Thoughts

The Biological Roots of the Self

Note: This post was originally a comment in a Facebook thread, the context of which has been totally lost to me. It was written 2-3 years into the my journey into spiritual doubt. While I don’t remember the Facebook thread that provoked the comment, I do remember the origin of the line of thought. Through casual conversations with my boss at work, I came to realize that almost everything I consider ‘me’ is rooted in genetics and circumstance. ‘American.’ ‘Male.’ ‘White.’ ‘Verbal.’ ‘Analytical.’ ‘Nerdy.’ ‘English-speaking.’ Once my brain and body are stripped away and Earth and all its cultures are left behind, what is left of me that is actually ‘me’? Even if we are resurrected after death as the Bible teaches, what would be left of us that was recognizable? This is another item that as I inhabit the life of faith I have to simply set aside as beyond knowing. (DL, June 13, 2023).

Is there any part of your consciousness that will survive the destruction of your brain?

Pointers to the answer:

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Technology

Why I’m Leaving Facebook

Note: I first made the decision to leave Facebook and migrate my content to this site in 2014. It would be seven years after that decision before I actually got the blog set up in September 2021 and started moving content over. I left Facebook permanently in May 2022. Looking back, I still entirely agree with the rationale below (although I came to like the Messenger app as the best part of Facebook and hardest thing to leave in the end). I have not missed Facebook or the interactions I had there. (DL, June 13, 2023).

After many months of consideration, I have decided to begin the process of disengaging from Facebook.

The primary reason is that I’ve become increasingly dissatisfied with the way FB manipulates users: curating our news feeds, constantly inserting ads and links to third-party content, giving priority to paid posts, etc. I have ceased to feel like what I see on FB every day is an honest reflection of my friends’ activities and interests; it isn’t. It’s a revenue stream optimized by FB for me to get me clicking on things that aren’t first-and-foremost about my friends, but rather about making FB money.

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Poetry

What is a Star?

What is a star?

The gleam above me in the night?
It isn’t really in the sky.
It is in fact behind my eye,
triggered by a beam of light
that struck a nerve and touched my brain.
A wave of such and such a height
has stroked the synapses of sight—
a process I cannot explain.
But nonetheless the star I see
rotating on the neural plane
by memory can be called again.
(It’s shining still inside of me.)
If eye and brain are not a star,
and neither is a memory,
then neither can the gleaming be.

—David Lohnes
July, 2014

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Politics

My First Thoughts on Transgenderism

Note: Ten years ago I wrote this as a Facebook post because I wanted to speak clearly and publicly in response to the then new (at least, it felt new) but growing cultural trend of normalizing transgenderism as a means of overcoming or negating biological reality. In the intervening decade, though the irrationality of the transgender movement has become increasingly accepted in our society, my views have not changed. If I wrote the post today, I would likely seek to moderate the tone somewhat, but the ideas themselves I still embrace. I post this here now out of a commitment to speaking the truth as I see it, even though I believe I may someday suffer professional or other repercussions for holding these views. Such are the times in which we live. Following the note itself are a selection of my comments from the discussion thread that followed the original Facebook post. (DL April 20, 2023)

I dislike provoking ill feelings in others, but with Bradley Manning’s transgender announcement today and the subsequent pronoun shift in the media coverage, Wikipedia, etc. regarding him, I feel like it’s time for me to say something clear about my position on transgenderism.

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Books

Neuromancer

Neuromancer (William Gibson, pub. 1984) was published when I was six years old, won a ton of awards, and put a lot of juice in the cyberpunk sub-genre. (All I know about cyberpunk I learned on Wikipedia, but basically I take it as a kind of sci-fi-noir that (usually?) incorporates lots of networky technology.)

I was drawn to the book for two reasons (I mean, aside from the fact that it’s a sci-fi novel. Duh.). First, I wanted something good. I don’t get to read sci-fi very often, so no time for garbage. Neuromancer was the first novel to win all three big sci-fi awards, and it’s on lots of “best of” lists, so it seemed promising. Second, I wanted something dystopian (More Blade Runner than Star Trek); I don’t know, maybe it’s a phase I’m in. Anyways, Neuromancer seemed to fit the bill on both counts.

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Technology

The SharePoint 2013 Distributed Cache Service: A Crash Course

Note: I wrote this on company time (I think; the learning was certainly done on company time) for a company-hosted SharePoint blog at my first IT employer. The blog never really went anywhere. The idea was to demonstrate our bona fides by providing top-quality SharePoint content on our own blog. I no longer have the image that was included in the original post, but you get the idea. I put this here as a record of some of the writing and thinking I was doing at the time. This was pretty cutting-edge stuff in March of 2013 (at least for SharePoint nerds). (DL, Sept. 7, 2021)

The Distributed Cache service is a new piece of SP 2013 architecture that has the potential to wreck your deployment. Here’s some helpful information I gathered while installing a six-server production farm for one of our enterprise clients.

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Politics

In the Wake of Sandy Hook

Note: The Columbine massacre, which happened at the end of my senior year of college, is the first mass shooting that I remember. In the twenty-five years since, it seems undeniable to me that mass shootings of this type have increased in frequency and severity. While I believe the primary cause is not the guns themselves (guns have been been woven into American society since the beginning) it seems increasingly clear that we as a society cannot be entrusted with guns without more effective limits. I wrote this Facebook post in the wake of Sandy Hook to explore foundational principles that we would have to observe and incorporate into our thinking as we explore more effective gun control as a society. (DL, June 10, 2023).

