Tag: Faith

How Much Should I Spend to Keep My Refrigerator Running During a Power Outage?

by James Wallace Harris, 8/31/26

148,000 MLGW customers lost power on August 22nd during a severe storm. We only lost electricity for a couple of hours; however, several of our neighbors went five days without power. Over the last twenty years, we have lost power many times for 1-4 days.  I wrote about some of those times: “Thrown Off the Grid Kicking and Streaming” in 2017, “Blogging by Candlelight and Paper” in 2011, “Living Like Jane Austen” in 2008.

Every time this happens, I research buying a whole-house generator. And every time, I decide they’re not worth the expense. Over the years, some people I know have bought them, but their reviews have been mixed.

This time, I meditated on what it means to go without power. Am I just being whimpy? Essentially, what hurts the most is having our routines disrupted. The August heat and January cold are unpleasant, but not immediately life-threatening. What pains us is not having TV and computers. That’s pitiful, don’t you think?

My two main worries are freezing pipes and spoiled food. This house survived an ice storm without power for two weeks, so the pipes are probably okay if we keep the water dripping. And we’ve had to throw out a couple hundred dollars of food twice. But is it worth spending $10,000 to save what’s in the refrigerator? According to this video, that’s what it would take to get the icebox going for a week. (Although I could probably do it cheaper because our fridge is smaller and cheaper DIY solutions.)

It does seem unwise to spend thousands to save hundreds. I’ve been watching dozens of YouTube videos about backup power, and there’s an interesting socio-economic divide between the various filmmakers. Many are made by guys who obviously have a lot of money, while the rest are made by do-it-yourself scroungers. I’m not like the guys with expensive homes or the guys who can make $2000 power stations with $200 worth of mail-ordered parts.

The video that impressed me the most was this guy who combined a smaller power station with portable solar panels.

Yet, this is still somewhat complicated. This guy has a house wired to handle this approach. I’d have to get a very long extension cord to run from the solar panels to the Bluetti through an open window, or just carry the Bluetti outside whenever I needed to recharge it. Also, notice this guy is one of those with money. I think prepping is a big hobby for some rich dudes.

That Bluetti with two portable solar panels is $1699 on Amazon. As the video showed, it’s a very versatile setup. It can be used for a variety of devices. And it beats the solutions offered by the guy in the first video. However, do I want to spend $1700 to save maybe $200 in groceries?

I think Susan would prefer to use the Bluetti to keep the TV going. But we learned something from the last two ice storms. In the first ice storm, we learned we wanted our phones the most. After that storm, we went to AT&T and signed up for unlimited data and the ability to have internet hotspots. We also bought a smaller Jackery power station for $200 that can recharge our phones several times.

During the next ice storm, we bundled up in several layers of clothes, got in our La-Z-Boys, covered ourselves with blankets and cats, and streamed movies and TV shows on our phones. It worked great.

We did get tired of eating cold food. We even ate out of the icebox for a couple of days. The cheese and yogurt seemed fine. We ultimately had to throw out a bunch of frozen dinners and veggies, but it was probably less than $100 to replace.

During this recent power failure, we offered to let our neighbor stay with us, but she preferred to stay in her house. We kept her frozen food for her. She didn’t complain much about five days of no air conditioning. She just visited friends and stores with power.

I think the real reason I spend so much time thinking about devising emergency power solutions is that it’s an interesting technical challenge. But do I really want to spend $10,000-$20,000 to solve an interesting problem? Isn’t it just more tech toys that I love?

We have several LED lanterns and a Jackery for the iPhones, and that seems to do well enough. What bothers us is not eating our regular meals or following our daily routines. Susan and I are creatures of habit, and we hate being thrown out of our ruts.

It’s revealing that losing the internet is the most disturbing aspect of power failures. What does that say about us? Our iPhones are little internet lifeboats, and that keeps us somewhat content. But what we want is our big-screen TVs. Isn’t that sad? Probably going without them for several days is character-building.

Still, plunking down the bucks for a Generac so we’re never inconvenienced still tempts me. What I really want is what Base Power offers in Texas. Base Power offers to rent whole-house battery backup. Rent is $19-29 a month, and installation is around a $1000. If everyone’s power company offered that deal, no one would buy whole-house generators or whole-house batteries. Letting the power company deal with everything is the way to go. I think I’ll wait.

