpful and encouraging.  I am pretty confident that if you follow this plan you will lose weight.

The story begins on a fine evening at the end of October a few years ago.  For whatever reason reason I was looking at Life insurance weight tables and they informed me that I was 35 pounds overweight.  I was horrified.  How had this happened???  All my life I had been reasonably athletic and also somewhat poor - both of which had led to me to be perpetually lean.  For instance, in college  I would only eat a $.50 can of corn for lunch every day (I am glad those days are in the past).   Well I can tell you what happened - I got a job and the paycheck that goes with it.  I am not a flashy person, but I do enjoy eating.  It is one of my primary recreational activities.  So once I had a paycheck and no longer had to eat cans of corn, I would go ahead and buy that big cookie after eating lunch.  Why not - I deserved it right???  Well I did start to notice over the course of a couple of months that my pants were getting tighter, but I could ignore that easy enough.  I did not notice that I looked any different.  Reading the numbers on the tables sparked me into action.  At the time I was in a hotel in Urbana Champagne.  I promptly walked down to the hotel gym and started riding the exercise bike.  I think I rode it for 45 min and I was pretty tired at the end.  I believe I burned around 450 calories.  Next I decided to give up eating cold turkey for the last day of the conference I was at.  This was tough because conference food is good., but all that good food comes with a caloric price.  I think I may have cheated and eaten a strawberry.  Even when I got back to NM it was tough because it was Halloween and my roommate had a big pot full of leftover candy bars that were dying to be eaten.

Now one I got back to NM I obviously had to find a diet that was sustainable for losing weight.  I started doing a little research on what actually caused people to gain weight.  Now we have all heard a number of urban legends regarding weight loss.  For instance the most famous one is that you should eat many small meals instead of three large meals.  Another one is that if you cut your caloric intake dramatically your metabolism will slow down and you will not burn so many calories.  Well I am a very results-oriented person, and based on my experience all of this discussion is not worth listening to.  In reality losing weight is really simple.  Basically if you burn more calories in a day than you eat you will lose weight.    I am a numbers person so basically what it boils down to is this.  For every 3500 calories you burn that you do not make up for with food you will lose a pound.  Armed with this knowledge I could create a goal I could shoot for.

Here was my plan.  I decided I would exercise for an hour every day.  I am a very busy guy so this is the max time I could spend at the YMCA.  I started out riding a stationary bike but eventually I transitioned to running on a treadmill.  Running is pretty much the most time-efficient way any normal person can burn calories.  My hour-long workouts typically resulted in burning roughly 600 calories a day.  Now the resting metabolism for a guy like me is roughly 2400 calories per day.  That means in a day I was burning 2400 + 600 = 3000 calories a day.

Now the normal recommendation is to lose something like 1-2 pounds a week, but I lead a somewhat undomesticated, rock N roll lifestyle so I decided I had neither the time nor the patience for that.  I decided I would try to run a 2000 calorie a day deficit.  This would mean I would lose a pound every other day and that I would lose 35 pounds in about 70 days.  I decided this was acceptable.    In order to do this would require that I eat a total of 1000 calories per day.

So next I started looking at the calorie content of food to see what would work for a diet.  I knew I needed protein because I was working out alot.  So I looked at the protein content of food.  I figured I would eat some lean meat.  I started out by eating the following every day:  For breakfast I would have a cup of yogurt (100 calories) for lunch I would have half a bean burrito (~300) calories, and for dinner after my workout I would have a salad (no salad dressing, only vinegar) with half a pound of turkey and a little bit of cottage cheese (~500 calories).  For a nighttime snack I would have one rice cake with salsa.  I really like salsa and thankfully salsa has almost no calories.

