A Curious Girl: Good news... surprisingly enough, it's the Gospel :)

Well I actually have inspiration for an entry, so prepare to be stunned!

On the other hand I feel all weird after giving blood, so maybe not.

Anyway, I've been feeling a tad fed up lately. Not sure why. Lots of things. The future and careers. My faith and whether I'm really a Christian or not. Whether I'll ever be a proper writer.

Anyway. On Saturday I did ten hours on a 12 hour prayer vigil (well, I took breaks for food but I still did quite a lot :) ) for Christian unity. Partly I went because Christian unity on campus is quite lacking, let alone the rest of the world. But I also went because I've been... 'avoiding' God recently. Not praying and stuff. To be honest, lame as it sounds, I've been too scared to. God seems like a scary person who prefers to inflict rules and keep us all in a miserable heap of self scolding. Like having self-esteem is sinful.

When God's like that, it's very easy to imagine why you wouldn't want to be a Christian. The trouble is, no matter how I try to apply logic to it, I just can't give up. Abcsecrets, when she was writing her diary, once said that people who stop being Christians never were Christians in the first place. I'm not sure that's true, but there's some truth in it since I can't let it go. It seems like such a waste...

Last night I was feeling useless and lost and fat, and guilty about feeling fat (cf. Why I Hate Dieting), so I stuffed 'Fat is a Feminist Issue' by Susie Orbach - I've finally bought myself a copy - and 'Messy Spirituality' by Mike Yaconelli into my bag.

I love Messy Spirituality. The first thing I felt whilst reading it was that I honestly don't think God minds me questioning my faith. I don't think he minds my occasional bouts of skepticism or my relentless ranting. Just so long as I don't give up.

Life becomes much more easy when you realise all we really have to do know it's OK to fail. To know that we're all messy people struggling along and the best way to help people is to support them and not criticise them. I like how reading 'Messy Spirituality' I suddenly felt much more charitable towards everyone else. When I accepted that I'm in an OK place it was much easier to realise that everyone else is an OK place because a place where God is is always an OK place.

*smiles* So yeah, I've been reminded of Jesus's coolness (loving messy people and pissing off the religious establishment! Woohoo!) and am pleased to announce that we can now return to the 1983 classic "Helen's Exploits in Christianity". There will be no further interruptions.*

Hmm... the weirdness after giving blood seems to have worn off a bit...

Had a cool tutorial this morning. Our tutor "Dale" is great, he offered us tea and coffee and interrupted my presentation (on Gibbs Free Energy... which is useful but I can't get fantastically excited about it...) for a discussion on entropy... In which I argued against the common Creationist assumption that if entropy exists then life can't exist without God, because the second law of thermodynamics says that entropy ('disorder') tends to an increase and life is too highly ordered to have arisen spontaneously. There's nothing like using false science to prove God. Basically, it's not a correct assumption because order can be created whilst disorder is created in the surroundings. The Second Law of Thermodynamics is "The entropy of a closed system tends to increase" or "Spontaneous reactions increase in entropy". This doesn't mean that non-spontaneous reactions can't happen - the 'closed system' in question is the universe - there can be no other true closed system. To take an example, you can toast a piece of bread over a fire - this is not a spontaneous reaction, since you have to heat the bread until it's toast, the chemical reactions won't start if you just wave it over the the fire and then leave it in the cold to become toast. On the other hand, you can very easily start a fire which will keep going without continual attendance This is a spontaneous reaction, and creates entropy, meaning that even though your toast is decreasing in entropy, the rest of the universe is still tending to an increase.

There, now if you're a Creationist please don't use the 'DNA is too ordered' argument :)

Incidentally, I thought of a 'Deep Thought from Science' (I used to have a short text about how potential is more important than determination in stem cells - ie., it's not what we will do, it's what we can do, that matters, written up and stuck on my wall). In a reversible reaction, say the Haber process, there comes a point of equilibrium where it appears that nothing is happening.

For example, in the formation of ammonia, nitrogen and hydrogen are reacted together to make ammonia. However ammonia also readily reacts to become nitrogen and hydrogen. If a factory left nitrogen and hydrogen in a reaction chamber for long enough, there would come a point where no more ammonia could be made, despite still having plenty of nitrogen and hydrogen. This isn't to say that the nitrogen and hydrogen aren't still reacting - they are, it's just that the ammonia's turning back to nitrogen and hydrogen at the same rate. The situation is perfectly balanced, but little is being achieved. The only way to make more ammonia is to upset the balance - take out the ammonia or add more nitrogen and hydrogen. You see, sometimes it's dangerous to let things stay balanced... to just fit in and not do anything different. Whilst at equilibrium lots of reactions are happening, they aren't doing anything and are effectively pointless.

So yes, go upset the balance, it's more useful and generally much more fun :)

So anyway, I feel much better and am not planning to fall victim to self-floccinaucinihilipilification. (see last entry)

Random word for today: prerequisite

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