There ought to be a law

 

But then, as someone said, more laws often mean less justice

A few days ago – despite all the problems going on in this country - Senators Maria Cantwell (D., Wash.) and Ted Cruz (R., Texas) introduced the “Protect College Sports Act,” a bill intended to bring government regulation to college sports.

Remember former President Ronald Reagan’s “nine most terrifying words in the English language”? “I’m from the government, and I’m here to help.” But such is the complete chaos that college athletics has fallen into that NCAA presidents seem to actually want government to solve their problem (which usually is a problem in itself).

It’s true that college athletics is no longer “amateur,” by any stretch (and believe me, the definition of that word has always been stretched in college athletics).

The intent is for the power of the United States Government to lay down some rules to which all universities, and coaches, will adhere.

Yeah, sure.

Way back when the NCAA actually had a rule book and tried to enforce it, I would routinely have coaches and school administrators and boosters and fans complain about how big and complicated the NCAA rule book was (and it was).

I always pointed out however that it was their own fault. Every time some coach or “fan” did something to gain an unfair advantage over the competition and got caught (“getting caught” being the operative phrase), NCAA officials would get together and make another rule. Most of the rules were clarifications or addendums to existing rules, because people, being people, were always looking for the loopholes.

For example, there was a period when coaches contacting prospects had gotten so out of hand that the NCAA instituted a “dead period,” when coaches were not allowed to visit with prospects face-to-face. But there was nothing in the rule that said they couldn’t call prospects, and they called so often that some top prospects’ families had to get separate phone lines just to be able to make and receive routine family-related phone calls.

There was no rule against accidently running into a prospect. A coach couldn’t be penalized if he happened to be at the 7-Eleven pumping gas and the stud prospect happened to pull up at the same time. It was known as the “bump rule” – you could accidently bump into an athlete you were recruiting. Only then coaches took to “accidently” being at all sorts of places that athletes might show up. I know of a coach who hung out at the water fountain at a prospects’ local public gym, knowing the kid would at some point come get a drink.

Then there was the enterprising coach who combined the rule with the exception. He would drive to the prospects’ neighborhood, park his car across the street – so he wasn’t on the prospects’ family property – get out and call the prospect while leaning against his car. During the course of the conversation, the coach would get the prospect to look out the window where he’d see the coach. That was supposed to show how much this coach cared about this recruit.

And so, the NCAA had to keep adding more rules for every time smart coaches found a loophole. A lot of my friends said this was just coaches being smart – and it was, but these coaches also knew they were violating the spirit of the rule. They knew the intent of the law, and they figured a way around it.

I’d tell my friends in the NCAA that there really only needed to be one rule: don’t cheat. But it was just too tempting to parse what “cheat” actually meant.

Now they want the federal government to make actual federal laws to do what university presidents are afraid to do.

Some famous historian-philosopher once said, “More laws, less justice.” There is something to be said for that idea.

That got me to thinking about laws, and a remarkable phrase the Apostle Paul uses in his letter to the Galatians. He lists a series of characteristics he calls the “fruit of the Spirit” - love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control. Then he says something interesting: “Against such things there is no law.”

I think most of us like the characteristics in Paul’s list, even if we’re not Christians. I’d say we’d all want our wives or husbands, friends, bosses or co-workers, to embody those traits (as I’m sure they’d like to see us do as well).

And who would pass a law against any of that? I don’t know any government that would outlaw patience. I can see an issue with impatience. If I’m at the bank and it’s closed, and I’m impatient so I break in and take some money – even if I leave a note saying “this is my account number; I just took what was mine” – the law is going to come after me. But not if I’m patient.

Being kind? Being gentle? Self-control? I can’t imagine who would even think to make those qualities illegal, punishable by fine or imprisonment.

Oh, you could cross a legal boundary with how you practice those traits. The Jewish Rabbis turned an already complicated 613 (more or less) Old Testament “Law of Moses” into thousands of interpretations, codicils, modifications and explanations that made it so complicated it was almost impossible to not break the law as, in their zeal, they interpreted it.