Now this was a pretty demanding it is true.  Actually for the first two weeks I woke up tired every day.  I was also thinking about food alot, and my brain seemed to be thinking slower than usual.  I was definitely losing weight, but I was getting so hungry that I resorted to eating Tofu as a snack one night.  That was not pleasant.  The Tofu experience convinced me that I needed to make a change.  I read somewhere that your brain needs fat to operate correctly and I liked the sound of that so I decided to go with it.  My current diet was really low on fat.  Now I do not have much time for cooking so I started looking at fast food to see if any fast food would give me protein and fat.  I looked at Subway and Taco Bell and some others, but nothing had a good ratio of calories to protein and other nutrients.  This is when I had to start thinking a little unconventionally - I checked McDonalds.  Now most food at McDonalds has a pretty low ratio of protein to calories, except for one Sandwich.  It turns out the double quarter pounder with cheese is actually very nutrient dense for the number of calories it has.  The Double quarter pounder has 750 calories, but it also has nearly 100% of your daily protein and fat needs.  Much to my surprise I found it was basically the perfect diet food.  If you do not believe me look at the nutrition information:

Double quarter pounder with cheese nutrition information:
http://www.mcdonalds.com/us/en/food/product_nutrition.sandwiches.287.double-quarter-pounder-with-cheese.html 

I decided to stop eating the dinner salad and switching to the double quarter pounder for dinner after my workout.  My energy level went way up and my happiness level went way up too.  I no longer thought about food all the time because the fat in the double quarter pounder satisfied my food craving.  I never thought about tofu again.  And prehaps more importantly I was still losing a pound every other day.  Another plus is that I made new friends at McDonalds.  They started getting my order ready as I walked in the story every day.  I was a regular.

I carried this diet out for 6 weeks.  I lost 29 pounds from where I started and this even included a period where I went to a different conference with really good food (I restrained myself the first day, but the next two days I indulged myself.)  I realized I could stop at this point because I visited some friends in San Diego and someone came up to me and asked if I was alright.  They were wondering I had gotten cancer.  So I decided the life insurance company did not know what they were talking about and I went back to normal eating habits - just in time for Christmas :-).  Of course now normal meant keeping an net 0 daily calorie intake - which is easy when you have been eating only 1000 calories a day.

Now I have to make a disclaimer - I may be a doctor, but I am not the kind that helps people.  As my brother likes to say I am a "machine doctor," so take this with a grain of salt - literally, after the daily run you might be low on salt. I also want to leave you with a few notes:

NOTES:

1. I found I really like running on the treadmill.  It forces you to run harder and it is less damaging on the joints.  I find if I run hard on the street multiple days in a row I will get shin splints, but this never happens with the treadmill because it is cushioned.  
2. If you look at the numbers diet is by far the most important element in this equation.  Actually I could have not exercised at all and still lost alot of weight.  Conversely, you can exercise alot and then undo it in a second by eating a few cookies.  
3. Many people might think this diet would make you weak, but I cut 14 minutes off my best half-marathon time doing this.  I also felt more agile.
4. If you do not like double quarter pounders with cheese you could just eat the appropriate size steak instead.  

After the diet ended I continued the running.  I eventually got down to a sub 1:30 half-marathon which puts me in the top 6% of men in San Diego who raced.  Not bad in my opinion.  Now I am trying to get to an 1:20 half marathon.

I hope this story inspires and helps people to lose weight.  Please feel free to share your weight loss story with me in the comments.  I like to hear people's success.

A 2 Degree-of-Freedom Perspective of the Catholic Landscape.

