Welcome to the Phoenix Nest

Who am I? What have I done to justify presenting my so-called truth to you? What have I done to make it worth your while to explore the Phoenix Nest? Here's some basic information about my background:

• Ex-Academic Philosopher. I am a trained philosopher, PhD and all that (Brown University, 1970), and Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Wichita State University (1970-1977). I wasn’t a very good academic philosopher: I spent too much time trying to figure out what the truth was, or seeking ways to shoehorn philosophical skills into recalcitrant freshman heads, and not enough getting publications out. But after a life of applying philosophical analysis to questions about religion, mind and spirit, I now think I have some ideas worth sharing.
  
• Ex-Corporate Researcher. I worked a quarter of a century at The Boeing Company, at various locations in two states, trying ineffectually to improve the way the company built its software systems, so that they could be improved, maintained, and integrated together. In the course of that career, I wrote a number of forgettable reports that seemed important at the time. The only one that I believe has lasting value was Technical Report on the Semantic Unification Meta-Model -- Volume 1: Semantic Unification of Static Models. [ISO TC184/SC4/WG3 N175, October 1992] This was an analysis and formal logic of natural language, at least as used across the business community. It was intended to provide a basis for sharing information within and across companies. It contains some ideas that are relevant to the goals of the Nest, and it would be nice to include some of them here, but that task is way down the priority list.
• Ex-Christian. My family was nominally, but not devoutly, Christian. When I was very young, we attended church rarely; in high school, more frequently (Fort Scott First Presbyterian Church, to be precise). But when I went away to study science at a prominent institute, I found that I didn’t have the resources to reconcile the scientific view of the world with the literal interpretations of Christian doctrines of my catechism.
  
• Ex-Atheist. For many years I characterized myself as an atheist, a non-believer, but after a while, the label scratched like a hair-shirt: not because I realized the error of my apostasy, but because it described only what I didn’t believe, not what I did believe, and thereby lumped me together not only with other apostates, but also with people who made claims that were widely divergent from what I could accept. There were philosophical ideas that I did believe that conflicted with the rationalistic reductionism of many professed atheists. In any case I wanted a more constructive depiction of what I believed than the purely negative atheism.
  
• Ex-Unitarian Universalist. For a few years I gravitated to the Unitarian Universalist Church, doctrinally the most liberal of religions. It did not impose any doubtful dogmas on me. I joined with the hope of establishing a social community, as well as to provide a context for conversation about religious matters, and to some extent my hopes were realized. I became quite active in the congregation.
  • Ex-Lay Minister. As a member of a UU community without a settled minister, I increasingly volunteered to prepare messages, sermons, if you will, for our Sunday services. This brought old, unsettled religious matters back to the forefront of my mind, and led ultimately to what you are reading now.
    
  • Ex-Ordained Minister. Technically I am still an ordained minister of the Universal Life Church, but I am not trained as a theologian. Some years ago I took a class in a seminary with the thought of becoming a UU minister. Didn't work! This was a local Catholic seminary which offered programs for other religions, which UUs in the area adapted for their needs. There were too many aspects of the teachings that didn't fit into my emerging faith, and managing that tension while working full time became overwhelming. I decided that learning more about the details of the Christian story was not going to help me get where I wanted to go. So I took the modern option: I went online, filed the application, and paid my money, became an ordained ULC minister. Too easy! This is obviously the least important of my credentials. But ironically enough it is the most influential in one respect: it legally entitles me to marry and bury! And I suspect there would be tax advantages if I worked it the right way. In any case you will not find here the official doctrine of any church.
  However, in the end the tolerance and inclusiveness that was the heart of the church had an unexpected corollary: some atheists who had like me gravitated to the church for social reasons claimed to be "offended" when words like "god" and "soul" were used. Consequently religious language and religious discussion disappeared. There was no context within which to ask some of the hard questions traditionally directed to the church. What was left was banal, repetitive moralizing on the principle of tolerance, and a lot of discussion on current politics. The church I knew had become the equivalent of a ultra-liberal political action committee; and although it was polite and condescending, it had no interest in listening to pushback against its doctrines and tactics. Gradually I drifted away.

