Children of Eden and life as a story

One of the parts of the musical Children of Eden that intrigued me the most was the very anthropomorphic character of the Father. Within the story he is not some perfect deity with perfect knowledge; in fact, in the second act, Noah seems to teach God a thing or two about love and family. Rather than being theologically accurate, the play is more of a cosmic drama with familial relations as the theme.

But as I watched the show, I tried interpreting this as an interesting view of the Garden of Eden story--trying to pull a fairly orthodox LDS interpretation out of the play. And I realized that for most of the first act, I could see the Father's actions as legitimately godly. The key was in interpreting him as playing a role in his interactions with humanity. Rather than making the story boring by giving perfect, obviously morally correct commands, he increased the conflict and tension by seeming to be selfishly motivated and perhaps even mistaken.

To accept such commandments requires a leap of faith, and when this is combined with possibly imperfect human messengers, we have a pretty interesting story. To me this sheds a bit of light on topics like the black priesthood ban, polygamy, and most of the Old Testament. What happens if we see God as purposefully appearing enigmatic and perhaps immoral in order to require faith in Him?

I'm glad the State of California is so smart

I found this sticker on a car while we were at Disneyland. Being myself, I had to take a picture of it. My dad said he saw a similar sticker affixed to Disneyland (yes, Disneyland itself) but we couldn't find it later to take a picture of it.

Whilst trying to find information on this warning that Disneyland could cause cancer and reproductive harm, I stumbled across a few choice related items:

MSDS for water
An MSDS, or Material Safety Data Sheet, tells you what is hazardous about a particular substance. In this case, it's for water.
An interesting discussion on this. A mouse had one of these warnings affixed to it, saying that you should wash your hands after touching the mouse.

I won't add any more; it's already quite enough.

Public Transportation

So I'm living at home while attending ASU. The only problem? ASU is 25 miles away from my home. And gas is expensive. (Not to mention the whole thing about me not quite having a drivers license yet.) So I figured what I would do is drive to the nearest bus stop, park there, and ride the bus to ASU. I figured it'd take a bit longer, but nothing bad.

I finally decided to look up my route this afternoon. My first result was that it would take me 1 hour and 38 minutes to get to ASU. (Well, after the statements telling me that I lived so far from the nearest bus stop that I would die of dehydration before walking there.) That means I would have to get up for Physics as early as I did for Singers last year--and I doubt they would let me hold choir rehearsal on the bus. And Michael wanted me to switch to a 7:35 AM Physics class. Hello, waking up at 3 AM.

I did manage to get it down to 1:07 by going to a different bus stop. But I could attend South Mountain Community College and get there faster than ASU. Of course, without that $15,000 scholarship, I wouldn't be going anywhere...

Why I am not an Anarcho-Capitalist

Anarcho-capitalism is an intriguing political ideology involving the elimination of all government and the use of businesses to provide things like law, police, and national defense. For someone like me who typically despises governmental coercion, it's a pretty tempting idea. But I really don't think it's a very feasible idea.

First of all, the strongest form of anarcho-capitalism uses the existence of a natural law which all people agree upon in order to justify any use of force by private individuals. This law includes the right to life, liberty, and property. Under this law, it is unjust for anyone to take any of these things from you without your consent--even, say, democratically elected officials. Unfortunately, as evidenced by the existence of, say, governments, not everyone believes in this extreme natural law. If they did, or even a majority did, the government would be much smaller than it is now. So this doesn't bode well for an anarcho-capitalist society actually working or coming into existence.

But some anarcho-capitalists argue that even if we don't all agree on morality, if the costs of a law implemented by some group of people exceed its benefits, the company enforcing that law will go out of business. This is all well and good, but what actually happens to measure these costs and benefits? That's right, people get killed. Equilibrium would be found, but not without considerable bloodshed. Furthermore, who's to say that, for example, radical anti-oatmeal activists would hire someone to enforce a law against growing oatmeal and are willing to spend far more in defense of this goal than pro-oatmeal groups are willing to spend to defend the grain? Divorcing the use of force from any restrictions regarding its morality leads to a lack of regard for others' rights and liberties. That doesn't sound like a libertarian utopia to me.

A somewhat weaker, but still valid opposition to anarcho-capitalism comes from an efficiency standpoint. It is probably more efficient to have a single monopoly on the use of force than it is to have a multitude of different companies, each enforcing a different set of laws over a different area for different subscribers. But there are a number of technological and economic solutions to this problem--we could have somewhat standardized competing law systems, like those for credit cards today. And with more advanced technology, the provision of protection for only a subset of subscribers becomes easier. Still, I think it's more likely that a monopoly on force is most efficient.

So, in summary:
blah blah blah everyone has to agree on morality
blah blah blah no one agrees on morality
blah blah blah equilibrium found in human lives
blah blah blah efficiency