A Child Is Worth More Than A Cartoon Dog

My goddaughter Rebecca has brain cancer, and may pass on before she sees her seventh birthday.  So naturally, this fact sent me spluttering into rage:
There are 120,000 signatures to bring back Brian the Dog on Family Guy.
There are 1,500 signatures to increase funding for children’s cancer.
And, no; no.  I don’t want to hear it.  There are all sorts of understandable root causes as to why a cartoon dog gets more attention than dying kids, and I’m sure you can make excuses for humanity, but I’m not going to listen today.
I’m going to fight it.
Here’s the deal: For every donation you make to the Cure Search For Children’s Cancer Fund in Rebecca Meyer’s name before December 31st, 2013, I will match that donation.  (Up to $500.)   The thing about children’s cancer is that we think we’ve whipped it, but in many cases mortality rates for kids are worse than for adults.  And nobody likes staring into that abyss.  Much more pleasant to watch Family Guy, which at least gives you a few laughs along the way.
But kids need the damn help.  So if you donate, I will, and we’ll make the world a better place.  (And while you’re at it, take a few moments to sign the petition to increase funding for children’s cancer from its current small base of 4% of total funding.)

The 2013 Annual Greed List!

The time has come for my Annual Greed List – the large (and, yes, uncut) list of things I desire for Christmas in 2013. Why do I do this? If you’re really interested, here’s a brief history of the Greed List.
The briefer version, however, is that I think “What you want” is a reflection of “Who you are” at this moment – your music, your hobbies, your fandoms, who you are as a person.  I find it fascinating as a history, watching how what I’ve desired has mutated (the shifts away from physical objects is so bizarre, as I used to want tons of CDs and DVDs and now that’s mostly a computer file somewhere), and remembering what I thought I wanted so badly but turned out to be too much effort to turn into a hobby (last year’s fire poi), and the things I did want that became habit (last year’s straight razor).
And while I guess I could just toss all this on an Amazon Wishlist and send you over, why bother?  I want you to know who I am in this moment, and so I not only list what I want, but explain why I want it.
So here it is.  Here’s who I am this year, expressed in what I want, in descending order of most-lust to least-lust.
The Xbox One.
I’ve gone back and forth on this one, as I want to like the XBox One, but have listed the reasons I probably won’t buy it right away.  And it’s early in the days of the Console Wars, and maybe the XBox One will turn out to be the Nintendo Wii-U – an embarrassing, underpowered platform.  And that’s why I won’t drop $600 on the sucker.
But if someone wanted to get it for me as a gift….
I don’t know who would, honestly.  The only person who might conceivably splurge that much is Gini, and she’s made it clear she won’t.  (I can’t blame her.)  But if someone out there has a spare $600 and wanted to drop it on a random blogger, well, I’d definitely play it.  Probably.  I promise I’d be extremely excited about it.  At least on Christmas Day.
Okay, maybe not your best idea.
The Disaster Artist: My Life Inside The Room, the Greatest Bad Movie Ever Made, by Greg Sestero
At our house, we have a tradition: we lure people into watching The Room, the worst movie ever made.  Most of the so-called “bad movies” are a little sad, and a little monotone – I don’t like MST3k because they mock guys who were doing their best with no budget, on one-joke films.  After about ten minutes of these bad movies, we get that they can’t act and there’s no SFX budget and oh ha ha I am bored.
The Room, however, is a chameleon of suck, mutating into an entirely different terrible movie every ten minutes.  When you think you can’t take enough terrible soft-core porn, it becomes an incomprehensible drug family drama, and then a crime thriller.  Sorta.  It’s amazing.  And they had $6 million to make this fucking thing, and it looks awful.  I have watched The Room at least ten times, and its charm has not faded.
So an inside story by one of its lead actors?  In a book that is well-reviewed?  Be still, my beating heart.
The Black Guardian Trilogy, on DVD
This is where I fell in love with Doctor Who.
I hadn’t really seen Doctor Who before, but my friend Mark Goldstein had them all on tape.  And I watched this show where a man in a weird suit woke up in the cellar of a ship, a big 17th-century schooner, then walked out on deck to discover that the ships were sailing through space.