Over the course of the last couple years I have realized that the scales we use to classify different types of Catholics may be impeding our spiritual progress.  My particular concern is with Faithful Catholics that are more on the conservative side.  Catholicism is a tough religion to follow.  You spend many, many years (read decades) struggling just to get a sense of it and live somewhat "comfortably" with it.  I am not sure many people at all even get to this point.  It seems you almost have to adopt a somewhat conservative stance at some point to get to this point.  It can be done from a more progressive standpoint, but it seems people are much more likely to fall away from that side or at least be less consistent about it.  I may have a bias here though because I came more from a conservative outlook.  I have observed there may be a different lesson learned from the other direction that I am just not able to observe.  What I have been finding myself trying to explain to people for a few years though now is that we should not be content with a simply conservative Catholic Church.  I think this is what Pope Francis is really trying to push right now.  It is also the case that the role of the Laity is increasing.  The Laity is more educated than ever and we do have a role in developing the body of Christ.  This implies taking a more "progressive" stance.  It is the case thought that when a "conservative" hears about "progressive-ism" they tend to right away think that some kind of evil is afoot.  What I am trying to get across is that this is not always the case.  It is entirely possible to stay within a defined set of constraints and come up with new insights and frameworks that push the community forward.  I am a research engineer.  From my point of view this is completely possible.  I learned all about physics and chemistry and math...  And what I learned is that with those tools we constantly need to update our models as new information, tools and skills come to light.   We occasionally need to look at problems from new paradigms.  We are not throwing away all the work of the past, we are just using it in a different way.  It takes a certain kind of person to effectively do this.  Oftentimes this person has a rebellious streak to them but demands logical consistency.  I know many people like this myself, but they are not common in the general population.  The even rarer person is the deeply spiritual Catholic who is Faithful to the Magisterium of the Church, but also recognizes the need for new "paradigms" so to speak.  It is very intellectually easy to be outright rebellious and just throw teachings out in order to further some agenda a person might have.  It is much harder to find a person who accepts the Truths of Divine Revelation, but is willing to try and apply new human methods of looking at them.  Personally I have seen so many results in fields such a information theory, game theory, math, psychology, sociology, management and negotiation, and engineering that shed additional light on Faith that I baffled that theologians are not having a field day picking off intellectual low-hanging fruit left and right.  I am actually kind of disappointed.  On the other side I occasionally see things in these secular fields that could benefit from the Divine Intuition offered by the Church.  It is easier in this case though for me to understand why they might ignore it.  But I digress.  My point is that is is possible to be Faithful to the Magisterium and be a progressive thinker.  Many of our Saints would fall into this category as would Jesus himself.  This is why many Saints were investigated by the Church during their time.  They were promoting ideas/actions that were revolutionary and meant non-incremental change.  But the Saints were obedient to the will of legitimate authority.  I think more Catholics should be encouraged to engage in this type of activity.  There are so many results available from so many fields and such a massive ability to collect data on the human condition that the time is supremely ripe for a Catholic Intellectual renaissance.  To make matters even better we are currently in the perfect position to mess it up.  The secular world has little to no respect for the Catholic church right now on account of the sex scandles.  The upside of this is that any mistake we make now is easy to dismiss from a secular point of view because we are just those backwards Catholics who don't allow women to be priests or use birth control.   Actually I get excited as I write this because as a professional intellectual I can assure you that it is absolutely necessary to allow tolerance for mistakes in order to move forward.  If the Catholic Church were more respected we would probably take a more reluctant stance towards allowing intellectual freedom and mistake making.  I say lets make the best of the situation we find ourselves in.  

I have also noticed many non-Catholics, and even Catholics themselves do not really understand the Catholic family with any amount of breadth.  I have spent the last four years living in a place with very few young Catholics.  Most of the people I interact with here are some kind of secular humanist/atheist who have no idea what the Catholic church is about.  My impression is that they think of it as some super-coherent, wealthy cult with brain-washed followers who blindly do whatever the Pope says when and his clergy minions are not involved in some kind of scandal or attempt to oppress someone.  

For some reason people have no trouble thinking that a religion like Islam is complicated with groups like Sunnis and Shiites, and various tribal, historical and geopolitical differences.  We seem to think that since the Catholic Church of the west is right in front of our faces that it is easy to understand based on sound bites on the news.  

I am guessing that part of the reason people think of us as a uniform mob is that the Catholic Church likes to emphasis our temporal and geographic unity - and for good reason.  However, while it is true that we are unified, but we are far from homogeneous.  There are something like 23 different rites within the Church.  Most people are somewhat familiar with the Roman rite, but are totally unaware of the others.   There are slightly different little "t" traditions all over the world.  And it is more common than not for baptized Catholics to ignore the teachings of the Church.  We are also far from wealthy.  It is more like we have high revenue, not so much high profit.  Alot of money flows through the Church because we are attending to alot of different concerns. A reactionary is happy with going back to ways we used to do things, at this time people in this category tend to lean towards pre-Vatican II policies.  

