Category Archives: Blog

Bible and Science, Two Views.

Posted on by

There are two main views Christians seem to have about science.

1. The Unified View. Science and the bible portray one unified truth.
2. The Conflict View. Science and bible are in conflict and are at war.

Young earth creationism (YEC) promotes the Conflict View as the only way to understand the bible.

Reasons To Believe (RTB) goes with the unified view. They make way more sense to me that the conflcit view.

YEC’s consistently tell me the conflict view is the only view because for science and bible to not be in conflict means the bible is not credible. I think they fabricated that and it is a lie.

Mark 13:32 states that no one, not even the angels in heaven or the Son, knows the day or hour of the end times, only the Father. This verse emphasizes that Jesus in his incarnation, while fully human and fully divine, did not have full access to the knowledge of the father and the holy spirit. So YEC’s overclaim about what jesus knew about Genesis. His knowledge came from the Septuagint.



Family Genetics, Genealogy, and YEC.

Posted on by

Unbelievable that I have to explain this.

In America we pass property to blood relatives. What is a blood relative? They came from your parents. Or your grandparents. Or your great grandparents. Or your great great grandparents. Etc. Until you go back so far you A) have no legal paperwork trail or B) have no indentifiable DNA patterns in common. You have to have one of those to have blood relatives. That is what genetic FAMILY is.

Every child you have gets about 1/2 your DNA. Their children get 1/4. The next generation get 1/8th. And so on. Until autosomal DNA is so diluted it is at noise level. So when we compare individuals we cannot tell if they are genetic blood relatives. You cannot be a blood relative of everybody on earth.

But there is an exception. Y-DNA passes intact from father to son. And so on. All the way back to the first man. Adam.

We can measure the SNPs. We see mutations and they accumulate. Sometimes living people will have the same Y chromosome where the common grandfather is back 10 generations. Or 50 generations.

We can also dig up bones and match them. Even if they are 10,000 years old they will contain the same SNP sequence minus the recent mutations.

The point is, we can trace where our patrilineal blood relatives died. And their ancestors too!

I know where my ancestors were all the way back to pre-history. And I know where my brother in law’s ancestors were too. So no, we are not blood relatives, our ancestors never went anywhere near each other. But, pontificating Answers in Genesis YECs (Young Earth Creationists) at church want to tell the whole church that I am related to my brother in law. Its kind of like saying I am Chinese. This claim of theirs is completely baseless.

Science people will claim that celts came from the eastern Ukraine. Science deniers claim no no no, they came from Noah’s Ark. Which is true? If they came from Noah’s Ark then they would be buried down the road from the Ark, and the next few generations would be buried a bit further down the road, until they got to western Europe. That trail is completely missing. I mean, the skeletons aren’t there.

What I see is that YECs do not evaluate the evidence.

Why Look At This?

Why did I start talking about this? Because of the YEC claim that I am related to my brother in law. No, it didn’t mean “we are all children of Adam”. People tell me “oh, we all have DNA, we must all be family”. No, that is not what they are talking about. They are talking about Moral Obligation to Family. Meaning blood relationships. In the context they used it it meant I have a moral and Christian obligation to let my in-laws continue to abuse me. Because I am related. So I therefore am obligated. And I am a sinner if I by chance just want to get away from it. Move to another state, don’t look back. However, that is not acceptable. Because? Because, as they claim, I am related to my inlaws. WHAT THE HELL? They are talking about blood relatives, not strangers on the street. Not sons of Adam due t all sons of Adam possess DNA. No. It was a statement about close family.

Now, how do I know I am not related to my in-law family? The above explanation on DNA. That’s how. And I had told this to a 12 step group at church. I study the family’s genealogy and DNA. But there is another reason. It is because the leader is a self entitled fundamentalist YEC asshole. So he instantly overrode me and took a vote. He got the group to vote! WHY? Because he says so. Thats it! I thought I would die of a heart attack. I didnt go back to church for months after that. Here I had been deciding to be free of the abuser and they could not live with this. They think their job is to fix people! But we know really only God can fix people.