In the wake of the terrible sadness of Sandy Hook, we need to reevaluate the place of guns in our society—specifically the place of the modern weapons that have done so much to increase the average person’s lethal potential.

This is a contribution to that reevaluation. It is a statement of principles that I believe to be true.

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Politics

Thank God for Barack Obama

I predicted to a friend yesterday that Obama would win in a landslide. I have felt that way all Summer. On the morning after, Andrew Sullivan captures my feelings about Romney and right-wing media:

[This election] has revealed that Fox News, Drudge, and the rest have been engaged in a massive propaganda campaign to create an alternative reality and get the rest of us to go along. . . . What was defeated tonight was not just Romney, a hollow cynic, but a whole mountain of mendacity and delusion. That sound you hear is the cognitive dissonance ringing in the ears of ideologues and cynics. Any true conservative longs for that sound, the sound of reality arriving to pierce through fantasy and fanaticism.

I want to share a challenge with my conservative friends: Did you buy into the story that a media conspiracy was twisting the polls? Did you reflexively dismiss bad news during this campaign as media bias? Did you look to Drudge, Fox, Rush, Hannity, Beck, Dinesh D’Souza, et al. to give you the *real* story?

Don’t. They are as blinded by bias and ulterior motives as any in the “mainstream” media. I hope you can see that now.

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Family

Willard E. Lohnes, M. D. (1924 – 2012)

Willard Erwin Lohnes Sr., M.D., 88, husband of Nell Jackson Lohnes, went to be with the Lord on Sunday, October 21, 2012.

Dr. Lohnes was born February 12, 1924 in Waterloo, IA, to the late Herbert Joseph Lohnes and Margaret Anna Heinl Lohnes. After graduating from Waterloo’s West High with the class of ’42, Dr. Lohnes served with the US Army Air Forces in the US and in the Pacific area until 1946. After WWII, he passed up a chance to transition from bomber navigator to jet pilot, choosing instead to pursue his long-held goal of becoming a medical doctor, graduating from Harvard Medical School in 1951. He served as general and thoracic surgeon until retirement in 1989.

Despite never making pilot with the Air Force, Dr. Lohnes did become a pilot, becoming certified as both a private pilot and private pilot instructor. He was also an avid reader and had a deep appreciation for music, theology, and education. After retirement, he served as a Gideon. He was married twice, both times for more than thirty years.

Surviving in addition to his wives Nell Jackson and Martha Miller, are four sons (Paul Lohnes, Willard Lohnes, Jr., Wes Sanders, and David Lohnes); four daughters (Anne Whiteford, Margaret McCoy, Laura Ray, and Rachel Salter); 26 grandchildren and 11 great-grandchildren.

He was predeceased by his brother, Dr. John Lohnes, and his grandson, Micah Lohnes.

Memorial services will be held at 11:00 a.m. Monday, Oct. 29 at Mitchell Road Presbyterian Church, officiated by the Rev. Curtis DuBose and the Rev. Willard Lohnes Jr.

Burial and funeral services will be held at 11 a.m. on Friday, Oct. 26 in Cherokee, Iowa.

Memorials may be made to Mitchell Road Presbyterian Church Missions, 207 Mitchell Road, Greenville, SC 29615; or to Golden Strip Gideons, P.O. Box 1025, Fountain Inn, SC 29644.

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Faith

Conversation About Origins

Note: Until my early thirties I was a convinced Young-Earth Creationist. I firmly believed that the Earth is approximately 6,000 years old, and that the global flood of Noah as described in Genesis 6-9 was a historical event that occurred approximately 4,500 years ago. As described elsewhere, in September 2010 I began a new research project that led me to question my previous convictions. In the Spring of 2011 as my doubts mounted, I had the opportunity to speak with Ken Ham at a homeschool convention, and on his recommendation, wrote a later to one of Answers in Genesis’s staff members. This e-mail captures my thinking and research on this topic at that time in some detail. Dr. [Name Redacted] did in time respond (see the postscript at the end), but his answers were not sufficient to end my doubts. (DL, Sept. 18, 2021)

Dear Dr. [Name Redacted]:

Ken Ham suggested I write you and gave me your e-mail when I approached him after one of his speaking engagements in the Spring.

I was reared in the church. I made a profession of faith at four. I was heavily involved in Child Evangelism Fellowship through junior high and high school. I took a bachelor’s and a master’s at Bob Jones University. In the ten years since, I have been heavily involved in Christian education and (on my own time) in Christian apologetics, often in regards to the scientific inadequacy of Neo-Darwinism and the evidence for Y.E.C. I have read fairly widely in the field of Y.E.C., most recently (as it happens) in Coming to Grips with Genesis.

Over the last ten to twelve months I have begun to seriously question the tenability of Young-Earth Creationism.
WIth that doubt (which has come to border very closely on flat disbelief), has come a concomitant and unsettling uncertainty regarding the veracity of the Scriptures as a whole. As you know, if Genesis isn’t true, we must seriously ask whether any of it is true.

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