In order to give people not familiar with the Church family a better sense of what we are about I have made this chart.  I got tired of the 1-D scale that involved Conservatives/Orthodox, Reactionaries and Progressives/liberals.  This is an elementary way to look at the world that does not even begin to capture the subtitles of what is really going on.  For now I just did the cliche cartesian thing and added a second dimension.  I might try something else later, but this will do for now.  In this case, the second dimension is whether or not a person or organization is Faithful to the Magisterium of the Church.  I have populated the chart with examples of people or groups that I perceive as falling into the different categories.  To clarify a little, in my terminology, a progressive is a person who is trying to aggressively pursue new paradigms of thought or practice.  They might also be looking for order-of-magnitude changes.  I consider JPII and his "Theology of the Body" an example of a progressive.  This was a fairly new way of thinking that had not been considered before.  I consider Christopher West and his approach to the Theology of the Body also in this Category because he adopted a very modern style to presenting it and has received alot of flack in the process.  A conservative may still be tending toward new growth, but in a much more incremental manner.  They might be content simply finding new ways to communicate what we already know or thing.  When I say Faithful to the Magisterium I basically mean that a person at least does not obstinately say or do things that are against the Church teaching or authority.  Hopefully more positively they uphold the teachings of the Church and spread them, but practically this is a hard definition to use because it is hard to apply to progressives due to differences of perspectives and opinions.  The "questionable" category here implies people/groups that I perceive do something that appears to be against Church teachings, but they may still be in good standing with their superiors, or the matter is somewhat being debated.  I put "Live Action" in this group because traditional Catholic teaching is that lying is never an acceptable tactic, but some reputable Catholics are willing to come to their defense so I am just not sure.  Personally I would not want to be a part of it, but it is a tough judgement call.  The no group refers to people/groups that may be baptized Catholics who are blatantly against Church teachings, or authority.  Such people promote the use of artificial birth control, promote abortion, have separated themselves from their legitimate Superiors, or obstinately remain in some form of state of sin.  Some of the groups are in this column are schismatic Catholic groups.   I am admittedly a little loose with my whole terminology - for instance Nancy Pelosi and Joe Biden have not been publically excommunicated, but they actively promote Abortion which implies a self-excommunication has occurred.  Who I put in which group is not so important and is a matter for debate.  The more important idea I am trying to get across is that there are different ways of looking at Catholicism that are valid.  From a Salvation point of view I assert that the main thing that matters is that you fall into the column of Yes's with regards to being Faithful to the Magisterium.  Basically being sure to stay free from mortal sin and practicing lawful obedience.  I would say that if you fall in this category it does not matter if you want to get into the Catholic Charismatic Renewal or go to Latin Mass every day of the week with a mantilla on your head.  From a salvation point of view it probably does not matter.  On the other hand, there are conservative groups that have removed themselves from the Church and have gone against Church teaching.  SSPX is probably the best example of this.  I have been around the Catholic block more that a few times now and I have seen other examples.  For instance before the scandal broke concerning the founder of the Legion of Christ I was always a little leary of the Legion from the first time I ever heard of them.  The thing about the Legion that made me nervous is that they seemed to be too controlling and militant.  My experience has been that tendencies in this direction are not healthy.  There are unhealthy and health levels of discipline and they seemed on the unhealthy side.  I think this had something to do with their leadership.  I hope the organization goes in a holy direction from here on out.  

My main goal in talking about this is to encourage those who might be so inclined to move into the Upper left box I call Faithful to the Magisterium/Progressive.  This group is not for everyone and admittedly it is probably pretty rare to find a person with the temperament and spiritual confidence required operate there, but maybe someone will say, "I saw this interesting result during my work involving how parrots talk to people more during morning hours vs at lunchtime and that times into so an so theological concept in this new way."  And when that person arises I would like to meet them so we can talk and move forward with action.  

Thought Crime, Virtue, Lust and Mind Reading at UC Berkeley

Virtue is Beautiful - Gardens on the Mount of the Beatitudes 

When I was growing up I would come across this particular passage in the Bible that I found quite challenging.

Matthew 5: 27-28
27
“You have heard that it was said,r ‘You shall not commit adultery.’
28
But I say to you, everyone who looks at a woman with lust has already committed adultery with her in his heart.

For a dew years (~11-15 years old) I thought this passage was just impossible to follow and so I did not even bother trying.  How do you really control what your mind thinks?  Especially when you are a middle/high school boy?  It also seemed be concerned something that was a non-issue.  What did it really matter what you thought anyway?

It really does not matter what happened, but something did happen back when I was a sophomore in high school that caused me to take a much more serious look at this.  I basically started taking this issue of lust much more seriously.  I earnestly began trying to fight off every lustful thought that tried to enter my mind without exception.  This was not an easy task at all.  It was without a doubt the toughest thing I ever tried to undertake at that time and ever since.  I tried so hard to control my thoughts that my head would really hurt.  The way I went about it probably was not the best, and I could recommend different ways to go about it, but I found it was possible to succeed in this endeavor. Prayer and discernment were definitely a big part of it.  So was the application of intelligence and good judgement in terms of knowing what was a temptation and what was a sin.  Actually knowing what I know now, I can say it is challenging, but is not as impossible as it seemed at first.  I have to admit though that I really did not know what the point of all this effort was other than to avoid something that was considered a serious sin.