Going without electricity is so damn revealing about our personalities that I shouldn’t try to always avoid it.

JWH

Ancient Christianities: The First Five Hundred Years by Paula Fredriksen

by James Wallace Harris, 12/39/25

Ancient Christianities by Paula Fredriksen is a scholarly work that chronicles the evolution of Christian theology over its first half millennium. I would say this book is not for the faithful, but for readers who enjoy studying history. Paula Fredriksen is an American historian and scholar of early Christianity. She held the position of William Goodwin Aurelio Professor of Scripture at Boston University from 1990 to 2010. If you are considering reading Ancient Christianities, I highly recommend following the link to her name. Fredriksen has published several books on Jesus, Paul, early Christianity, and St. Augustine that I want to read.

I will not review Ancient Christianities; for that, I recommend reading Joseph Foltz’s review in Ancient Jew Review (May 14, 2025). Instead, I’m going to describe why I read this book.

I believe we are all brainwashed as children by our parents, family, teachers, peers, and churches. We can’t recall how we acquired our foundational beliefs because they were imprinted at a time when we understood little about reality. These beliefs are recorded so deeply in our minds that we seldom examine them. The amount of work it takes to explore this area of our personality is too great for most people.

There is a fascinating parallel between dredging up personal memories from our early minds and studying the history of the early formation of Christian theology. It’s impossible to know anything for sure about either. However, working with memory and history can be enlightening.

I gave up religion back in the mid-1960s, but I’ve never been able to erase everything that going to church as a child put in my head. However, I’ve always felt kindly towards the person we call Jesus. I assumed he discovered a new way of seeing the world that was more compassionate than was common over two thousand years ago.

Over the years, I’ve read many books by historians trying to discover who Jesus was and what he taught. I’ve concluded it is impossible to know what Jesus believed or preached, and Ancient Christianities only confirms this conclusion.

If you study all the various sects of Christianity and all its theologians, you will not find one common denominator. Whatever Jesus believed, it’s been obscured by thousands of new opinions. Some scholars claim that Jesus might not have existed at all, but was created to promote specific concepts. But we can’t even identify the first creator of Jesus, because the idea of Jesus has been recreated countless times over the last two thousand years.

Because Jesus didn’t write down his philosophy, we can’t say for sure what it was. The earliest writings about Jesus come from Paul, but we can’t trust them because Paul didn’t know Jesus. Paul wrote letters about Jesus twenty years after Jesus died. He says very little about Jesus the man. But that’s like you writing about someone you heard about who died in 2005.

The authors of Matthew, Mark, and Luke wrote decades later and told different stories about Jesus that don’t always match up. That’s like writing about someone you heard about who died in 1980.

The author of the Gospel of John wrote even later and went full gonzo on the story of Jesus.

Paul Fredriksen recounts how many other men wrote stories about Jesus in the following four hundred years. Everyone made something new up. And some of their ideas involve concepts as far out as those imagined by science fiction writers.

Ancient Christianities is about endlessly reinventing Jesus over five hundred years. Those ideas are so ancient, so deep in our collective unconsciousness, that they are like ideas that we acquired when we were four, and dwell in the darkness of our unconscious minds.

Every theologian and every historian has their own theory about Jesus’ identity. All we can do is pick the one we like the best, but we can never know.

I’ve always wanted to believe Jesus was the guy who came up with the ideas in the Sermon on the Mount. I’m not so sure anymore. I’m currently leaning towards the idea that Jesus was a radical who wanted to overthrow the system. It’s not hard to picture him talking like the hotheads on the internet with big ideas. And that the Sermon on the Mount came from a later storyteller.

There’s a wonderful book, The Five Gospels: The Search for the Authentic Words of Jesus. It’s based on the Jesus Seminar, where, over a decade, theologians and historians debated which passages in red in the New Testament were said by the historical Jesus. The Five Gospels is based on voting, and the results are color-coded. Even among experts, there is no complete agreement. We tend to advocate for what we want to believe. Confirmation bias is powerful.

Books like Ancient Christianities help us understand how commonly believed concepts evolved from specific people. (By the way, it’s all men.)