So after all that, who am I now (i.e., at this moment), what is my philosophy, my outlook on life? Why should you look any more closely into my Nest? Well, mainly for the fun of it! But if you need assurances that I won't be leading you through some dark underbelly of the noösphere, here's my elevator speech:

You're not going to find me in (or out of) any box. There is no brand of religion or philosophy you can apply to me and say that you've come even within a gross approximation of me, or what I believe; nor can you get any closer by saying that I am not this or that. Whatever the road, I've taken a different one. If you need to enclose me in some form in order to understand me, that form won't have a single name. But it will be multi-colored. It will have a time- and context-changing mix of the following hues:

• Naturalistic. My faith has nothing of the supernatural. If God cannot be found in nature, I will not find Him, and you will not find Him in these pages. Thus my beliefs are akin to those of David Hume and others who espoused natural theology.
  
• Scientific. I have a strong respect for science, though not the dedicated focus to be a scientist. The methods of scientific inquiry have taught us too much, have been too successful, to ignore them when their ox threatens to gore my sacred cow.
  
• Skeptical. Respect for science or scientists or anyone else, including myself, does not mean accepting their authority without carefully considering the reasoning behind any particular claim. Science, philosophy and religion are not just disciplines, they are institutions, made up of people in cooperative competition. Their zeal in the competition sometimes outweighs their care in adhering to rigorous procedures of proof. (Or sometimes they're just way off base!)
  
• Holistic. However, let me be clear: although I am an naturalist, although I respect science, I am not an atomist; I am not a reductionist; I do not believe that everything can be explained by reference only to the laws of physics. The universe is not a mere cloud of particles flying in close formation; it is not a mere conjunction of facts. Reductionism is not a scientific discovery; it is a faith held religiously by some scientists or philosophers. I believe to the contrary that there are aspects of the world and the people in it that cannot be understood except by looking at them as wholes. I am such a whole, and so are you!
  
• Pantheistic. Among those phenomena that require holistic thinking is the fact that I as a whole make things happen! So do you! So does everyone else! So does everything else! What we do now influences the future. All of us together create the future. What happens in this world is not fate; it is not written. Nor is it the direct will of some external, supernatural deity. You and I and everything else make it happen. We are co-creators of the future. But to be a creator is to be divine, it is the essence of divinity, of the Godhead. In that sense, we are all divine, we are all gods.
  
• Libertarian. Since I believe that you and I as wholes make things happen in a way that cannot be explained by reference to the state of our brains and the laws of neurophysiology, or to the state of our minds and the laws of psychology, or for that matter to the state of God's Plan and the laws of theology, that makes me a libertarian, in the philosophical not the political sense. I believe in a strong form of free will, a topic to which the Phoenix Nest is largely devoted.
  
• Panentheistic. Not only am I a divine whole, I am part of a divine whole, a creative whole. What drives this world is not just the force of our individual wills, but a vortex, a vortex of vortices, set in motion by the patterns of our interactions, but coming to have a life and power and self-preserving inertia of its own.
  
• Reconstructionistic. Some atheists talk as though the only thing that matters in religion is God, and that once that is disposed of, once God is truly dead, once science demonstrates that the world can be explained without reference to God, religion should wither away. We should, they say, stop using words that smack of that discredited religion. They are genuinely surprised, even affronted, when it doesn't happen that way, when people they thought were smart persist in their peculiar habits of faith. But the fact is that religious faith integrates people's lives in a myriad interconnected ways that science, at least the atheist's simple view of science, does not replace or even acknowledge. I use words like faith, God, soul, sin, hell and salvation. I use them systematically in a way that preserves the way they integrate humanity, but I do not mean by them what our parents means, what you probably mean. Part of my task in the Nest is to reconstruct, to redefine those concepts to fit our new world.
  