A couple of years ago I came across this Atheist cartoon that deals with the issue of "sinful thoughts." Basically they paint God as a cop out looking for thought-crime offenders.  To be honest at first I had to sympathize with their view.  To some extent that is what it looks like, but at the same time I also knew they were missing something - I just was not sure what it was.  It made me think, but ultimately what I realized was that what secular society in general lacks is the concept of "purity of heart."  When I say purity of heart I am talking about some intrinsic quality of a person that orients them to good (More or less)  This is pretty much what Jesus is talking about as he lays down the beatitudes just before he talks about anger and list in a person's heart.  This is what I realized was important. This is really nothing new, I knew it all along, what I did not realize is that not everyone had the concept of purity of heart to work from.  My experience now is that this makes a big difference.



From a secular perspective it is so easy to dismiss the concept of a pure heart and striving toward some internal goodness simply because there is no way to observe or measure it.  At one time behavioral psychology (see B.F. Skinner) was big for just this reason.  Who cares what is going on inside when you cannot observe it.  Lets focus on what we can measure and restrict our understanding to just that.

Well from the Catholic perspective only God can really know the heart, but there may eventually be ways to at least know a little more about what is going on inside the mind.  About two years ago I learned about some work being done in the Gallant Lab at UC Berkeley on decoding visual images being seen by the brain.  It is really remarkable.  I invite you to take a look at this video on the work.  Basically they are able to show it is feasible to tell what a person is seeing solely based on fMRI measurements.  They basically do it by applying machine learning techniques.  One day this could be used for a whole variety of applications such as mind reading, interrogation, etc etc.  Imagine if an artist no longer had to practice painting or drawing.  They could focus solely on creativity and print their ideas directly from the mind.  I digress though.  The more interesting question is what if your spouse had a way to know who you were fantasizing about even though they did nothing to act on it? This is a long way off from being a household item, but the day could come when a spouse stumbles on a brain scan log-file and find out about the other person you might currently be enamored with.  I just thought this was interesting because as science evolves, what we are capable of measuring and observing may have an impact on secular ethics, and it may look more like the "purity of heart" we strive for in Catholicism.

Thought crime might not be so innocent one day.

My Criticisms of the Big 5, and an alternative Dynamic Systems Paradigm

 (Disclaimer - this is a really long facebook post I once made during an arguement and it is kind of a work in progress right now.  I just want to get some of the ideas out there.  This is basically a summary of my objections to the Big 5 and an alternative Dynamic Systems Theory model)

This is an article I reference just to show an example of the common criticisms of MBTI

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/adam-grant/goodbye-to-mbti-the-fad-t_b_3947014.html 

Ok  - Here is what I think.  First, from what I understand all the studies that have been used to check the validity of Meyers Briggs do not use the theory correctly.  As JT Cove points out the author of this article does not use the theory even remotely correctly.  All the Academic discussions I have seen on this do the same thing.  They ignore the role of cognitive functions and instead use the simplistic idea that MBTI models personality as what I can best describe as a Cartesian, 4-dimensional “pseudo-binary” space.  When you use this line of thinking (which is incorrect) you guess that for E-I, S-N, F-T, and J-P you should see bi-modal distributions in the data.  This is not what I understand you see in the data though.  The data always comes out unimodal with a mean in the middle.  The problem is though that the MBTI theory does not model personality in Cartesian sense at all.  The mathematical framework that I currently think best matches Jungian theory is something more like a Markov chain or a probabilistic graphical network, where the states in the model are the cognitive functions.  If nothing else I think some kind of dynamic system model is much more appropriate to model human personality.  Actually one of the main strengths of MBTI over the big 5 in my opinion is that it does take into account that all people have thinking and feeling, etc, etc.  They are just used in different preference orders (sort of).  The author in the article totally misses this.  Big 5 just places people on a static point on a continuum.  To the best of my knowledge no psychologist in academia has ever tried to fit any kind of dynamic system model to personality outside of perhaps some work with infants.  Dario Nardi at UCLA has also mentioned dynamic systems models, but I can find no peer-reviewed papers of his.  If humans are better modeled like dynamic systems I really do not know what the resulting distributions in a Cartesian representation these types of models would give on the questionnaires used to check the validity of psychological tests.  Hard to say if it should come out bi-modal or uni-modal.  I could actually use some hand-wavy central-limit theorem argument to explain the fact that the data does keep coming out unimodal.  Personality is a pretty complicated and this hunch is not totally unreasonable but I really have no idea.  It would need to be studied more deeply.  This leads me to my criticisms of big 5. 