I put these folks in the category of RAPIST. Fundamentalist rapists. They live in a fantasy world and use the bible to justify themselves. I am not the only victim of the fundamentalists. I saw a lot of victims at that church. People who endure a lot of false religious shaming from fundamentalists.

They had made it very clear they are fundamentalists and follow young earth creationism and believe in a world-wide global flood. And are against Christians studying modern science. Or reading books. You see, books, even Christian books, might make you think, and thinking will lead you astray to the point where you wont take the word of fundamentalists just because “they say so.”

Back to the science. There is a conscept called admixture. It means what percent Scottish are you? Irish? French? African? Etc. Compared to current living populations. I myself don’t put much stock in it, but most people want to know if they are 45% Scottish, for example. That is based on autosomal DNA.

My inlaws come from a patrilinial viking line where we share a grandfather in 44000 BC. So we are cousins that are so far apart that we may as well be Japanese and Black. If you think Japanese and Black people are the same family you are nuts. Stark raving mad. They are not the same family lines. What cousins are we? 400th cousins 400 times removed? The point is IT WAS CAVE MAN DAYS. It doesn’t matter.

OK, OK, I can call my brother in law a cave man, I guess, have it your way. The real point they were making was science denial. That really is the whole point of YEC. Science is at war with God. Why? Because they say it is. And they use morality arguments as a weapon for brainwashing. Which is ministerial abuse.

This is part of why my presbyterian elder neighbor tells me Answers in Genesis is a satanic conspiracy.













SMS tip for admins

Posted on by

Sending emails to SMS or MMS

Email to Text settings

For services such as Voicemail Email Notification, you can enter the text message email address in the field.


To send a text message via email, you must use a SMS or MMS to email gateway. Just substitute a 10-digit cell number for ‘number’ for each carrier below:

What use are DATASETS really?

Posted on by

A bunch of people are trying to use datasets to implement permissions and ACLS via the GUI.
I use a zsh shell via ssh and give normal debian commands and scripts and automations. You cannot automate hardly anything via a gui. That is the #1 reason I abandoned TERRA-MASTER OS.

However, on TrueNAS there is the dataset dilemma.

Willnx says about datasets on truenas:

If it helps, here’s how my box at home is set up (with the datasets and such):
Vol1
+Berkeley (Unix dataset)
–>So many exports…
+Redmond (CIFS dataset)
–>Two different shares for my only two Windows boxes. Unique permissions for each.
+FTP (Unix dataset)
–>For the crap I always have to re-download when I make a new VM/ build a new PC.

I don’t have any quotas set up on these datasets either. I don’t care how big any of them get, provided it doesn’t fill my NAS 100% and turn it into a big brick.
Instead, I set up a reserve space on Vol1.

To me, the real power/ benefit of multiple datasets are:
More granular snapshots (Clones too)
Different compression preferences
More granular Deduplication control

Using datasets (in my option) for permission control is kind of like using a big wrench to hammer a nail; it works fine, but not it’s intended use.



My thoughts:

So, what I am hearing above is snapshots and clones are a reason to use datasets. Plus, if you have a windows and want SMB (because NFS is hard to do on windows) you do not want files being accessed by NFS and SMB at the same time because SMB does collaborate on file locking.

I use NAS for backup of desktops. But I also want virtual machines and server like Plex and Home Assistant, etc, and I want them in their own dataset space.

Further thoughts: First thing I plan to do when creating the first NAS test bed is to see if the superuser can cp directories in dataset A to directories in dataset B.

I am used to different users having their own private file space in their home directory and see no need for anything else to separate them. Datasets seems like something that comes from non-nix operating systems. Nix has been great for 40+ years and there is no need to overcomplicate it. Debian is debian is debian.

Why use RAID-10 in a 4 BAY NAS?

Posted on by
ZFS: You should use mirror vdevs, not RAIDZ.

