God seems to delight in paradox (an apparent contradiction) to the dismay of some humans who find their vaunted reasoning unable to deal with this.  As our first example, there’s the light of day.  Einstein cited proof that it is made of little particles called lumens.  But scientists also have proof that it consists of waves.  Now what is it, a wave or a particle?  It can’t be both.

Paradox #2. God’s Son, Jesus, was a man.  He ate, drank, slept, and died.  He was also God; He rose from the dead.  Now God and man are two contradictions.  We say you can’t be both.  Well, God touts this paradox.  He was both.

Don’t you love it?  We have a God with a sense of humor.

I grew up on Long Island, but people still expected me to know how to ski !  That problem was solved when my cousin, Heidi, came to visit us and then immigrated.  She picked my two brothers’ and my first pair of skis at a ski shop in Great Neck, and took us Upstate and to Vermont on weekends.  From her we learned about the snow plow turn, and then the christie.

It was a whole new world, the lifts, the home town cafeterias, the bed-and-breakfasts where we stayed.  The ski instructors were mostly immigrants, too.   I didn’t get hurt ‘til we went skiing when I was in my sixties. 

I have fond memories of those days, and what a great country God has given us.  Heidi went out West, married a veteran, and raised a family of three children.

Artificial Intelligence will not tell you whom to marry, but if you feed it the right information, it will tell you who can best support you or who is best for raising children.  So where does that leave you?  It means you don’t worry about the things AI deals with: national budget, nuclear confrontations, the assimilation of immigrants, the prevailing of one party, etc.  It can be used to detriment as well as beneficence, and so is a tool, not an ally. 

The people who use it must still be trained in morality and the finer values of our civilization, and that is done through human contact, not machines.  Never negate human  hagiology.

Two of my ex-students are at Sing-Sing.  What did I say, or what didn’t I say?  Of course, it’s presumptuous to think I, a teacher they had only one year, had anything to do with it.  Would that I could have prevented it.

In life, we often have a chance to influence someone greatly, and who’s to say we ever recognize that.  My youngest brother, as a teen-ager, loved to play basketball with us and I always told him, “Gather all the loose balls you can.”  In high school he grew to seven inches taller than I, and when the Boston College coach saw him in action, he signed him up for the first team.

Of course that’s a made up story, though the Boston College coach really did sign him up for the first team.  Height is important on a basketball team. But the fact that he got the rebounds meant something, too.

Cyberwarfare, (e.g. the shutting down of the electric grid) would no doubt precede a nuclear attack on the USA.  It does not only refer to computers, though stealing of secrets stored on them is part of it.  When we are up against a man devoid of moral strictures like Putin (Who was his mother? His father?) we’d best consult the Lord.  And we’d best be alert.  Could the Russians have voted for Biden?

AI (Artificial Intelligence) could be the reason for Putin’s crazy behavior.  It acts that way sometimes.  Anyway, we’re in a new age, but some old things are still valid.