First, we need to take a step back and look at what big 5 actually is.  Big 5 is really a data-driven, static, 5 dimensional Cartesian model of human personality.  From what I can tell psychology researchers basically took a bunch of surveys and performed factor analysis on them and got out 5 main factors and said that is a good way to model human personality.  Now the fact that it is purely data driven means there was never any theory really used to guide the investigation other than perhaps the implicit idea that humans can be broken into independent factors.  This means in some ways it is arguable whether or not it is even “scientific” because there really is no hypothesis or model you are trying to test against.  It is more like a modified form of an observation.  This criticism is common and I think the big 5 article on Wikipedia also mention it.  My main question though is, why in the world does anyone think a static, Cartesian model is a good way to capture human personality?   What about humans is static?  Why did they do this?  I will give my theory.  Basically psychology is often considered a “soft” science and as a result I think the academic field sort of has an "inferiority complex."  In order to maintain credibility they seem to try to tie everything to data as much as possible.  This is reasonable enough, but I see at least one problem in the implementation.  Psychology education appears to have chosen statistical factor analysis as its weapon of choice for data analysis.  They focus on using statistical factor analysis for pretty much everything.  Problem is that in doing this they are making the assumption that everything can be modeled in a static Cartesian space.  This is kind of ridiculous.  Many important phenomena are much better described using other types of models.  Dynamic system models for instance (This is my current preference for modeling humans).  I am pretty sure Psychology researchers do not have the same kind of mathematical maturity that an engineer or computer-science researcher has.  My background was full of dynamic system models and techniques do exist to fit data to them.  I think psychology is in a mode where they really like factor analysis and either are not aware of other types of models, or they just do not want to bother with them.  I feel like they are kind of caught in a case of “When your only tool is a hammer the whole world becomes a bunch of nails.”

One quick mention on the tests.  I do not think the current survey-based tests are very good.  They are not really repeatable or reliable.  I am currently exploring the possibility of using different types of tests to measure personality.  I am wondering for instance if tracking the kinds of moves people make in playing certain kinds of games might provide a better measure. Fe might be measurable by looking at how much vital signs in a person change when exposed to certain images.  I am also curious if for instance S and N people might remember details from scenes differently.  This might be a measurable difference.  I think better testing techniques need to be developed before progress can be made.    

 I believe my thoughts on this could actually be used to build much more life-like machines.  I think many algorithms you see in computer science map to cognitive functions.  For instance, search algorithms seem sort of like Ne.  Design of experiment is like Se.  Simulations are like Ni.  Pattern recognition is like Si.  POMDPs seem a lot like Te.  Hierarchical deep learning and PCA are sort of like aspects of Ti.  Neural networks seem somewhat similar to Fe (You can make fast decisions on complicated data but you really do not know how you did it).  Fe is in some ways like using your own system as an analog computer to calculate results about external events.  I think you could make a machine with current algorithms and arranging their use according to some kind of dynamic system model such as a Markov Chain.  I have seen some cutting edge personality engineering work for robotics, and in my opinion it is pretty crude.  Engineering researchers are blindly adopting big 5 as well, and I think it is to their detriment.  Engineering is not constrained as science is to concepts such as searching for “truth.”  It just has to work.  I think I can make a better human-like machine using MBTI theory.  I am laying down theoretical framework for this in my spare time.

At the end of the day MBTI is just a model like anything else.  The pertinent question is how useful is it.  I know however that a person is going to have a hard time convincing me that there is no such phenomena as the “INTJ” or “Fe.”  I think if nothing else Jung was really onto something.  May not be perfect but something is there worth taking a look at. A dynamics systems approach may be the paradigm shift the personality research field needs to advance.