Has to do with lowest stress and quickest resilver.
Could use 3 bay RAIDZ1 with hot spare, but that is more stressful on all drives.

My plan A.

System 1: The back end. (Lower performance CPU). A 4 bay terramaster F4-424 pro should use 2 mirrors in raid 10 format.

System 2: The front end.

A 6 bay terramaster F6-424 MAX (higher performance a bandwidth:
Should use 2 mirrors or if 2 extra drives are added use 3 mirrors, all in RAID-10 format.
Have a cold spare available. Back up system 2 to system 1. Back up both to external USB drives and rotate offsite. 1 to back, 1 to cloud.

Have a third system in another location for fault tolerance.

On Alpha

Posted on by

What is Alpha?

Alpha measures the performance of an investment relative to what was expected based on its beta. Simply, it shows how much an investment has earned beyond the expected return.

  • Positive Alpha: If an investment has a positive alpha, it has outperformed its expected return based on its beta.
  • Negative Alpha: If the investment underperforms its expected return based on its beta, it has a negative alpha.

Slouching Toward Heresy: Early Confessions

Posted on by

The Christian church makes use of two types of confession of faith.

  1. The symbol set up once for all, and drawn up in the language of the new testament. This is ascribed to the apostles as an authentic summary of scripture. [Cullmann, p 10]

    Cullmann points out an example of this first type is the so called Apostle’s Creed. An example of the next one, below, is the Nicene Creed. The Niceno-Constantinopolitan symbol represents a mixed type, on the one hand containing the anti-Arian formula, but on the other often regarded as apostolic. [Cullmann, referring to Caspari]

  2. The symbol conditioned by circumstances, which transcribes the Biblical Gospel into the language and concepts of a certain period. On the basis of the New Testament, this symbol takes up position over against new problems and heresies unknown in the apostolic age. [Cullmann, p 10]

I would like to point out the New Testament in the 27 book form we see today was compiled by Athanasius, Bishop of Alexandria, in 367 AD, 32 years after the Council of Nicea. So for over 300 years the New Testament did not exist as a bible. It consisted of scattered manuscripts and letters copied and sent around the world from region to region as separate writing. Not all books were accepted. Jude, James, 2 Peter are examples of rejected books in many parts of the world.

So when someone says “I go only by the New Testament” what they are referring to is that which was compiled in 367 AD, translated into Latin, translated into English 1100 years after the fact. [Duvall and Hays, p 499].

And was accepted by the Bishops of the catholic church after 367. Protestantism was far off in the future.

What Cullman is really talking about, and Habermas is evaluating, is having rules of faith and formulas which trace back to the apostles. The purpose was (and is) to dethrone every future tradition in the name of apostolic tradition. Not to set ecclesiastical tradition above scripture. [Cullmann, p. 13], [Habermas, p 143-170]

Is fundamentalism now a new ecclesiastical tradition? Is it slouching towards heresy? Hard to say. But when one gets criticized for affirming the Apostles Creed and the Nicene Creed because “it is not Baptist belief, Baptists don’t have creeds” one begins to seriously wonder.

So, a reasonable course of action is to study the teachings of the apostles and how these were written down, and how these writings were spread across the world, ending with the compilation of the New Testament in 367 AD.

In decades of attending Baptist churches I have never heard of this. It seems to have been buried and is the best kept secret of the 21st century, as if it is some sort of rotten fruit.

REFERENCES:



Oscar Cullman, The Earliest Christian Confessions, 64 pp., published 1949 and 2018.

Gary R. Habermas, The Historical Jesus, 304 pp, published 1997.

Scott Duvall and J. Daniel Hays, Grasping God’s Word, 592 pp., published 2020.




Mark 9

Posted on by

49 Everyone will be salted with fire.

50 “Salt is good, but if it loses its saltiness, how can you make it salty again? Have salt among yourselves, and be at peace with each other.”


This tells me to worry about salting myself and focus only on my own journey. And to back off on harassing other believers who have their own journey. Advocating truth is different than hunting someone else’s sins. And it is different from human pressure to conform.