If you read enough history books about religion, you realize there is no divinity anywhere to be found. It’s all concepts created by men. Like the famous story by Carl Sagan, it’s turtles all the way down.

JWH

Paradise Lost – What if Our World is Heaven?

by James Wallace Harris, 6/15/25

If I ignore the depressing news on my screens, I can step out of my front door and view a beautiful world. Looking at the photo above, do you see heaven or hell? We seldom consider Earth a paradise, but we all experience moments of beauty and serenity, as well as moments of pain and suffering. We spend our lives avoiding the one and seeking the other.

For most of my life, I felt like I was climbing a hill towards my dreams, but now, in my seventies, it feels like I’m sliding down that hill. I wonder if I’ve been chasing fantasies while ignoring reality. There is a book of conversations with Philip K. Dick called What If Our World Is Their Heaven? I’ve often wondered if we were living in heaven and didn’t know it, or worse, what if we were living in heaven and were turning it into hell.

Over the last several years, theories have been proposed that our universe is an artificial reality. I’ve always objected to that idea, but it asks a fascinating philosophical question: If we’re living in a synthetic reality, did we choose to be in it? Why would we want to experience so much pain and suffering?

I’ve always believed our existence is a Darwinian reality where everything happens due to randomness. If I believed in God, I would have to ask: Why do you make us suffer?

Hinduism and the concept of reincarnation also suggest something interesting. That belief system claims we are souls coming to this reality to evolve, and suffering is a teaching tool.

Whether we are here by accident or choice, it still leaves the question: Why do we suffer? If our pains are due to the luck of the draw, how do we make the best of a bad situation? If we’re in some kind of cosmic classroom, what are we supposed to learn? And if we’re a participant in a monstrous computer game, how do we win?

Is it delusion to think our place in the universe is anything other than an accident?

Because an algorithm observed me read one story on coping with life in my seventies, they have sent me many more. I’ve seen list after list of the personality traits of those who survive well and those who don’t. I can’t help but wonder if there is a correlation between belief and how we survive.

Do people who believe life has no purpose succumb quicker than those who think we do? And even if we accept that we’re living a Darwinian existence, aren’t there two approaches to that, too? Isn’t existentialism a positive choice over naturalism or fatalism?

Even people of rock-solid faith die horrible deaths. Few people escape this world without suffering. If suffering is so integral to existence, what is its purpose?

JWH

The Psyche of Blind Faith

by James Wallace Harris, Saturday, January 9, 2021

This essay is not about Donald Trump or politics, but I’m going to use the January 6th riot at the Capitol as an example of blind faith. In the days following the riot several news reports have appeared where followers of Donald Trump have denied he was the instigator of the riot, and in some cases, that the rioters were not the real followers of Donald Trump.

The evidence for Trump instigating the riot is overwhelming, and growing, as law enforcement and the media assemble a timetable of events and clues. I can easily see January 6th becoming the subject of future congressional hearings like those covering the JFK assassination where we heard weeks and months of testimony. In the end, most people will believe that Trump was the inciter-in-chief in the same way the congressional investigations concluded that Lee Harvey Oswald was the lone gunman. But like lone gunman deniers, there will always be deniers to Trump’s guilt.

This kind of denial comes from a psychology of blind faith. I find that psychology fascinating. We see blind faith everywhere. What allows some people the ability to tune out aspects of reality to maintain their faith in a particular belief? One good example is the free-market capitalists whose faith keeps them from seeing pollution, climate change, wealth inequality or any other negatives to capitalism. They must deny all evidence to the contrary to maintain their faith in the purity of Milton Friedman’s teachings.

The ultimate example of blind faith came just after the crucifixion of Jesus. The followers of Jesus saw that he was dead. However, they couldn’t accept that death, so they invented a faith to prove he still lived. Their blind faith created a new view of reality that they see but others don’t.

The only way to maintain blind faith is through denial. I now see denialism everywhere, which implies blind faith is everywhere.

Donald Trump inspires blind faith in his followers. What causes that? How does it work? Why him? It’s obvious that no amount of evidence can penetrate such faith. It’s a survival mechanism. Believers obviously benefit from other positive mental states once they let go and accept a faith. Once a faith is accepted any threat to that faith is also a threat to the new sense of wellbeing.