That is an iconic image for me.  It is all of sci-fi for me, this wonderful blending of tropes.  And I hadn’t really known you could do that, until Doctor Who showed me how.
And it is not a good series, Lord knows.  Even in terms of mid-1980s Doctor Who canon, Peter Davison fighting the Black Guardian isn’t his high-water moment.  But this is out on DVD now, and I want to recapture that magic, even if as with most old-school Doctor Who it is wrapped in tons of padded storylines and recycled “Oh, the Doctor has been captured again” moments so they can get the most usage out of the few sets they managed to build.
I do not believe in guilty pleasures, only indefensible ones.  My heart longs for this.  I know it’s not good, but it is fundamental to me, and I must have it.
Tangled, on Blu-Ray.
One of my favorite movies of all-time, right up there with The Princess Bride.  And we have the boring old regular DVD, which has no extras.
I wish to see the extras for one of the best movies of the last decade.  (Frozen may be better, but it’s not our on DVD yet.  I’ll just sing along with all the songs until Gini bashes me in the head with a frying pan.)
Elliptical Bike.
I don’t know a better way to put this, but it’s the kind of bike that has two handles so that you can work your arms out while you work your legs.  I use one of these at the cardiac rehab center, and it is so much better than a stationary bike.  And it’s so much better than a real bike, where you have to go outside and get sweaty and have people watch your ugly flabbiness carted around town, when I could just stay in my basement and watch Batman: the Animated series that I got last year for Christmas.  (Thanks, Dad!)
This doesn’t have to be new.  One suspects we could pick one up on Craigslist for $75.  I’d be happy with that.
Better Angels, by Greg Stolze
One of the unexpected benefits of getting into podcasts – which I did because we got a dog, and to walk the dog for an hour a day involves needing some auditory distraction – is getting back into RPGs.  And so I discovered this gem from one of the creators of Unknown Armies, which may be my all-time favorite RPG (and a larger influence on my current novel than I’d like to admit).
Better Angels asks the question, “Why are supervillains so evil and so smart yet so incompetent?”  And the answer is that there is a secret organization that imprisons demons inside the bodies of the noblest men.  These noble men (and woman!) agree to harbor the demon so it will do the least amount of damage – but the demon needs to be appeased.  And so these poor sacrificial lambs enact huge plans they know are doomed to fail, big splashy things to make a demon happy yet easily toppled by the right people.
They are the supervillains.  They are the heroes.  And you play them.
Three Parts Dead, by Max Gladstone
Again, listening to a lot of podcasts – which are mostly roleplaying and book-related ‘casts for me – puts me in touch with a lot of really good books I want to read.  Max Gladstone was nominated for the Campbell this year for his debut novel, which mixes law school with magic.  That’s an interesting combo I hadn’t seen, and so I want to read it in the tub.  I need physical copies of all my books, man.  The tub is where my reading gets done, and I can’t risk my iPhone in there.
…Okay, I can.  And do.  But I like being able to put my electronic instruments of text-distraction aside for a while to just turn pages.  There’s a quiet beauty in that that I still like to experience.  It’s a joy that will doubtlessly be old-fashioned in another twenty years – is now, I guess – but I’m not willing to give it up, and so I want the dead tree editions.
Hamlet’s Hit Points, by Robin D. Laws
Robin Laws is one of the better RPG designers out there, and he wrote a book on plot structure – from an RPG point of view.
Now, I’m actually terrible at plotting.  Or, actually, I’m good at it, but I can’t outline to save my life, and I don’t think like other plotters do; I’m very organic.  I stumble across all my plots, and when I hear people saying things like “A scene is where two people walk in with conflicting motivations, and one is successful in achieving that,” I think of my own stories where that often happens, but it’s inevitably by accident.  I don’t think in terms of setting people up like some sort of mechanical clockspring.  I just put them in a room and they do things, and mostly those things result in a story.
