Cycle of Insanity

Music at The Village: Redux

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LSAT All Over Again

So . . . I sat in a 500-seat auditorium at the University of Missouri campus on a Saturday morning when I could have been doing 10,000 other things (Ok, maybe 2 other things: smoking dope or sleeping) and struggled with an odd test which included these comments at the beginning of each section. "Answer each of the questions in a way that is consistent with and does not contradict previous or subsequent answers. None of the questions presuppose any knowledge of the law." . . . or something like that. And to the best of my recollection, two of the problems went like:

1. A woman gets into a cab carrying a very expensive vase and she says to the cab driver "be careful you dolt. This is an expensive vase and I will hold you responsible for it if you drive crazily and cause it to break through your horrible driving, and we are participants in an LSAT question." And the cab driver says "I am not responsible for your expensive vase which you are carrying openly without any visible form of protection and whether or not we are participants in an LSAT question is irrelevant, and as to the quality of my driving vis a vis the safety of your vase, the two notions are unrelated." The cab drives away and, naturally, the vase gets shattered during transport.

2. A person gets into a cab in New York City and mentions nothing about being in a hurry or having a specific destination. The cab driver simply drives away and stops at a red light about 50 meters from where the disinterested passenger enetered the cab. At the red light, a person enters the cab with a machete and acts in a manner which indicates to the disinterested passenger and the cab driver that their lives are in grave danger ("What other kind of danger is there?" asks Jerk Nicholson -- no, that isn't a mispelling). The cab driver flings open his door and leaps from the cab to safety, though arguably, being in New York City, he was safer in the cab with a passenger wielding a machete in a menacing way.

RE 1: Is the cab driver responsible financially for the vase? The lady clearly stated that she would hold him responsible, and he didn't say "get out" and even though he told her "no, I'm not responsible" he didn't refuse to drive her to her unstated destination, but the vase was not in a protective case and there is no indication that the lady placed in safely on the seat or unsafely on the floor. So can we assume she was holding it, thereby absolving the cab driver of responsibility? By driving away does the cab driver tacitly accept responsibility? By not getting out of the cab when the driver says "I'm not responsible" does the woman accept the "contract" with the cab driver to transport her and her vase without obligation to pay for the vase if it is shattered?

RE 2: The cab driver leapt to safety leaving the passenger in a dangerous situation. Was the cab driver wrong to do that? Does "saving his own skin" override the negative connotation of "leaving the passenger to fend for himself"? Is the cab driver responsible for the safety of a passenger with respect to a non-driving, non-cab-ride related danger? Even in Manhattan? Does the cab driver tacitly accept responsibility for the safety a passenger in all regards once the passenger enters his cab? Does the passenger have the same responsibility for the cab driver's safety that the cab driver has for the passenger's safety? Assuming of course you believe that the cab driver has responsibility for the passenger. Do we as individuals have a responsiblity toward one another in a situation of danger or is the concept "every man for himself" a valid perspective in this world?

Oh, and quit trying to decipher this question from your own supposed "knowledge of the law". The question actually has nothing to do with the law. You are probably bogged down with tying to figure out who was wrong and who was right and if you are . . . you are a dope . . . because the premise to these questions said that the "answer" didn't presuppose any knowledge of the law, only that YOUR ANSWER MUST BE CONSISTENT AND NOT CONTRADICTORY WITH RESPECT TO PREVIOUS AND SUBSEQUENT ANSWERS. Sorry I was shouting, an F-15 was flying overhead and I was afraid you couldn't hear me. Clearly, if you are a cab driver, you have an opinion which is probably different from an opinion held by a woman plagued with shattered expensive vase syndrome derived from having ridden in New York cabs driven by third world illegal aliens who cannot speak English and in all likelyhood hate you. And just as clearly, if you have ever entered a cab carrying a machete that you just purchased at S*A*M*S sold to you by a very rude cashier leaving you with an awful buying experience, but nonetheless enabling you to chop at vegetation to clear a campsite for your boy scout campout only to have a cab driver leap from your cab for no apparent reason, you have a different perspective.

