Essays or Something Important

Absence, Or The Love Of Things And God

To truly love a thing is to love its absence more than its presence. To love something is to love nothing.

Natural love: a possession.

"I can't imagine life without you"

"And because of your guidance, my dear God, I found salvation"

"I am a successful engineer"

If I were to place a lens over my eyes that tinted the world red, I would say that the sky is red. The orientation of the lens would not matter; the fundamentally blue sky would be painted red. Natural love is the result of a likened lens.

Obergefell V. Hodges And The Geographic Contingency Of Personhood

Any right whose obligations are enforced arbitrarily, contingent on any condition against any person, fractures the personhood of the individual, revealing that the right itself is illegitimate.

Obligations precede rights. In the case of free speech, courts have an obligation to uphold this right by prosecuting violations of this unalienable right. For example, if an activist publishes a radical text and faces undue arrest, they depend on courts to protect their right to free speech. In the realm of a corrupted judicial branch where political arrests are not examined for violations of the right to free speech, the activist finds themselves having a right in theory but not in practice. Rights are only truly real to the extent that they must have their corresponding obligations fulfilled, otherwise they are nothing but aspirational fiction.

Moral Distance, Or The Root Of Atrocity

The engine of all systemic and interpersonal harm, from genocide to the beatings of a child, is moral distance. Moral distance is the mental space placed between the perpetrator, which can be an institution or a person, and the victim. It is the perpetrator's refusal to see an individual life as precarious, complex, and painful as their own. In other words, the foundation of moral distance is the categorization of "me and them" or "us and them".

Programming Education As An Orientation Towards Virtue

Human power is the ability to create something from nothing. This is divine not metaphorically but literally. To program is to imitate God’s first grammar: let there be light. But we often forget that God spoke the world into being for the other. Programming thus is not a just a skill, but at its essence is the metaphysical participation in the act of genesis.

Human power itself is distinct from natural power, or the power of nature. Natural power manifests in natural disasters, the evolution of species, the obligations of sustaining one's own life, like food, water, and sleep, for example. Natural power operates through necessity and force; it does not ask. It acts. Hurricanes do not deliberate, hunger does not consult the hungry. In contrast, human power emerges from the exertion of will, a concious act of genesis shaped by moral possibility.