And so I’m fascinated by the people who do get the internal structures of plotting, as Robin does.  I’d like to see his take on it, because I don’t know that it helps me write but Holy God is it neat to see.
Yurbuds Ear Plugs
My earplugs fall out all the time.  These come recommended, and I can wear them under my sweet hat.
Shadowrun 5th Edition Rulebook
Shadowrun is one of the classic RPGs, a mixture of fantasy and cyberpunk.  It’s known for being intensely flavorful, and almost utterly unplayable thanks to FASA’s traditional love of really complicated rules for little upside, and also for having characters interact in planes where the rest of the party is utterly useless.  (You’re a hacker, huh?  Well, you get to go play in cyberspace, where none of the other PCs can venture!  Oh, and the mage has kipped off to the astral plane, similarly masturbating!)
Still, I have a lot of fondness for Shadowrun, and they brought it back thanks to a successful Kickstarter, and I would love to see what they’ve done with it.  Maybe the rules don’t suck quite as much!  Maybe the guy who drives the car can do something other than cowering in every firefight until it’s time to peel out!  And even if I never play it, it’s still fun to read!
Beyond The Rift by Peter Watts
Peter Watts wrote the most mind-blowing novel I have read as an adult: That would be Blindsight, which is actually a cleverly-concealed argument that mankind is…
…oh, I’ll let you read it.  But really.  It changes your view of life.  Itself!
That’s because Peter Watts is a biologist, and so his aliens are really alien.  And unsettlingly plausible.  And his story “The Things” is also awesome, and so this short story collection of his is something I covet.
But don’t read Blindsight unless you want to know something about your biology you may not want to know.  It’s that good.
The Rithmatist by Brandon Sanderson
Brandon, I know mainly for being very nice to me at a convention when he didn’t have to.  He’s a big author, huge, and yet was very nice to this short story writer and offered to play Magic with me.  So I like him.  And he’s great on panels, as he would be because his podcast Writing Excuses (well, his podcast with several other smart writers I admire) is awesome.
He’s also famed for really consistent magical systems, so much so that his fans have actually hypothesized (and correctly!) what had to happen in future books because according to the physics of his spells, X would have to happen… and it did.  So when I hear he has a YA book out with a new magic system, I want to try that.
The Lives of Tao by Wesley Chu
Speaking of Writing Excuses, I heard Wesley talk on there, and his background as a martial artist and stuntman sounded fascinating.  The only other guy I know who is a martial artist who writes is Joe Lansdale, and Joe is one of my pantheon of Godly authors.  So that’s intriguing.  Then you throw in the idea that Wesley wanted to write a story about a pudgy, middle-aged nobody who, via alien possession, becomes a badass, and that character arc snapped me right into “interesting.”
Muppets Animal Underwear
Do I really need to give an explanation of my deep need for this?
Cloud Atlas on Blu-Ray DVD
Cloud Atlas was a very underrated movie about reincarnation – while it’s beautiful and ambitious, the horrible makeup pretty much killed it.  Yes, you can turn a South Korean woman into a ginger, but the results are kind of eye-searing.  And I know, they were trying to show how people can change races and sexes through their various lives, but by God that horrible yellowface makeup on Jim Sturgess did not help.
Still, I have a long habit of loving movies that are more about the idea than the execution, and this is no exception.  Cloud Atlas has been on HBO several times, and I’ve enjoyed it more on each watch; I’d love the bonus features, and I’d love to watch it whenever I see fit.
Dishonored, for the Xbox 360
I’ve heard good things about this game, and I need a shoot-’em-up to occupy my time.  (Note: Good games are thin on the ground this year.  This may be the first time in recorded history where a videogame didn’t make my top four.)
Microphone Pop FilterI’m getting into podcasting, and I’m told this is nice to stop all my plosive “P”s from bursting people’s eardrums.  Though the first podcast I recorded sounded pretty good to me.  Thankfully, this is cheap.
Hereville: How Mirka Met A Meteorite, by Barry Deutsch
The first book in this series promised: “Yet Another Troll-Fighting 11-Year-Old Orthodox Jewish Girl.”  And lo, they did fight.  This quirky little graphic novel was charmingly unpredictable, and I’d like to see if the second in the series is as good as the first.

