Geoff's Miscellany

Miscellaneous Musings

Geoff

Punching Bags

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It was finally cool enough to work out in our garage rather than at the gym.

Avery and I lifted weights and I hit the punching bag.

I increased the intensity of my blows just because I thought my hands had hardened up pretty well over the past several weeks. This resulted in two things.

My wife noted that hitting the punching bag looked pretty manly. She’s seen me dead lift and squat nearly 400 pounds in the same day and just gave me a fist bump. But watching me punch an invincible target that never gets hurt, tired, or offended looked manly. I know she’ll support me if I have to fight this guy:

It also resulted in some of my skin peeling off when I washed my hands later. It wasn’t from abrasions, it was just from pounding. It happens.

But then at church, somebody asked, “Who have you been punching?” “I don’t punch anybody,” I said. Silently, I reasoned that I was just exercising like a young man at the wrong age.

Two Ways to Efface God’s Image

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Throughout Scripture it seems that humanity is meant to do two things:

  1. Be like God (Genesis 1:26-27)
  2. Worship God (Genesis 4:1-4)

I don’t mean to propose some lens here that is the super right and only way to read Scripture. But I do notice that many of the sins throughout Scripture involve attempts to be like God through incorrect means and attempts to worship God through incorrect means.

For instance, in Genesis 9:5, drinking and eating blood is prohibited. In ancient though, this was often supposed to give you life, which was why the gods were offered blood in sacrifices. Indeed, even the Israelite concept of sacrifice required blood. So, drinking blood was, in a real way, an attempt to be god-like. Similarly, the sin in Eden was made appealing because of fruit’s ability to make people like God (Gen 3:5).

This is a big leap, but because it is a blog post and not a sermon or a paper, I propose that the life in Christ then, could be described as:

  1. Worshiping God aright, through Jesus Christ.
  2. Learning to be like God, through Jesus Christ.

Mistaken Theological Tidbits

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Everything happens for a reason.

The phrase above is trivially true. Every thing that happens certainly has a cause. But it is often seen as a piece of centrally true theological reasoning. You lock your keys in your car, “God did it for a reason.” You get gas from over-eating, “It happened for a reason.” You make a bunch of bad decisions that hurt others and famously, “I learned something from it, therefore it must have happened for a reason.”

I submit that in the trivial sense, yes everything happens for a reason.

I then also say that Paul’s argument in Romans 8 assumes and even requires that many evils are meaningless and vain, but that despite their vanity, God can cause them to work out for the ultimate the good of a group of people who love him. That’s the argument. A lot of things that happen are pointlessly evil. That’s what life apart from the revelation of God becomes according to Ecclesiastes: meaningless.

So, while I am thankful that many people, even non-Christians attempt to preserve the dignity of others and of themselves when they are going through trials (by pointing out that it’s clearly happening with some inscrutable divine purpose behind it), I also want to point out that only God can bring meaning out of the pointless evils and lame drudgeries that people are subjected to throughout their lives. The Scripture never says that such things are always caused with good in mind. Though it does state that some events are from God for trials, it seems to also indicate that many evils are frivolously wrought by evil persons and forces in the creation.

Thoughts I’ve lately had

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  1. Teaching people to be disciples of Jesus might actually take some wisdom literature/self-help classes on time management, goal seeking, and how to say no to feelings.
  2. In the Old Testament, covenant seems to be the more important institution when compared with kinship.
  3. Thinking about point 1, young Christians certainly need to understand the gospel before they understand Aristotle (as Luther said in Heidelberg), but, man o man, they really should read some Aristotle (ie, contemporary books on habit formation) if they wish to appropriate the character of Christ because modern evangelical teaching (not all, but much of it that I’m exposed to) does not help.
  4. I’ve been making a list of engineering/mathematical problems to spend time on and I found two game theorists that look at the Biblical text using game theory to understand the narratives of the Old Testament. It’s actually not that bad. The one I’ve actually spent time reading it Steven Brams.
  5. Make a morning routine every evening before you go to bed if you wish to not regret the rest of your day. Seriously.
  6. Thank God that Cal 3 and Physics are covering the exact same type of vectors right now.
  7. I don’t understand why kids will play for football coaches at the risk of their lives and not do 5 minutes of homework for people that want to help them get into college.
  8. I recently made fun of a class mate for misspelling something in a lab report. Then I misspelled the first word in an email I sent to the lab group. Humble pie.
  9. Read Udo Schnelle and Adolf Schlatter to understand your New Testament better. Seriously, what are you waiting for?
  10. Oh, read your New Testament first, of course.
  11. I’ve gotten to teach about Jesus’ resurrection at church lately, looking at the marvels of the texts that focus on our Lord’s rising from the dead has been riveting for me.