And then we have Jesus, who takes all those hundreds of words and breaks it down to “Love the Lord your God with all your heart, and your neighbor as yourself.”

Sounds almost too simple, doesn’t it? Like “don’t cheat.” Yet, if you’ve actually tried to live that way, you realize just how difficult that can be, how we can’t help but find ourselves in situations where we say, “Yeah, but this is different.”

I recently heard about a lady in my community who is so conscious of not wanting to be even tempted to sin that she makes it a point to drive 5 miles per hour below the posted speed limit, so that she doesn’t accidently break the law.

That’s convicting. Not to say I’m going to adjust my driving, but I get her point.

And I’d hate to be stuck behind her on a one-lane road.

But in saying that, I’m showing my lack of patience. My frustration with being behind someone driving the speed limit – much less 5 mph slower – shows my lack of gentleness, kindness, goodness, maybe even of self-control … and the fruit of the spirit flies past me like a billboard on the interstate, acknowledged but only with a passing glance.

I had the pleasure of getting to spend a little time with John Paul, a successful race car driver who competed in IMSA and Trans-Am race back in the 1970s and ‘80s, winning the 24 Hours of Daytona and the 12 Hours of Sebring. His son, John Paul Jr., often raced with him and was successful on a variety of levels. Unfortunately, both men had serious issues outside of racing that led to well-documented trouble.

John Paul had a shop outside of Lawrenceville, Ga., where I worked at the time, where he built his race cars. One time, we got into a conversation about driving and he told me he would often drive from Lawrenceville, just north of Atlanta, to Daytona, Fla., in less than three hours, less than half the time it should take for a roughly 450-mile trip. But then, he would drive his own modified Porsche and might run 200 mph on the interstate because, he told me, “These interstates are made for high speeds and I’m qualified to drive at that speed.”

I asked him about state troopers, and he told me that when they saw what he was driving and how fast, they didn’t even try. If they did try to stop him, they couldn’t catch him.

The story reminded me of another lesson from another Paul, the Apostle, who said in 1 Corinthians, “All things are lawful, but not all things are profitable; all things are lawful, but not all things edify.”

In other words, just because you can do something doesn’t mean you should.

But then, to paraphrase James Madison, if men were angels, no rules would be necessary. But we are not angels.

As many of us – including the NCAA - has found out, much to our chagrin.

Sounds of Silence

 

Thoughts on the Pope's reflections on AI

Pope Leo XIV – the Bishop of Rome, Vicar of Jesus Christ, and Supreme Pontiff of the Universal Church, the first American Pope - released what the Catholic Church calls first encyclical, entitled Magnifica Humanitas: On Safeguarding the Human Person in the Time of Artificial Intelligence.

At roughly 42,300 words, the document apparently is essentially a warning of the risks and ethical challenges posed by artificial intelligence. I haven’t read it – I’m not Catholic, and have no particular allegiance to the Pope, and 42,300 words from him is daunting - but judging from the stories and synopsis I have read, that seems to be the main takeaway.

At first glance, talking about artificial intelligence may not seem to be exactly in the Pope – or the Church’s - wheelhouse. But I read an article recently by a lady named Avital Balwit, who is chief of staff to the CEO of Anthropic. This was published in The Free Press (thefp.com), an online site I frequent. In her article, she said there is an expression that AI (artificial intelligence) developers in California use in referring to their work: “Building God.” Balwit said the phrase is not completely serious. She writes that it “sounds wildly grandiose. No one I have met means it literally—nobody thinks they are making something supernatural or divine. To try to decode: The speaker is gesturing at how powerful this technology could become—even, eventually, functionally omniscient or omnipotent.”

So maybe the Pope should comment on the idea of “building god,” even if the phrase is not entirely serious.