Brave (Feminism 101) vs. Frozen (Feminism 102)

Watching Brave’s fumbling attempt to put a girl front-and-center becomes weird when you see the real feminism in Frozen.
Now, the thing about feminism in kids movies (and in general!) is that it’s all about the encoded messages.  And a movie can have a strong woman and still have some pretty terrible role models buried in there.  And Brave, well… it means well, but in the end the messages it sends aren’t really terribly interesting.
Because the message of Brave is kinda feminist, but first-layer thinking of feminism.  Merida wants to do boy things!  This is why she’s interesting, becoming a boy!  Otherwise, she’d be like all of those other useless icky girl princesses.  And her mom wants to keep Merida down, and what a mean mom she is for refusing to let Merida have her dreams!
And in the end, Merida sees that Mom has her reasons for wanting Merida to be a princess… but that sense that women who don’t act boyish are somehow less interesting permeates the picture.  Is Mom as compelling a character when she’s not a bear?  Not really.  Is it implied that maybe some women would be happy being a princess and doing girly things?  Not really, no.  Is Mom pretty much wrong And so to my mind, Brave is largely a lesson of “Follow your dreams, as long as they’re active violent boy dreams.”  Maybe with a little dash of “Pretty isn’t strong.”
That doesn’t make Brave a terrible movie, mind you.  I found it a C-lister Pixar hit, in the same realm as A Bug’s Life – perfectly watchable, but not something I go back to the way I do Finding Nemo or Monsters Incorporated.   Yet many love it, and that’s fine; having mundane or even harmful messages is not at odds with you loving a movie.  (Or else my adoration of Gone with the Wind and Dumbo are deep trouble.)
Whereas Frozen is, like, next level.
Frozen features two sisters, each radically different, with two beautifully-devised motivations.  And I’m not going to give too much away, as part of the joy of Frozen is following the plot where it goes – but unlike Brave, where Mom has a point but really is actually wrong on pretty much every major point come the movie’s end, both sisters have compelling arguments. Neither understands the other’s experiences in life. That misunderstanding drives the narrative.
And they’re so strong that really, either could lead a movie on their own; it’s hard to imagine an exciting story about the life of Merida’s Mom in the absence of Merida, a sort of bland film about motherly drudgery.  The subtle message of Brave is that boyish old Merida is the interesting one, a quiet slam against motherly love – it’s worth having around, sure, but is it anything you want to do with your life?  The argument is severely weighted against one side of the frame.
Whereas Frozen is so perfectly balanced.  Both sisters are girly in their ways, living beautiful dreams and seeking romance – and yet they remain active and flawed protagonists.  They’re heroes.  And they don’t have to squirm out of their dresses or muss their hair to be valid – though mussed hair does result when they’re out in action, of course.  It’s like watching an argument between two equals.
Plus, the songs are incredible, and the plot is wonderfully curveballed, and the voicework is great.  To reiterate: Brave’s message isn’t a bad one, and it’s not a bad movie.  But on the whole, I give the nod to Frozen.  But if, as others have noted, a children’s movie is basically a way of injecting morals and cultural mores directly into kids’ heads, I think I’d by far rather take the message of Frozen.  It’s a message of sisterhood. And really, really beautiful.
(Also see this beautiful link: A Feminist Defense Of Princess Culture.)

Black Friday Experience Is So In Tents

I went out for Black Friday, once, because we hoped to get a laptop for our daughter. Gini and I got up at 3 a.m. – “dark o’clock,” as we called it – groaning and complaining all the while.  We drove to Best Buy.  We discovered a line of people stretching around the block, like an impromptu city, families who’d clearly settled in for the long haul: tiny houses of tents with children sleeping inside, playing music on boom boxes, sitting in front of their reading books.  They’d brought equipment for the journey.  Some had coffee makers, space heaters, little generators.
We were clearly outmatched.  We went home.
A similar thing happened when Chik Fil-A opened up across the street from us: FIRST 100 CUSTOMERS GET FREE FOOD FOR A YEAR! And it was a bawdy thing, with a DJ playing Southern-fried rock, the same crowd of campers, looking quite enthused about the whole thing.  And when Piada opened up down the street with the same deal, again, that tiny town of patient waiters.
To me, Black Friday is an abomination.  It destroys the retail workers’ day off, encourages the worst kind of consumer behavior, and it’s not even a real deal.  (You frequently get better deals before or after; they jigger the numbers to make it look better.)
And before I started looking, I had always assumed that Black Friday shoppers were desperate poor people – the kind of folks who, if they couldn’t get that laptop for $399, they wouldn’t get it at all.  Why else would you be motivated to spent the night in the cold, waiting endlessly?
But what I suspect is that Black Friday and Opening Night have become codified experiences.  There’s people for whom Black Friday has become a tradition, a weird hunting expedition, where the entire family packs up and gets prepared and has all the fun of defeating this absurd challenge that capitalism has laid out for them.  For these guys, it’s a thrill to get the tent up and running, to stake out the good space in front of the store, to spit in the eye of what’s obviously intended to be an uncomfortably ugly experience and make it a place where there’s hot cocoa and laughing and dancing.
They bond.  And I’m absolutely certain that there are people who only exist as Black Friday Friends – they’ve staked out their turf at Best Buy every year, have a jolly rivalry with last year’s neighbors as this year they’re two spots closer to the door, exchange duties on McDonald’s runs as they go get the food.  The point isn’t whether it’s the best deal or not, the point is that they’ve beaten the system.
And I’m not sure how to think about that.  Viewed in that light, it actually seems kinda fun.  But the sort of people who have all of the equipment for the good tent and so forth are probably not the people who really need the deal, and so Black Friday becomes weirdly more abhorrent to me – you’re forcing all of these poor retail workers to leave their Thanksgiving dinner earlier and earlier so you can have the thrill of beating them.
Black Friday, one suspects, is actually a sports challenge wrapped in consumerism.  An endurance contest with a prize built in.  And that’ll just make it that much harder to eradicate as a tradition.

