A RETIRED PROSECUTOR'S RANDOM THOUGHTS
Sunday, March 23, 2025
WHY TRUMP WON
Friday, October 25, 2024
Back in the late seventies Lake City had a thriving chess club. Approximately twenty players met weekly at the old rec center just off Main Boulevard. I have been trying to resurrect the chess club, but the number of players is miniscule compared to what it once was. We meet at 6:30 PM every Tuesday night at Panera. You are invited.
One recurring problem we have is that an odd number of players show up, and that means that one person has to sit and twiddle his thumbs while everyone else plays. Last week I decided to do something about that problem. I invented a three-player chess game. I know there are already-existing three-player variants of chess, but I find the boards awkward. Especially when pieces are moving through the center of the board, they behave in what I believe to be un-chessic ways.
My solution was to use the Glinski hexagonal board and put three armies in three of the six corners. We play-tested the game at our last meeting and decided that the Glinski board, with five circles of hexagons, was too small. I went home and added a sixth circle of hexagons, and I think the board is now large enough. Here is the array of the pieces on the enlarged board:
MOVES OF THE PIECES: Instead
of a rank and file, hexagonal boards have a file and two 30-degree cants. Thus,
a Rook can move in three directions rather than four. The Bishop moves through the corners of the
cells in three diagonal directions. The Queen combines the moves of the Rook
and Bishop.
THE ROOK'S MOVE |
THE BISHOP'S MOVE |
The King moves one cell on the
file, cant, or diagonal. There is no castling. Stalemate is a loss for the stalemated player. The Pawn moves one cell forward on the file and captures
one cell forward on the cant. The Pawn can make an optional two-cell first move. There is en passant capture. The Knight moves
one cell on the file or cant followed by one cell on the diagonal.
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MOVES OF THE KING AND PAWN |
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MOVE OF THE KNIGHT |
Because there are three diagonals, the Glinski board has three different colors for the cells. For clarity, we have kept all the cells white in the diagrams.
WHAT IS THE BIGGEST NO-NO WHEN BEING ARRESTED?
Tuesday, August 27, 2024
GOSPEL PARALLELS
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AVAILABLE ON AMAZON.COM. CLICK ON THE PHOTO TO GO TO THE WEBPAGE |
When
I was a senior in college I developed an intense interest in the historical
Jesus. I read many accounts of the “Quest for the Historical Jesus,” and
decided to embark on my own quest. I embarked upon an intense study of the
Gospels which lasted until I graduated from law school and began to practice
law. Even after that time I still would engage in sporadic bouts of Bible
study, and I have amassed two thick books containing notes of my studies.
One
thing that I was especially intrigued by was the Synoptic Problem—an attempt to
explain why the first three Gospels were so similar while at the same time
being so different. I read as much as I could about the Two Document
Hypothesis, the Four Document Hypothesis, the elusive Q Gospel, Proto-Luke, and
many other theories of how the Gospels came to be. I examined several Gospel
harmonies and Gospel synopses; and I decided I could distill the various
harmonies and synopses into a more harmonious synopsis of my own. I worked on
this synopsis for several years and made many false starts toward producing a
manuscript of my synopsis. Since most of my work was done in the years BCE
(Before the Computer Era), I found the project rough sledding as a spare-time
project.
Now
that we are firmly in the CE (Computer Era), and I have retired from full-time
employment, I have decided to publish a manuscript of my synopsis. You might
ask, “Why another synopsis (or harmony) of the Gospels. Aren’t there enough
already? My answer is, “Yes, there are many, but I find none of them entirely
satisfactory.” In harmonies, the authors try to interweave the Gospel of John
in among the Synoptics. Given the wide differences between John and the
Synoptic Gospels, this is a very difficult task which renders unsatisfactory
results. In most synopses, the passages from John are either ignored or
consigned to footnotes, another unsatisfactory treatment. Among the synopses,
the pseudepigraphal gospels are usually ignored. Throckmorton’s is different in
that his synopsis puts pseudepigraphal passages in footnotes.
I
wanted a synopsis which moved John’s parallel passages out of the footnotes and
into the main text. I also wanted the main text to include passages from what I
consider the two most important pseudepigraphal gospels, Thomas and Peter.
Although they are far inferior to the Canonical Gospels, they are far superior
to all the other pseudepigraphal gospels which I have read, and they just might
contain a small amount of authentic material.
The
Synoptic Gospels contain many of the same stories in almost precisely the same
order. These stories are called parallels. Although we see many sequential
parallels in the Synoptics, many of the parallels are non-sequential. For
example, Matthew and Luke report that when Jesus first enters the Temple during
the Passion week, he immediately cleanses it. Mark says he just looks around
and returns the next day to cleanse the Temple. Then there are doublets—stories
which sound a lot like other stories but are sufficiently different to cause
the reader to be in a quandary as to whether they are telling different
versions of the same story. For example, Matthew reports the exorcism of two Gergesene
demoniacs; but Mark and Luke say that Jesus exorcized one Gadarene demoniac.
Then we have doublets, which tell very similar stories but are sufficiently
distinct details that they are likely different incidents. For example, all
three Synoptics tell the story of Jesus healing a leper, but Luke also tells a
story about Jesus healing ten lepers. Then there are passages that I call
analogs: they tell similar stories, but the stories are very different. For
example, Luke’s Parable of the Prodigal Son is similar to Matthew’s Parable of
the Two Sons, but they are so dissimilar as to be two different stories.