• Universalistic. You are not going to agree with me, at least at first. And that's OK. The Universalist Church advocated the doctrine of universal salvation, declaring that God was too good to consign people to the eternal torment of Hell in the afterlife. With this aspect of their faith, including mistaken ones and the faith that one has no faith, I wholeheartedly agree: God's grace, whatever that means, embraces all faiths; no one is at risk of hell for being of the wrong religion or for believing the wrong doctrine. This is of course contrary to the doctrine of most organized religions. In these pages I will be arguing for a certain religious and philosophical and scientific point of view. If you disagree with me, you're mistaken, ! Or I'm mistaken and need your assistance in discovering my error. But I will never claim that you are damned to Hell merely for being mistaken. And I will try my best not to let my frustration over not persuading you, interfere with out relationship.

When you read a printed book, the technology you're using is very simple: ink has been absorbed into the fibers of the page in very precise ways. The difference between what you see and what's really there is way down at the chemical level, just as it is for most anything in our ordinary environment. Certainly the technology required to put that book in your hands — the writing, the transmission, the layout, the printing, the packaging, the shipment, the marketing, the delivery — those are complicated and evolving. But the technology of your reading the book is very simple.

That's not the case if you are reading the book on your computer or some other electronic device. There, multiple layers of technology underlie what you read, each layer embodied in code that has been written by people to present you with the illusion that you are just reading another book. You could read that code too if you wanted, but despite what was hinted in The Matrix, that is a very hard way to grasp the meaning of what is written.

What code? Well there are at many kinds of code, typically written by different people, in different languages, with different objectives:

• Every device has an operating system consisting of code that loads and executes the apps on the device.
• Every application ("app") on every device, for example, web browsers or PDF readers, is made up of code that's designed to do things that users find useful. (Whether they do other things is another matter. Caveat emptor!)
• Different from the application code are collections of code that are used as data by applications, for example, to present a book-like appearance of words and pictures on the screen of your device. For examples, a PDF reader can read and display any PDF file; a browser can display any web page that meets W3C standards.
• In order for that data to be available to the applications, some code has to be stored somewhere, waiting for the application to retrieve it. For simple documents — photographs, PDF files, simple web pages — the stored code is a copy of the same data used by the app, and is in the same form (the same sequences of 1s and 0s). But that's not necessarily the case. Sometimes the stored code has to be transformed in complex ways before it can be used by the application code; and changes made by the application have to be transformed before they can be stored.
• Then of course there is the code, often interacting libraries of code in different languages, that retrieves, organizes, and sometimes transforms the stored code into the code used by your application.

When you go to a shopping web site, every page is assembled from elements stored in many different places, different files or databases, or calculated on the fly from those elements. When you buy something, the sales transaction isn't recorded in that page; it's sent to a database, where is triggers follow-on processing, concluding with the delivery of the item to you.

Underlying its beautiful appearance on your screen, the Phoenix Nest is a large collection of code. More precisely, it is the code of a web site designed to be viewed in a web browser, that is, it is part of the World Wide Web.

The World Wide Web (WWW), commonly known as the Web, is an information system where documents and other web resources are identified by Uniform Resource Locators (URLs, such as https://www.example.com/), which may be interlinked by hypertext, and are accessible over the Internet.[1][2] The resources of the WWW are transferred via the Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) and may be accessed by users by a software application called a web browser and are published by a software application called a web server.

The Web is one of the most transformative technologies in history. Its impacts, for both good and ill, have yet to be understood. One of the things it makes possible is to enable someone with a modest amount of training and resources, and with a lot of time to fill, i.e., some like me, to publish ideas that cannot be published elsewhere. It's the vanity press of the 21st Century. As always, whether something should be published is a whole 'nother matter entirely.