Memory and Hearing Scripture

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Joshua Foer, in his book on memory, Moonwalking with Einstein, observed this about adding versification to the Bible:

For the first time, a reader could refer to the Bible without having previously memorized it. One could find a passage without knowing it by heart or reading the text all the way through. (144)

This observation is quite important because when we notice obvious quotations of the Old Testament in the New Testament, it is likely that this rhetorical device was meant to bring a range of emotions, concepts, and themes to mind that were exemplified by the context of the passage quoted. It is certainly possible to over-read things when we make this realization. The opposite danger is more readily possible though. If we assume that ancient readers thought of the Bible in terms of discrete versified units, then we are contradicting a fact about human memory that has been documented by modern science and thousands of years of observations by practitioners of memorization. So, when you notice a quote of the Old Testament in your New Testament, go read the context or the whole book. You’ll get a better picture of what the New Testament author is saying. 

Two Weight Lifting Book Reviews

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As with all books, fitness tomes range in quality and genre.

Some are essentially reprints of complicated protocols used by coaches.

Others attempt to give training advice based on evidence, whether scientific, anecdotal, or testimonial. Some attempt to give theories of training from principles. Here are brief reviews of the latter sort.

McGuff, Doug, and John R. Little. Body by Science: A Research Based Program to Get the Results You Want in 12 Minutes a Week. New York: McGraw-Hill, 2009. 

Many people might think this book is bogus, especially because of the subtitle. But the book is a marvel of attempting to use scientific research that really is not about training protocols in order to come to conclusions about the human body. Those conclusions are used to infer the most efficient training program available. Thus the system is brief, simply, hard, and safe. This is also one of the best books for pointing out the rather comprehensive benefits of strength training. 

When the subtitle says, “12 minutes a week” it does not mean only twelve minutes in the gym. It means doing each set of exercise to muscular failure for one hard set after a warm up. Thus your squats performed in this fashion might be a set that takes one minute of smooth reps taking 4 seconds each for 12-14 reps. After training in this fashion you will need to rest briefly before your next exercise. But with adequate rest (less than the book prescribes…I’d say to train this way between 1 and 4 times a week) you will make progress. So the twelve minutes is referring to the fact that a six movement routine will, ideally require 6 minutes of time actually lifting the weight after a warm up. Doing such a routine twice a week is 12 minutes of training.

Perryman, Matt. Squat Every Day Myosynthesis, 2013 Kindle Book

Perryman’s book is superb. He challenges several misconceptions by trying to look at the nature of the human person in a “meta” sort of way. You are a dynamic system so training your body in increments makes sense, but it does not necessarily work like this “Stimulus, rest, adapt, repeat.” He recommends that to make long term gains it is useful to expose your body to difficult but not impossibly difficult stimulus on a regular basis, like every day. This sort of protocol will not be best for saving time, but it might be best for injury recovery (due to a weird feature of connective tissue), psychology (you don’t have to psyche yourself up to lift heavy weight if you do it every day), and strength (because the movements are trained so often that they actually become a skill). 

Conclusion

These books, though widely divergent in conclusions, might be the best books that are easy to read for understanding the human response to exercise. Both approaches work and both are based upon the same principles. Depending upon your goals and values (time/strength/soreness/nagging injury healing, etc) you can use one or a combination of both approaches to approach your desired level of fitness.