New Story! "The Sturdy Bookshelves of Pawel Oliszewski," At Intergalactic Medicine Show!

My tale of strange woodworking magic, “The Sturdy Bookshelves of Pawel Oliszewski,” is now available for your reading pleasure (and auditory pleasure, as they added in an audio production of it).  This is one of my favorite stories I wrote this year, as it’s where I started to find what I’m thinking of as my new author-voice – the one that melds a little more of my snarky blogger you all know with the fiction bones it needs to have in order to survive. Your teaser text is here:

When people asked me about Pawel Oliszewski’s bookcases – which they inevitably did, especially for the brief period I was paid to answer their questions – I told them my story in strict chronological order. I explained how I moved next door to Pawel, a quiet Polish accountant, when my mother died. I told them how, over the course of seventeen years, my neighbor gifted me with seven fine specimens in his legendary line of improbable bookshelves.
No, I wasn’t willing to sell them. Yes, he offered me more bookcases – roughly four a year, actually. Yes, I turned him down – the man would have filled my house with bookcases, if only I’d let him. Yes, I still have them all – the specimens I currently possess are specimen #89 (Vickers hardness test: 970 MPa), specimen #113 (Vickers: 1325 MPa), specimen #234 (Vickers: 2250 MPa), and the much sought-after late-era specimens #269, #287, #292, and #304 (effectively untestable).
Yes, it is an irony that each of the bookcases are worth more than my house now. Oh, no, I’ve never heard that one before.
But above all, I tried to tell the origin of the bookcases honestly – the tedious hobby of an asocial immigrant who specialized in awkward pauses. This was an error. People wanted Pawel’s garage workshop to be a magical wonderland – wanted Pawel himself to be a sage, armored in wise silence.
The official biography – which I did not write, despite being both a professional obituary writer and a good friend to the Oliszewski family – jostled the facts around, made it seem as though Agnes knew there was something special about Pawel’s craftsmanship all along.
But no. His bookcases were boring, as was Pawel, as was I. Ask yourself: If anyone had seen anything of interest in that quiet accountant, wouldn’t the world have discovered his bookcases years ago? Wouldn’t they have discovered Myra Turnbull’s purses and Jeb Guhr’s model planes?
No, the truth lay there all along, resting beneath cobwebs; it was just tedious. Easily overlooked. Like me.
Still. I’m going to tell you the way I’ve always told it. Strict chronological order. Just to channel a bit of the old man’s magic.
Are you interested now?

If you’d care to read the rest, it is over here.  I hope you do.

"Samson Was Betrayed By A Woman"

I was reading a roleplaying supplement describing a fictional history when I read this:

“Like Samson, [this character] was betrayed by a woman…”

Now, the “betrayed” part isn’t what I have an issue.  Lots of people betray others.
The problem is that it’s “a woman” who betrayed this guy.  Because if we flipped that script, it wouldn’t be “betrayed by a man,” as though all men were cut from the same cloth; no, it’d be “betrayed by his trusted Lieutenant,” or “betrayed by his best friend,” or “betrayed by someone who was described in terms of something other than his gender.”
This is another example of Smurfette Syndrome, where the “woman” is effectively a character class: you have the fighter! The thief! The wizard! And the woman! And that unconscious smearing (“betrayed by a woman”) implies that all women are alike, they all do this, and we need no further demarcation aside from “woman” to describe someone.
Which is a problem in both directions.  In this case, all women are subtly implied to be betrayers.  Because the only thing we know about this character is that she is a woman, not “a Lieutenant” or “his wife” or “his physician.”  If the betrayal is from “his lieutenant,” we can imagine all sorts of lieutenant-specific reasons to betray: power, “frag the lieutenant”-style incompetency on the part of the hero, shifting alliances.  If the betrayal is from “his wife,” then we wonder what issue was so great that it sundered a marriage.  But nope; it’s a woman, and what are women in that case but generic betrayers?
On the other hand, if it’s a positive syndrome – “was helped by a woman” – then we imply that all women are nice just by dint of being women, and so Madonna/Whore syndrome is raised.
Like I said, it’s a subtle thing – so subtle that a lot of people would miss it.  But men get to have positions and motivations.  Women are women.  And it’s rare to see men not given a profession or a relationship, because we know men have tons of different reasons to do things.
Women?  They’re just women, man.