This blind faith is why I’ve given up talking with my conservative friends about Trump. The wall between us is impenetrable. To talk with them feels just like being John Cleese trying to convince Michael Palin the parrot is dead.

The inspiration for this essay.

JWH

Are You Sure You Want to Reject Science?

by James Wallace Harris

Trigger Warning: Do Not Read While Flying

I assume we live in an objective reality understandable by the scientific method. There is a growing movement to reject science. Does that mean those people believe reality is explainable by something other than science? Or do science deniers assume reality is subjective and mutable by our thoughts, desires, and fears? What happens if science doesn’t explain an objective reality? What happens if we really do live in a reality where mind over matter rules?

I know science can produce inconvenient results, but do you really want to reject it? I can understand why the faithful rejects science, science invalidates their theories about life after death. I can also sympathize with business people who fear following scientific research means losing money. But still, do you really want to reject science? Hasn’t science created more wealth than faith?

What happens to our reality when everyone believes whatever they want?

First off, if you have doubts about science don’t get on an airplane. For hundreds of thousand of years Homo sapiens did not fly. Then we discovered science and took to the skies. If we were wrong about science, maybe flying really doesn’t work. If reality works by believing and we stop believing, what happens? If enough people stop believing in science will planes start falling from the skies?

Religion is based on faith. That means believing in believing is how things work. Do you really want to believe that? What if you’re lying in bed at night and imagine a monster is going to grab you and wad you into a bloody ball? Doesn’t rational thinking protect you from such dangers?

Whenever I’ve stood next to a jetliner I’ve marveled at its immense size and weight. It boggles my mind that science can explain how lift works, especially with something so massive. Yet, I put my faith in science even when it’s hard to believe. Science succeeds in so many millions of ways that I can’t believe it could be wrong even when I can’t understand.

What if the faithful are right, and it’s faith that makes things happen. If we lose faith in science, will that mean jets, televisions, computers, telephones, medicines, cars, and so on will stop working? Do you want to return to horses and plows? Do you want to bring back ghosts, demons, angels, pixies, devils, and all those other beings that science disproved? Do you want the world be be flat and just a few thousand years old?

What if mind over matter is true? What if technology works because we live in an age where Faith in Science works? Do you really want to stop believing in science and create a new age? I don’t believe it, but if you deny science, aren’t you believing that?

Back in the 1970s I got into a lot of New Age ideas. The foundation of those beliefs was mind over matter. Religions are based on the same principle. God created the world with the Word. If you take that to its logical conclusion, reality could be anything we imagined. That’s fine as long as you can maintain happy thoughts, but if your minds veers into darker ideas, it can get pretty damn scary. Think about the next time you’re 40,000 feet in the air. Don’t you actually prefer embracing cause and effect over the power of thoughts?

I decided way back then that I didn’t want to live in a reality ruled by mental power. I wanted reality to be objective rather than subjective. Of course, maybe I live in an objective reality because my mind subjectively built it that way, but I prefer not to even believe that. I want planes to fly because of the laws of nature, and not because of our shared beliefs.

Our species has a history of inventing explanations for reality. The only cognitive tool we’ve ever discovered that works in a consistent fashion is science. Magic, faith, religion, philosophy, gossip, conspiracy theories – all fail to produce consistent results – no matter how much we wish they could. Science has transformed our relationship with reality. Science isn’t easy to understand because reality is complex and thus hard to predict. Often the number of variables involve make it difficult for the statistical nature of science to be definite. But just look how we’ve improved weather prediction over the last several decades. Just consider how many diseases we’ve conquered. Just contemplate the marvels of technology. We can fly. Doesn’t the continual success of science validate it?

Just because science implies something you don’t want doesn’t mean disbelieving will alter the results. You don’t want to believe that – especially if you’re flying.

For those who believe in God, what if science is the way God works? In all religious texts, God or gods succeed because of magical abilities their believers can’t fathom. Faith is belief in the power of that magic. What if the belief in magic is wrong? What if reality isn’t ruled by magic, but science? People who reject science are people who believe in magical thinking.

The next time you’re flying in a jetliner, think about magical thinking. Does magic make it fly, or science.

But, like I said, decide before you get on the plane. Don’t think about it in flight – what if you decide wrong?

JWH