The point of the LSAT seemed to be that the concept of right and wrong are irrelevant when it comes to the law, something that every law show on television has hammered into our conscious over the last 50 years. What is relevant is to ensure that your decisions as as supreme court justice are not overturned because you are predisposed to dislike women carrying expensive vases. The point also seemed to me to be that it is OK that right and wrong are irrelevant provided you are consistent in your decision makeing and opinion forming . . . with one caveat: you must be in honest pursuit of the truth. Thus in the long run the truth will take care of itself.

That doesn't seem to be the case with God or the Bible. I am told that God doesn't change His mind. But my own "honest pursuit of the truth" seems to indicate that He does, but it doesn't lessen my opinion of Him. Yet the cogniscenti are rhetorically asking me "Where, hereritical scumbag?" and the places where He seems to me to be changing His mind are explained like "No, He just appears to be changing His mind. Actually, He knew how it was going to turn out and He was just teaching Adam, Abraham, Jonah, David a lesson" and off we go into a futile metaphysical discussion about the exercise of free will and the human inability to know all things.

If in my "honest pursuit of the truth" the Bible reveals to me that incest is OK and I belive in the Gospel with all my heart, will I be in different standing with God from someone who belives that incest is wrong and also believes in the Gospel with all his heart? Do you think the cogniscenti hold that it is fundamentally impossible to belive in the Gospel and also hold other beliefs about the Bible which in their view are wrong? (By 'cogniscenti' I am referring to people who honestly believe that the beliefs they hold came to them through the honest pursuit of the truth but your truth which you came to by your own honest pursuit of the truth is wrong.)

For example (since I am fairly certain that up to now I have made little if any sense), I once wrote to "the church" that perhaps the Second Coming of Christ would occur to each of us at our death and judging from the response from "the church" you'd have thought I suggested that Jesus was actually Gotama or had 9 heads or couldn't hit a low inside curve. No, reply email author, I honestly read the "multiple references in scripture proving your point" in the reply email which indicated just how wrong and misguided I was . . . and it wasn't nearly as obvious to me that I was wrong as was your clear intention to prove me so.

I was once told that "the main things are the plain things, and the plain things are the main things" by a wise individual who was trying to head off a challenge which I was not mature enough in my walk with Christ to enter into. I get it that to interpret the Bible in such a way as to satisfy us intellectually or twist the meaning of scripture to suit the way we want to see God is wrong. Really. I get it. But I am extremely uncomfortable when I am told that "this is the way it is" when that definition comes from man . . . any man. Ahhhh, the sweet paradox of Evangelical Christianity.

I once offered up the idea -- after having had a dream about just how incredibly wonderful the Bible is and how timeless is its value -- that it was written necessarily in a way such that different people IN HONEST PURSUIT OF THE TRUTH (sorry, a lorry with a fouled exhaust just passed by) would interpret it differently. And I was told "No. That's wrong. There's one way and only one way." I don't say this to condemn the idiot jerk-face rat-rot individual who said this to me, provided of course his intention and motivation for telling me that I was not only wrong but silly was rooted in his deep and sincere desire that my wretched soul be saved and not that his intellectual superiority be challenged by some ignorant lay person.

Pride? Of course. So answer this question smarty pants: A policeman enters a 7-11 and sees a man with a gun pointed directly at the face of a young, female cashier. The gunman is agitated and jumpy and CLEARLY about to pull the trigger of a very, very large caliber handgun. Unseen, the policeman draws his weapon and aims it at the man and suddenly realizes that he now has a bead on the no good scoundrel who "slept" with his wife. If he hesitates, pauses to ponder the philosophical quandry he now finds himself in, the innocent clerk dies: If he pulls the trigger, is he acting on the law and thereby serving justice, or "settling a personal score" in an act of raw vengeance? What difference does it make to the clerk, to the gunman?

If you really, really, really see no quandry, I'd like to talk to you. And wounding him non-fatally isn't an option.

I shall conclude this incoherant, meaningless ramble with a mathematical definition of God: God is the only entity that is not sujbect to the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle.