Rochefort 8

Rochefort 8 is a Trappist beer brewed in a Belgium monastery. It is also heaven in a bottle. It smells like a monastery in possession of wonderful fruits, fragrant flowers, flowing streams of sweet liquid, and fresh living soil. It tastes like it smells with tad more complexity. A bit of leather, a bit of alcohol, bubbles, apples from the farms of Eden, and grains from Valhalla. All combine to make a warm belly and flushed cheeks.

The Nature Of Time and Eternity

At the tender age of 18, I decided to attend a small liberal arts college in St Paul, MN, Hamline University. About to graduate high school, eager to move on to an institution of learning better able to meet my intellectual needs, I chose Hamline for practical reasons. It was one of the few schools to which I had applied. The school gave out scholarships based on academic merit and, I had worked hard applying for these scholarships. A small example of the foot in the door phenomenon, get students to work on a little scholarship essay and they're more likely to attend since they've already committed a bit of themselves with a certain amount of effort in writing the thing. They don't want to waste the time they've already spent by not taking the offer and going to the school. So, slightly manipulated, but appreciating the scholarship money, I decided on Hamline.

Now I've experienced many things about Hamline I don't like. The administrative structure, the wasteful avarice I occasionally witness my tuition money going toward, the small selection of available classes to take, all are examples of things I could do without. Most of all, I despise the hamline plan. It's a program meant to enforce breadth of study among students. All liberal arts colleges seem to have something similar, and maybe they're just as bad. I hope not. The Hamline plan centers around gaining little letters that are arbitrarily attached to classes. Students are pretty much forced into taking classes they have only a little interest in to earn these special little letters and often the letters are only remotely related to the material covered in these classes. Fortunately, this semester, I found a class to give me a few much needed letters that has turned out to be pretty interesting. Philosophy of science.

Today in philosophy of science, a theologian visited. The normal professor practices the Jewish faith and today was a religious holiday. So, I had my first substitute teacher in years. It was appropriate to have a theologian come in at this time, we were discussing the relationship between religion, actually mostly theology, and science. More specifically we discussed models of god that attempted to reconcile scientific understanding with a christian god while allowing for the existence of evil. This model rejects the classical Greek influenced christian doctrine that god is all powerful. Instead, God plays a role as a completely good influencer of the actors in the universe, and people are allowed self determinism. The future is undetermined. All that exists is the single moment we're in, which is connected to the past and to some unknown future. Not what most people are used to thinking. Someone had to ask, what about heaven and hell? I could only propose to fit into this system, one which I'm not too invested in, the idea that maybe time is just another dimension fixed into eternity with us requiring perceive this moving forward time in order to make sense of the universe. In this case, heaven consists of all the moments someone lets God influence him or her into doing exactly the right thing These would be moments of perfection fixed for all eternity, true bliss.

Still, I like Cartesian dualism with all its incoherence better, souls are way more fun than eternal moments. Still, the idea makes me want to put my mark on the moments I pass through, to make them eternal.