12 steps isn’t about fixing someone else. If we try to do that we will stumble them. And then earlier verses in Mark 9 apply to us.

12 steps also isn’t about holding to right church doctrine. Instead it is about how God is touching our own particular soul. Not about how someone else is supposed to experience God touching their soul. Only God knows the inner needs of another human. Only God can decide how to minister to them.

Telling another person “your experience must be my experience” is not being salty. So how do believers share saltiness? By confession, by sharing their own yieldedness with each other. That confession has nothing to do with condemning another believer for “doing it wrong”, or pressuring them to “shape up.”


Gene Trivia

Posted on by

What are single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs)?

Single nucleotide polymorphisms, frequently called SNPs (pronounced “snips”), are the most common type of genetic variation among people. Each SNP represents a difference in a single DNA building block, called a nucleotide. For example, a SNP may replace the nucleotide cytosine (C) with the nucleotide thymine (T) in a certain stretch of DNA.

SNPs occur normally throughout a person’s DNA. They occur almost once in every 1,000 nucleotides on average, which means there are roughly 4 to 5 million SNPs in a person’s genome. These variations occur in many individuals; to be classified as a SNP, a variant is found in at least 1 percent of the population. Scientists have found more than 600 million SNPs in populations around the world.

Most commonly, SNPs are found in the DNA between genes. They can act as biological markers, helping scientists locate genes that are associated with disease. When SNPs occur within a gene or in a regulatory region near a gene, they may play a more direct role in disease by affecting the gene’s function.



From https://medlineplus.gov/genetics

Most SNPs have no effect on health or development. Some of these genetic differences, however, have proven to be very important in the study of human health. SNPs help predict an individual’s response to certain drugs, susceptibility to environmental factors such as toxins, and risk of developing diseases. SNPs can also be used to track the inheritance of disease-associated genetic variants within families. Research is ongoing to identify SNPs associated with complex diseases such as heart disease, diabetes, and cancer.


Number of SNPs per gene.

Genes vary substantially in size, which leads to different numbers of SNPs assigned to each gene (Figure 1). Of 20,919 protein-coding genes 17,006 have at least one SNP assigned; most of these genes (∼77% or 13,083 genes) have fewer than 10 SNPs; 6.5% (1,097 genes) have more than 50 SNPs.

How many SNPs are in a gene?

SNPs occur normally throughout a person’s DNA. They occur almost once in every 1,000 nucleotides on average, which means there are roughly 4 to 5 million SNPs in a person’s genome.

Fun Links:
https://learn.genetics.utah.edu/content/basics/

Protestant Modernist Pamphlets

Posted on by

Protestant Modernist Pamphlets: Science and Religion in the Scopes Era (Medicine, Science, and Religion in Historical Context) Hardcover – October 8, 2024

by Edward B. Davis (Author)

See all formats and editions

A critical edition of ten rare pamphlets on science and religion published from 1922–1931 by the University of Chicago Divinity School.

In the years surrounding the Scopes trial in 1925, liberal Protestant scientists, theologians, and clergy sought to diminish opposition to evolution and to persuade American Christians to adopt more positive attitudes toward modern science. With funding from the Rockefeller Foundation and many leading scientists, the University of Chicago Divinity School published a series of ten pamphlets on science and religion to counter William Jennings Bryan’s efforts to ban evolution in public schools.

In Protestant Modernist Pamphlets, historian Edward B. Davis, who discovered these pamphlets, reprints them with extensive editorial comments, annotations, and introductions to each. Based on unpublished correspondence and internal Divinity School documents, these introductions narrate the origin of the pamphlets, as well as their funding sources and how readers reacted to them. Letters from dozens of top scientists at the time reveal their previously unknown views on God and the relationship between science and religion. Viewed together, the pamphlets and Davis’s critical assessment of their historical importance provide an intriguing perspective on Protestant modernist encounters with science in the early twentieth century.