It’s interesting in that this Pope took his name from Pope Leo XII, who served from 1878 to 1903, during the last half of the Industrial Revolution. World economies were going through radical changes, moving from farm to city, from handmade to machines, which led to mass migration to urban areas, and creating incredible amounts of wealth for a relative few industrialists, not to mention some radical political philosophies. Leo XII issued his own encyclical, known in English as Rights and Duties of Capital and Labor. In it, like the current Leo, he addresses the fears and concerns of new technology.

Essentially, what I gather the current Pope wrote is that there is no turning back the clock on AI, but that we need to learn to use it appropriately – morally – and not let it rob us of our basic humanity.

Since he is the head of the Catholic church, it’s appropriate that he used two Biblical stories to teach from: the Tower of Babel (Genesis) and the Building of the Wall of Jerusalem (Nehemiah).

If you know the story of Babel, humans – who to this point all spoke a common language – decided to build a tower that “reaches to the heavens.” Their building was, for the time, revolutionary; the Bible says, “They used brick instead of stone, and tar for mortar.” This tower was apparently real. The ancient Greek historian Herodotus (484 – 425 BC) said the tower of Babel still stood in his day and he had seen it.

It’s not likely that they expected this tower to actually reach heaven, or else they’d have built it on a mountain, reducing the distance. Maybe they thought they could build a tower from which they could see heaven and observe what was going on, or see the whole earth.

But if you go back to the end of the story of the Flood, you see God commanded people to “increase in number and fill the earth” (Genesis 9:1). Instead, they gathered together on a plain to build a great city, including this tower, in what would eventually become Babylon, near modern-day Hillah, Iraq, about 60 miles south of Baghdad (according to a quick Google search).

That seems to be an important part of the story, that this tower represented rebellion against God’s command to “fill the earth.”

Pope Leo compares this story of building with another construction story, that of the wall of Jerusalem. The children of Israel had been captured, years later, by the Babylonians and scattered throughout that empire. Sometime later, a group returned under the leadership of Nehemiah, and started rebuilding the wall to protect Jerusalem. While Babel is a tale of pride leading to ruin, the wall is a story of protection, of fulfilling God’s promise.

Sorry. I didn’t mean to go on so long about these two stories. But I think Pope Leo IV makes an interesting point.

If I remember my college class on computer programming correctly (this was the age of computer cards, or punch cards, that programmed early computers), this technology runs on language. In those days, the language was Fortran and COBOL and ALGOL. I was a journalism major, so don’t hold me to anything technical or mathematical.

Today, it seems our computers can communicate with each other across various programming languages fairly easily. We seem to have eliminated the problems of systems running on different languages that we had back in the 1970s.

The internet now has an incredible ability for humans to communicate with each other, to be in contact across oceans and continents, to send and receive messages and pictures and homemade movies with incredible speed and simplicity (if even I can do it).

It’s supposed to connect us. And certainly it does, to some extent.

It’s also entertaining us, which becomes a problem. Engineers work hard to keep us from being bored. Fly on an airplane, sit in a waiting room – shoot, observe a family riding in a car – and while you see people sitting next to each other, side-by-side, maybe even shoulders touching, they are more likely to be studying their phones that interacting with each other. They don’t talk. They don’t even sit and contemplate the world going by outside the window. They are entertained.

I know. I do it too.

Not everyone who used to sit side-by-side on airplanes or in waiting rooms or even on long car rides communicate with each other. Often these were done in silence.

But we’ve done away with silence, too. It’s as if we’re afraid of silence, of not having “anything to do.” We’re afraid of just having to think, to let our minds go wherever our minds might go, devoid of outside stimuli.

This isn’t new. C. S. Lewis wrote in The Weight of Glory, “We live, in fact, in a world starved for solitude, silence, and privacy: and therefore starved for meditation and true friendship.” Almost two centuries before Lewis, theologian/philosopher Søren Kierkegaard wrote, “The present state of the world and the whole of life is diseased. If I were a doctor and were asked for my advice, I should reply: Create silence!” 17^th-century philosopher Blaise Pascal, in Pensées, said, “All of humanity’s problems stem from man’s inability to sit quietly in a room alone.”