How I Thank God.

The MRI is in; Rebecca’s brain tumor has not, as yet, grown back.  Which means she will not die yet.  Had that MRI gone poorly, the best we could have done was put Rebecca in hospice and wait for the end.
I have never been so happy to hear about a girl getting chemotherapy in my entire life.
And so I thanked God that Rebecca was okay.  Which was a little awkward, because depending on who you talk to, God was the person who gave Rebecca the tumor in the first place.
The thing about the Rebecca’s saga is that there is a significant amount of providence in her story.  If they had not been at the ER when Rebecca had had her first seizure, Rebecca might not have survived the seizure.  (They had to break open the crash cart to save her.)  If the  Meyers hadn’t been on vacation in Jersey, they wouldn’t have been so close to CHOP, the best children’s hospital in America, where extremely talented surgeons resected the entirety of the tumor.  And as far as parents go, the Meyers are a superteam for a child with cancer – Kat is a doctor, and Eric’s dealt (sadly) with familial cancer before, so they both know what to expect and how to deal with it in a way that provides the best care possible for Rebecca.
Yet I recognize the intense survivor’s bias in all that.  There are children in similar circumstances who weren’t near an ER.  There are kids who got worse surgeons.  There are kids who got parents with less experience.  Am I then implying that God wanted these kids to die?
(Which is foolish, as it’s not as though Rebecca has lived yet.  She has merely passed the first of what are hopefully many milestones.  Her life is still very much in danger, and as usual XKCD described the experience best.)
Yet I thank God nonetheless.
The thing about God is that if He exists, He’s working off of a logic that we’d find hard to understand.  We get bent out of shape about death, which is understandable, since to us death is the end of everything. But if we truly accept all the ideology of God, death is actually a temporary thing, and then we transition to another area.  Death is traumatic to us, sure, but if you believe all the way then you have to understand that to God, death isn’t cruel but a way of transitioning someone from one state to the other.  We see dying as the end of all things, but to God it would merely be a beginning.
And I can’t claim to understand all the ramifications of that logic, though I’ve tried.  There’s a ton of pain and suffering on Earth, but if the stories are to be believed, all of that goes away.  It affects us now, gouges our spirits, but after a million years of living in paradise we’d probably struggle to remember what all the fuss is about.
Infinity is a long, long time, my friends.
None of this is presented in an attempt to convince you.  I’m just saying that faith is a lot more complex than asking why people suffer now.  There are certain fundamental tenets of life where, if we’re wrong about them, then everything we know changes.  For me, in a very real way, my faith is a way of engaging with the universe and saying that I don’t know how things work… and that faith taps into much the same humble mystery I get from learning about scientific breakthroughs.
The world is a complex and wonderful and terrifying place, and I can never know it all.  To me, science and faith meld, clasping hands and spinning in circles, reminding me to question everything.  And so I thank God.
But I also question Him.  Jay Lake, an atheist who is dying of cancer, posted a treatise on faith, where he said, “I have an immense respect for faith and its power. I have a profound disrespect for confusion between the truths of faith and the truths of testable, empirical reality.” And in that, the atheist and the Christian agree completely.  I think that science is our best way to understand the universe and to combat our silly monkey brain biases… but I also recognize that science is an imperfect tool, not the best thing but rather the best thing we have available.
And so I keep my scientific brain open at all times even during my faith, reminding me that I do not know whether God exists, and if S/He exists I certainly do not pretend to understand all the concerns of a compassionate, omnipresent being. My dog thinks I am terribly cruel for putting her on a leash, but my dog does not understand how close she’s come to being hit by a car many times.  To delirious people in hospitals the nurses are cruel demons, tying them to a bed and poking them with needles.  It’s very easy to appear cruel if someone does not understand the methodology of your kindness, and if there is a God it may well be that some portion of our torment may be a kindness we do not understand.  Or that God is not as omnipotent as we’d like.
Or that God does not exist.  I can keep that option open, too.  It is a poor faith that has to deny other possibilities in order to exist.