Anyway, to be read on a browser, and do everything I intend it to do, the Phoenix Nest incorporates three different kinds of code, each in its own language:

• HTML (Hypertext Markup Language). Every web page is written in this language. With HTML a page is organized into a hierarchical structure (its DOM or Document Object Model) that the browser interprets into elements that it can display on a screen. For example, the code
  • <div class="PColH bg-04">
    • <div class="PColC dvLeft">
      • <button class="PColBtn" data-btnShow="+" data-btnHide="&times;" title="Show this!">+</button>
    • </div>
      <div class="PHdrT dvLeft">
      • <h4>Web Development Languages</h4>
    • </div>
    • <div class="dvClear"></div>
  • </div>
  encodes the header at the top of this section (or at least it did when I wrote this), including the button you can use to hide or display the section. Note the hierarchy imposed by the nested <div>...</div> tag sets.
• CSS (Cascading Style Sheets). These determine the appearance of things on a page: colors, positions, sizes, styles, and so on. These features were originally handled in HTML itself, and simple web pages can still be written without CSS, but anything complicated requires it. CSS makes it "easy" for web-builders to make similar things look similar. For example, the CSS code
  • .PColC>button {
    • margin-left:0 !important;
      margin-right:0 !important;
      display:inline;
  • }
  controls the size of the margins around the button in the header to this section, and in most similar headers in the Phoenix Nest.
• Javascript. This is a scripting or programming language that enables pages to be dynamic, to do things, on specified conditions. Code in scripting languages is what makes clicking on a BUY button actually execute the order. For example, the javascript code
  • $(this).on (_click, function(event) {
    • event.preventDefault();
      var sel = $(this).attr(_data_list);
      if (sel === undefined) {sel = _toc_sel;}
      if ($(this).html() === $(this).attr(_data_btnShow)) {
      • $(sel).find(_dPColBtn).each (function(event) {
        • PColBtnTgl ($(this), _1, _fast);
          $(this).html($(this).attr(_data_btnHide));
      • });
        $(this).html($(this).attr(_data_btnHide));
        showhide.html(_hide);
    • } else {
      • $(sel).find(_dPColBtn).each (function(event) {
        • PColBtnTgl ($(this), _2, _fast);
          $(this).html($(this).attr(_data_btnShow));
      • });
        $(this).html($(this).attr(_data_btnShow));
        showhide.html(_show);
    • }
  • });
  tells the browser what to do when you click the button in the header to this section. (And yes to you tech-savvy nerds out there: this particular segment of javascript embeds some jQuery functions.) By the way, some simple active operations, such as following hyperlinks, are built into HTML and don't required additional javascript.

Without languages such as these, there would be no internet, no world-wide web, and in my humble opinion, the world would be a poorer place. However, to make use of those languages and actually produce web pages, we need an environment of rather complex technology.

By the way, learning these languages, even as non-fluently as I do, has required me to seek help on the web. There are a variety of helpful sources around, but the one I rely on, the one I go to first, is W3Schools, for all these languages, and others besides.

Even with a rudimentary knowledge of web languages, getting the Phoenix Nest from me to you requires a range of different technologies:

• Computer. Obviously I need a computer to build and view the Nest. Mine is an Apple iMac with a 23" screen and a lot of memory. Web development requires you to have ready access to many applications simultaneously. A screen whose real estate allows only one window at a time will be hyper-frustrating.
• File Management System. This is built into every computer and its operating system. It is perhaps the most important foundation tool: it allows me to organize not only my web files, but also images, PDF files, and web links, so that I can find them when a page needs them. Good librarianship is critical to putting information on the web.
• Web Browsers. These are applications that run on computers and other devices to display web pages on the screen. I use both Google Chrome and Apple Safari. For the last few years Safari has been my browser of choice.
• Hosting Technologies. These are the tools that know how to get a webfile from storage and send it to a browser. As large and complicated as the Nest is, I use two hosts:
  • Local Host. This provides a web server on my own computer, allowing me to view my web pages while they are in development, without the time and complications of putting them on the web, where they would be accessible to the public. For my local host, I installed MAMP on my computer.
  • Public Host. For you to see the Nest, I needed a host available to the wide world web. For that, I chose GoDaddy.com. They provide web-accessible storage space for all my files, a DNS server that converts the URL of the Phoenix Nest into a physical address of the Nest files, and of course the web server software to retrieve and send to your browser the files required by that URL. They a have always provided good service, fast internet speeds, and a couple of email accounts that I use.
• Web Development Technology. This is the technology to create, edit, and integrate web pages, and to upload it to the web server. For very simple pages, a text editor and an FTP program are enough, but for the Phoenix Nest, I needed the support of a web development environment. For that I chose Adobe Dreamweaver. It provides a broad suite of features that I rely on:
  • It provides editors for a wide set of web languages, including the HTML, CSS, and javascript mentioned above. Those editors have syntax checkers that help to avoid errors.
  • It provides a WYSIWYG viewer that lets me see web pages approximately as they would look in a browser, and to edit those page through that view. This feature of Dreamweaver is of poor quality; the approximation to a browser is remote. Someone who is used to a word processor will be severely disappointed. But since my local server allows me to view those pages immediately in a true browser, the experience is one I can live with.
  • It enables me to manage the site as a whole, specifying all the details that local and public hosts require.
  • It enables me to upload and download files between my development environment and the public server.
  The complexity of the Phoenix Nest almost guarantees that nothing I do works right the first time, and often I take out my frustration by swearing at Dreamweaver. Some of that anger is justified, because despite its high price, Adobe never seems to understand the negative impact some of its design decisions have on the web developer; nor does it seem to listen to user complaints. Nonetheless, I continue to use it, because I'm used to its foibles, and can usually solve the problems it confronts me with.
• Photographic Technology. I have lots of photographs in the Phoenix Nest. Most of them I took myself during my Grand Fossil Tour. These can be viewed in my reports on the Tour itself. Ultimately, I hope to present photos of fossils in an integrated virtual museum. To acquire and manage these photographs, I use the following procedures and technologies:
• Touring Technology. The final kind of technology that I use on a regular basis are the tools I use to plan and execute my Grand Fossil Tour:
  • RVTrip Wizard. This browser app lets me find campgrounds and other points of interest, display them on a map, and organize them into itineraries, showing the mileage between stops. It lets me specify the number of days at each location, and calculates where I will be when. By switching to Satellite View, I can zoom in on a campground and see the actual layout of the camp sites. Many is the RV park I've rejected because the Wizard showed me that the RVs were packed too tightly. RVTrip Wizard also provides hyperlinks to Campground Reviews and to the websites for the individual campgrounds.
  • Google Maps. I have a long-standing love-hate relationship with Google Maps. Functionally it is the most complete and integrated mapping tool available:
    • It has one of the most comprehensive databases of places available.
    • It is available on computers phones and tablets.
    • On phones and tablets, it provides adequate GPS services, navigating me to where I want to go, especially important since I don't travel with a co-pilot.
    • Its computer version is browser based, which means that links to maps can be shared with other people and devices, and they can be embedded in web pages. (Apple Maps fails here, since its maps are locked exclusively into a Mac application.)
    No other map application matches this combination of capabilities. Nonetheless, I use it reluctantly:
    • Google's business model is reputed to be one of the most invasive of personal privacy.
    • Every use of a Google product reports your usage to Google, including where you are and any other data they can find. For that reason, I have ceased embedding Google Maps in my web pages, because Google was getting cookies from my pages, even when a viewer didn't look at the maps.
    • Google GPS facility is obsessed with shaving seconds of your trip. Often it has routed me and my trailer through residential streets, when a slightly longer route via a highway was available. A few times it has routed me under trestles too short for my trailer, twice with expensive consequences. (That's one of the perils of not having a copilot to double-check the GPS.) I do not know if Google has height and weight restrictions for roads in its database. If it does, it does not make them available in the route filtering process. It definitely should make them part of a much-more user-friendly route planning capability.

These of course are only a fraction of the applications I have on my computer and devices, but these are the ones that play an important role in making the Phoenix Nest available to you.