Silence is uncomfortable. As a recovering journalist, I learned that if I let the person I was interviewing finish an answer and then I didn’t say anything for a minute or so, the person would often then blurt out something imminently quotable, maybe even more truthful, because by and large humans can’t abide silence.

But we need silence. In Ecclesiastes 3, Solomon says there is “a time to be silent and a time to speak.” Research shows that even brief periods of silence can have measurable health benefits. A 2006 study published on Healthline found that a 2‑minute silence after music led to greater reductions in heart rate and blood pressure than listening to slow, relaxing music alone. According to elissagoodman.com, “Silence helps lower cortisol and adrenaline, shifting the body from “fight-or-flight” into a “rest and digest” state.” The Cleveland Clinic reported that “Calm, quiet moments can steady breathing and reduce muscle tension.” These studies are everywhere.

I grew up in a faith that stressed having a ‘’quiet time,” a time away from the distractions of life to be quiet and contemplate God. Jesus did it, frequently moving away from people – even from his disciples - who followed him. “Then Jesus went with his disciples to a place called Gethsemane, and he said to them, ‘Sit here while I go over there and pray’” (Matthew 26:36). “Very early in the morning, while it was still dark, Jesus got up, left the house and went off to a solitary place, where he prayed” (Mark 1:35). “But Jesus often withdrew to lonely places and prayed” (Luke 5:16).

But even in prayer, too often I can’t bear silence. I tend to start out talking to God, asking for things, petitioning for people, explaining what happened (Lewis writes, “the trouble is that what we call ‘asking God’s forgiveness’ very often really consists in asking God to accept our excuses”) – as if God needs a daily briefing on my world and what I have done.

These days, I am trying to enter prayer by saying less. God already knows my heart. He knows what is going on. Oh, I still talk, but I want to spend a few moments being quiet, and maybe – just maybe – I’ll hear Him speak to me, reveal Himself to me.

Again, C.S. Lewis in The Weight of Glory admits he often approached his quiet time with a sense of timidity. As one writer put it, Lewis did so “not because he feared he wouldn’t meet God, but because he knew he would. If he wasn’t careful, God might maneuver past Lewis’s rote prayers. Then, in the silence, God might tell him to do something he’d rather not do, such as skip his extra morning cigarette, or, worse, tear up the sharply worded letter he was about to send to someone who’d been rude to him.” (How modern are Lewis’ warnings!)

Indeed, silence can change us.

But let me bring this back full circle, to the Pope and AI. Lest you think I am really smart, know I used some form of AI for this writing. I don’t know all these scripture references by heart, or all the quotes that I use. But I can simply put a phrase or idea into what I know as the “search engine,” and my research is often done for me. AI is indeed a tool we can put to use for good purpose.

The problem is if we use AI - the internet - to distract us from real life, or if we use AI or AI simulations to substitute for real flesh-and-blood relationships, it just might make us less human. But if we use new technology as a tool, it can give us more free time to actually develop real relationships, strengthen the ones we have, read and study more.

It might even make us more human.

It might even bring us closer to God.

The phrase "I am" has powerful connotations

 

“I think, therefore I am.” – Rene Descartes.

“I am, I said.” – Neil Diamond.

“I am what I am, and that’s all that I am” – Popeye.

The phrase “I am” has some powerful connotations. We use it all the time – “I am going to the store” or “I am washing dishes” or “I am thinking.” It’s a definitive statement of present tense, of what “I am” doing right now, this moment.

It’s also the name God gave to Himself.

This was back in the book of Exodus, when Moses was coming up with all these excuses as to why he could not go back to Egypt – where, he believed, he might rightfully be wanted for murder – to free God’s people.

