The Trinity is Antitransitive

I grew up going to St. James United Methodist Church in Sioux City, Iowa. Every time I return home and attend church there, I rethink many of the thoughts that I have had in that building over the years.

One of those thoughts is that I have always liked one of the stained glass windows next to the pew in which my family regularly sits.

In particular, I have always liked the visual representation of the relationships in the trinity.

However, I have never known why I liked it...until now!

The Trinity is an antitransitive relation.

Now, to explain what that means.

A relation is the formal mathematical notion most closely related to the word I used before, "relationship". In the case of the Trinity relation, each pair of (distinct) words (i.e. God, Father, Jesus, Holy Spirit) is ascribed either "is" or "is not" (so the Trinity relation is a binary relation). (For each pair of identical words, the window does not state the relationship but it is implied that each word is related to itself, thus ascribed an "is" and making it a symmetric relation.)

To understand an antitransitive relation, it helps to know what a transitive relation is. A (binary) relation is transitive if

for all words x, y, and z, if x is related to y and y is related to z, then x is related to z.

The most commonly known transitive relation is the equivalence relation. As everyone knows, if x is equal to y and y is equal to z, then x is equal to z.

An antitransitive relation has the exact opposite conclusion about every triple of words. A (binary) relation is antitransitive if

for all words x, y, and z, if x is related to y and y is related to z, then x is NOT related to z.

Although somewhat counterintuitive, I believe it is the mathematical beauty of the Trinity that drew me to this window all those years ago.

(Or maybe it is because it also looks like a planar embedding of K₄...nah.)

Church Volunteer

I was a volunteer in church today partly because I sat in the front row and partly because the pastor has spoken to me before and thought that I would do a good job.

I uploaded the section of the sermon in which I am volunteering to YouTube (see below). Pastor Tim did not tell me what I would be doing for him, so all of my actions are solely based on his verbal cues. If you listen closely, when he tells me that I am going to be Jesus, you can hear me respond with "That's a good role."

If you want to see the whole service, you can find it at the website of Blackhawk Church. The sermon is called "Forgiving Myself" and is in the series called "Forgiveness".

Anyway, here it is...

Dead Sea Scrolls

On Tuesday, Shannon and I went to the Milwaukee Public Museum to the Dead Sea Scrolls exhibit. Their version of the Dead Sea Scrolls Exhibit only lasts until June 6th.

At the beginning of the exhibit, there were many artifacts, including pots, coins, (chest) ossuaries, medical tools, makeup tools, oil lamps, and probably some more things that I am forgetting. My favorite were the coins (because there were probably the type of shekel mentioned in the Bible) and a particular ossuary. The display said that the ossuary probably belonged to Alexander Son of Simon of Cyrene, the man who carried the cross of Jesus. Upon reading Wikipedia about Simon of Cyrene, it says

A burial cave in Kidron Valley discovered in 1941, belonging to Cyrenian Jews and dating before AD 70, was found to have an ossuary inscribed twice in Greek "Alexander Son of Simon." It cannot, however, be certain that this refers to the same person.

There was also a model of Jerusalem accompanied by a few aerial photographs.

After a few displays about finding the scrolls, we got to see a facsimile of the of the Great Isaiah Scroll. Created circa 100BC, it predates the previous oldest copy of Isaish by 1000 years. Finally, the next room contained actual dead sea scrolls. They were pieces ranging in size from a softball to a fingernail and set between glass. After this room, there were a couple more hallways with other examples of old copies of the Bible.

The model of Jerusalem reminded me of a thought that I have had before. I think that people should make famous buildings, such as the temple at Jerusalem, into virtual worlds (not unlike World of Warcraft or Second Life) that can be explored via computer. What better way to learn what the temple looked like than to explore it?!

Love Madison 2010

In Madison, I attend Blackhawk Church. Not last weekend, but two weekends ago (the weekend of Sunday May 2nd), Blackhawk had their second annual church "service" called Love Madison. Instead of having a traditional church service (in a building, singing songs, praying, listening to a sermon), about 2,700 of us went out into the community and volunteered our time in many, many different ways. I am told that there were over 100 service projects.

My project involved removing invasive species (Buckthorn and Garlic Mustard) along a trail in Verona, a city 20 minutes southwest of Madison. We had about 25 people in our group. The job was supposed to last four hours, but we worked so quickly that we got done an hour early.

Here are some action shots:

Revelation Song

Yesterday in church, the featured song was Revelation Song, which I have heard before and really like. I just went to my last.fm account to add this song to my library. While there, I decided to watch someone's YouTube video (embedded below) that they made based on this song.

The combination of this song and this video brought me to tears. Praise be to God!