Likewise, the Parable of the Sower, which appears in all the Synoptics, has an
analog in Matthew’s Parable of the Weeds.
How
do we prepare a synopsis which melds all these different types of stories into
one harmonious whole? I have tried to accomplish this task by putting the sequential
parallels in boldface and arranging them in parallel columns. The non-sequential
parallels are included with the sequential parallels, but they are not in
boldface. They may be put in parallel columns, or they may be set out below the
sequential parallels. I have treated the doublets and analogs the same as
non-sequential parallels, but they are usually placed below any non-sequential
parallels. The bottommost entries in each section are the pseudepigraphal
parallels and doublets.
In
arranging the stories, I have tried as much as possible to adhere to the
numbering system worked out by Albert Huck and Hans Leitzmann. I have also tried as much as possible to have
each story confined to a single page. Where it is not possible to get all the
information on one page, I have subdivided the stories and added letters to the
section numbers. For example, Luke’s Discourse against the Pharisees is in
Huck’s Section 154, but I have subdivided it into 154A-F. When I can’t get all
the non-sequential parallels, analogs, and doublets on a single page, I have
also subdivided the sections and given them trailing letters. For example,
Luke’s story of Sending out the Seventy is placed in Section 139A. The
additional material is in Section 139B.
Sometimes
this system breaks down, as in the story of Peter’s Denials. The parallels are
not sequential, but making separate sections for each of the non-sequential
parallels would have been tricky, so I put them all in a single section and set
them out in boldface despite the fact that they weren’t truly sequential.
Throughout the synopsis I have used public domain translations of the texts. The main text will come from the WEB Bible, which is available online at Biblegateway.com. Quotations from the Gospel of Thomas come from Mark M. Mattison’s The Gospel of Thomas: A Public Domain Translation. Quotations from the Gospel of Peter come from M.R. James’ The Apocryphal New Testament.
You
will encounter some unfamiliar words in the pages of this synopsis. I have
appended a glossary of those words at the end of the book. One word which ought
to be defined at the outset is “pericope.” It is a technical term used by Bible
scholars which means “Bible story.” Thus, the Parable of the Prodigal Son is a
Gospel pericope, as is the story of the baptism of Jesus.
Regrettably,
the text of this book is single-spaced without spaces between the paragraphs. Although
it makes reading somewhat more difficult, doing otherwise would have made the
book a great deal longer and more expensive.
Sunday, August 18, 2024
THE BEST OF ALL POSSIBLE WORLDS?
Sir Fred Hoyle (1915-2001), the British astronomer who gave the Big Bang its name, was a maverick among his contemporaries. He denied that the Universe started with a Big Bang, and he said that the likelihood of life arising on Earth through the accidental combination of amino acids (the theory of abiogenesis) was similar to the likelihood of a tornado roaring through a junkyard and assembling a Boeing 747. Hoyle was aware that he had many detractors, but he said, “I don’t care what they think. It is better to be interesting and wrong than boring and right.”
Something else that Hoyle said was, “I have always thought
it curious that, while most scientists claim to eschew religion, it actually
dominates their thoughts more than it does the clergy.” One scientist who fits
Hoyle’s aphorism is Paul Davies (b. 1946), who has written many books
discussing God and physics (e.g. God and the New Physics, The Mind of
God, and The Goldilocks Enigma). In his books Davies wrestles with
the questions of how the Universe came to be and why it is so conducive to the
spawning of living things, including sentient living things such as ourselves.
He examines and rejects many explanations, including the
explanation that God made the Universe. In The Mind of God Davies asks the question,
“In what sense might God be said to be responsible for the laws of physics?” He
then summarizes the thoughts of Gottfried Leibniz (1646-1716) on the subject.
Leibniz first posited that God must be rational. Otherwise, how could we live
in a rational Universe? The next attribute of God must be that He is
omnipotent. He made everything. How could He not be omnipotent? A rational,
omnipotent God must also be perfect. This concept is probably beholden to St.
Anselm’s (1033-1109) Proslogion, where he argues that God is someone “than
whom there is nothing greater.” What else can we say about a rational,
omnipotent, perfect God? He must be omniscient. Leibniz held that God must have
these characteristics. Then Leibniz asked the question, what kind of a Universe
would be made by a rational, omnipotent, omniscient, perfect God? The best of
all possible Universes.
Leibniz’s theory that we live in the best of all possible
worlds was savagely ridiculed by Voltaire (1694-1778) in his work Candide, where he made a learned nitwit by the name of Professor Pangloss the butt of
his jokes. Of course, Voltaire made the problem of evil his argument against this
being the best of all possible worlds.
Of course, we, with our limited knowledge, doubt that this
is the best of all possible worlds. But what’s best for us may not be best for
the Universe as a whole. To those who would criticize God for making a
less-than-perfect Universe, Rev. J. Vernon McGee (1904-1968) said, “This is God’s
Universe, and God does things His way. You may have a better way, but you don’t
have a Universe.”
Davies, of course, doesn’t believe God created the Universe,
but he seems to think that our Universe is the best of all possible Universes.
He bases this opinion on the twin facts that mathematics so perfectly describes
everything in the Universe and that the Universe is perfect for the spawning of
sentient life. In his book The Goldilocks Enigma, he considers several
explanations for this, including the theory that God made the Universe. I forget
which explanation he said that he
preferred, but I do recall that when I read all the possibilities he put
forward, I decided that God is the simplest, best explanation for the Universe being the way
it is.