Moses says to God, “Suppose I go to the Israelites and say to them, ‘The God of your fathers has sent me to you,’ and they ask me, ‘What is his name?’ Then what shall I tell them?”

It wasn’t just Pharoah that Moses was concerned about; he couldn’t help but wonder if the people he was being sent to rescue wouldn’t believe God sent him; why would they? Would you?

God said to Moses, “I AM WHO I AM. This is what you are to say to the Israelites: ‘I AM has sent me to you.’” (This is all in Exodus 3).

“I am” is a phrase to say “this is what I am doing at this moment.” It is a statement of present tense.

As a name of God, it is the ultimate statement of present tense; of self-sufficiency, self-existence, and immediate presence. What I believe God is saying is He is the eternal present tense. No matter when or where, God is saying “I Am here.” In a very real sense, God is always “living in the moment.”

That’s not bad advice for us, to live in the moment, to be present in the here and now. But it can be difficult for us to do. We get so bogged down in the past, or paralyzed by how we envision the future. Often, we seem to live more in the past or the future than in the present, in the “now.”

Not that there isn’t value in remembering. I have some great memories that cause me to smile, or feel loved, or help me navigate what is happening now.

Not that there isn’t value to looking to the future. Where would we be without some kind of plan, whether it’s as simple as “What am I going to do today?” or as complex as “Where do I want to be in 10 years?”

But there is something to be said for being able to live in the present tense, to not letting myself be discouraged by things that have happened that I can’t change, or fearful of the things that might happen.

I wonder if it would not be better for us to remember that God is in this moment. He doesn’t have a past, or a future. For God, who is outside of time, everything is right now. It’s a difficult concept to fully grasp, because we are time-bound creatures. But somehow God is beyond time, outside of time. Everything is “right now” for God. He is “I AM.”

And how much less stressful would my life be if I could live that way, to not be limited by what I can’t change and not be worried about what has not happened yet? Yesterday’s mistake does not need to keep me from today’s success; yesterday’s success may not help me overcome today’s problem.

“I AM” is a powerful concept. We don’t have to be afraid because fear relates to what happened in the past or what may happen in the future. “I AM” says all I can do about anything is right now, in this present moment.

Somewhere I read that life is like air. We breathe it in and out every moment. Generally speaking, it’s no good if we take in a lungful of air and don’t exhale it to take in another. To stay alive, I must keep breathing, in and out. I can’t worry that the previous breath may be my last and try to hold on to it and never let it go, because eventually that will kill me. I can’t be afraid that there will not be another breath for me to take. All I can do is breathe.

So, as much as I am able, I want to live, in a sense, like God: in the present. It’s kind of like the old “WWJD” – What Would Jesus Do; that question we are supposed to ask ourselves in every decision we make.

Obedience is actually only possible in the present tense. I think it’s impossible to obey God in any other moment than the present. We can’t do anything about not obeying Him in the past; the future has not happened, so we can only obey God right now, in the present tense. In the “I am.”

Maybe that’s why the Bible always emphasizes the “now” of obedience. “Today if you hear his voice, do not harden your hearts” (Hebrews 3:7–8). “Choose you this day whom you will serve” (Joshua 24:15).

I need to recognize that God is here with me, in the present. He says His name is “I AM;” that “Never will I leave you; never will I forsake you” (in Deuteronomy 31:6 and again in Hebrews 13:5); that “Jesus Christ is the same yesterday and today and forever.” (Hebrews 13:8).

I need to live knowing that right now is the most important moment, because God is right now in this moment. Rather than asking “What should be happening?” I need to ask, “What is happening? God, what are You doing right now? Show me so that I can see it and be in the moment with You.”

I like the way John Newton used his “I ams:”

“I am not what I ought to be, I am not what I want to be, I am not what I hope to be in another world; but still I am not what I once used to be, and by the grace of God I am what I am.”

Right now. Because I can’t live in any other moment.