A lot going on right now.

We gave our dog to my sister and her family, who in a few days will tell me if they want to keep him or give him back. There aren't any apartments near my work that allow dogs, and he'll have a better life at her house anyway. He'll have more space to run, and Ray's personality is ideal for maximizing his training potential -- a thing I regret not doing. The dog is very well behaved and relatively well trained, and generally very smart and eager to please anyway. I am confident they'll keep him.

I got the promotion I've been working for. I am glad for it, and proud of the title, but I guess it's like having a birthday -- I don't feel any different, and I suppose, for some reason, I thought I would. I think it's a consequence of all the hype and pressure that's been on me related to this promotion. Anyway, I'm glad to have it behind me.

The mask mandates have been lifted by the CDC, but not at my company. So now, my company can't use the excuse that they're sticking to CDC guidelines anymore -- it was never about the CDC to begin with. Now, they say that there is some potential liability if they remove the mask mandates and someone gets sick. I would be surprised if that were true, as I suspect it's more that corporate doesn't want to flip flop so quickly on such a controversial policy as the red badges, when they had to argue so often to get them implemented. People with a red badge still have to wear masks, and I'm one of a very small minority around the office who do so (I'm led to believe the proportion is greater elsewhere, and that many who wear green badges were openly opposed to the policy as well). Nonetheless, as I predicted before, I feel sometimes like a leper. The irony of the matter is not lost on me -- I was most vocally opposed to the masks, and now at my many unproductive meetings I am the only one hiding my face. It makes the meetings all the more loathsome to me.

To cope with the meetings, therefore, I'm bringing a pocket notebook to them hereafter, where I'll be practicing my shorthand. It's a way for me to not pay any attention to what's going on around me, while seeming to be making diligent notes. And, with any luck, I'll become a quick stenographer in no time.

I've noticed that my general tiredness, coupled with these frequent unpleasantries, is affecting my disposition in general. I've been a little more grouchy in my interactions on the forum and at home, and less able to comprehend complex arguments. I dislike that. I hope that my awareness of it will enable me to counteract it.

In the evolution forum, I noticed that I get anxious while debating the topic. I'm consciously trying to be open minded to the possibility that I'm anxious because deep down I know I'm wrong, but I can't shake the thought that the real reason is: whenever anyone tries to summarize anything about evolution, the pro-evolution participants accuse them of being uninformed because their summary wasn't complete or precise enough. And, when the correction comes in, it isn't so much an actual correction as it is a demand that language be used which denotes a factual relationship between the evidence and the Darwinian conclusions. So, it's impossible to have a detached conversation about the evidence, where we examine, "what could it mean?" because all descriptions of the evidence must promote evolution. For example, rather than saying "a differences are seen in the fossil record through layers of earth", we must say, "a progression is seen in the fossil record through time". And, rather than saying, "dinosaurs became chickens", we must undergo some kind of more lengthy or precise explanation of the many years during which intermediate species lived and died between the end of the dinosaur and the advent of the chicken (or whatever). These trifles extend the discussion and endlessly distract from whatever point the YEC person might be trying to make. And, if we persistently abstain from describing the fossil record as containing such a progression, or if we persistently summarize the years of evolutionary progress for the sake of time, we are called intellectually dishonest. Moreover, the YEC position is explicitly described as being intellectually catastrophic prior to any discussion about it. 

What am I to do? It appears to me that here, like everywhere else, there is a bent standard for literary precision and intellectual openness. I worry that this forum is not so different from others on the same topic, except that it's run by Christians. I think the only way to survive in it will be to forcibly engage in some really excruciating conversations about epistemic methods, and if arguing with atheists has taught me anything, it's that conversations contrasting basic epistemic assumptions are long and terrible.

I've been working on Isaac's enchiridion here and there as I get time. The hardest part is organizing the information I want to present. Right now, I'm thinking I will start by laying out some basic principles of communication (argument and literature), then hermeneutics (which depends on argument and literature), and then show how those hermeneutic rules can be used to interpret scripture to build a foundation for knowledge at length, all without mentioning any counterpoints or debated topics. Major questions in my mind include whether I can explain all that without contrasting the information against mistakes by digressing into a debated topic, and whether it's best to just go ahead and start with epistemics, and then build knowledge from the ground up, leading subsequently into communication and showing the sort of circular relationship between all of this and hermeneutics by way of "building the house from the ground up". Does the structure and organization of the book implicitly communicate a hierarchy of knowledge, and so would I be accidentally prioritizing empiricism if I teach from the conscious and observable to the subconscious and rational, rather than the other way around?

In any case, at the end of the section on epistemics, I'll summarize all the prior sections with several points in the form of a "toolbox". Then I'll get into all of the various debate topics which (I perceive) have been argued and resolved over and over for the past 6000 years, and explain how these epistemic tools make them readily answerable, in hopes that he'll not be like many others in history, who for lack of knowledge waste their years rehashing the same tired debates. I'll give a basic overview of the material so that he'll have enough to build on without needing to go and read all of Kant and Hume, in hopes that he won't be like someone who thinks himself smart only on account of his ability to regurgitate theories of long-dead people, but rather that he'll build on those theories himself -- a contributor to knowledge, rather than just a perpetuator of knowledge. And finally, I'll apply the same tools to many practical day-to-day issues, in hopes that he'll see how a right knowledge of God and a Christian epistemology is relevant to every decision, and every area of life, even the areas which we compute without explicitly mentioning God, including mathematics and every area of science.

"Yes, unfortunately we all have to pay them"