God's Debris

This is a book by Scott Adams, the creator of Dilbert.

The subtitle of this book is "A Thought Experiment". You are told to try and figure out what is wrong with the old man's explanation of reality - the old man is one of the two characters in the book.

While the old man does offer some interesting thoughts on God and probability, overall I did not like what he had to say all that much. It made life seem rather pointless in many ways. Maybe I just did not get it - if you read it and do get it, please explain it to me. Maybe I did get it after all, and that is why I reacted the way I did. I'll have to think on that some more I guess.

In spots, I thought the science itself was not quite right, and there seemed to be some holes in the logic here and there. This bugged me quite a bit and made it hard for me to keep an open mind on the rest for some reason. Maybe this was due to the note on there being something wrong with what the old man said.

That there is a sequel does confuse the issue further for me, as it seems to stick to the old man's argument from what I can tell. I do NOT plan to read it, so let me know if I missed out by not.

Give God's Debris a try if you want, but don't say I didn't warn you. I would like to hear what you think if you do read it though.

The Way

This is a book by Michael Berg of the Kabbalah Centre. I highly recommend it!

In many ways this book is better than the other Kabbalah book I reviewed recently, The Power of Kabbalah. There is a little less theory and more on application in The Way.

I think the book boils down to teaching on how important it is to be a truly giving person - not for show - and having a close relationship with God. This is sort of like the comment that Jesus made on loving God and your neighbor as being the basis of the law.

It is very difficult to summarize the details presented in the book, and I could not do the book justice this way. Read it and see for yourself.

Let me know what you think after you have read it.

A Shortcut Through Time

This book is by George Johnson on quantum computing. It is a very interesting introductory book and not too long on the math if you are not big on that.

I recently got interested in this subject and saw this book at the public library. Since I wanted to read something on an introductory level first, I chose it. I think it was a good choice. I plan to look into some more detailed works on the same subject in the future.

To give you a glimpse of what goes on, the book talks about the limits of conventional computers in such areas as cryptography and shows how a quantum computer would make short work of such problems. There is a good, basic introduction to quantum principles and weirdness, so don't panic.

I look forward to learning more about this exciting new field.

The Apocrypha

Today, I finished the selections I had chosen to read from the Apocrypha. I read the books of 2Esdras, Wisdom of Solomon, Sirach, Baruch, Letter of Jeremiah, 4Maccabees and Psalm 151 in the RSV.

Of these, the book I liked the best, or maybe rather the book that had the most meaning for me, was the book of Sirach. The meaning of the others to my life seemed a little more distant if you know what I mean by that; some searching was required to see the message for me.

I will now move on the the New Testament now where I plan to read all of it.