Why Didn’t I Ever Become Christian?

My wife and I made a trade last month: I would listen to a book of her choosing and in exchange she would listen to one of mine. I decided to make her listen to God Speaks Again in exchange for listening to Buy What You Love Without Going Broke, and this is just a fabulous comparison of where our heads are at generally. However, she enjoyed God Speaks Again enough that she suggested I listen to it too, so I have been, and then in our conversations about it, she said “it’s just funny to me that you like leapfrogged right over Christianity.”

Why didn’t I ever become a Christian?

The short answer is that it was easier for me to become Jewish and then to become Bahá’i, and then as a Bahá’i, to accept Mohammad and then Jesus as Manifestations of God, than it was for me to go in historical order. And I can accept Jesus as a Manifestation on the basis of His words, through the Bahá’i lens, but I don’t think I could in the same way as a Catholic or a Baptist. The rest of this is the long version.

There are limits to what I can explain rationally. For example, I can rationally explain why I became Bahá’i in terms of what was going on my life, but my experience of being Bahá’i is not a rational one so when I do make such explanations they feel very flat and like they are missing the point. I like bird watching, but I can’t give a rational reason why I enjoy it; I could try, and it might “make sense” but it would totally fail to convey the point of it.

There were two categories of causes for my becoming Jewish. The first was a series of coincidences which seemed to me to be God’s hand in my life. The second was a set of beliefs and rational arguments. The first is basically personal experiences that will have no meaning for other people. The second, because it is somewhat rational, can be conveyed and appears susceptible to counterargument, though I wouldn’t accept it.

I have always believed in the oneness of God and the existence of some kind of afterlife. I always felt like the unity of God contradicted the idea of Jesus being God or the Son of God or part of some kind of trinity of God. I was already looking elsewhere, and I had dozens of smaller objections but that was the main one.

I feel like I should make a few things clear. For one, I was literally shopping for a religion when I was young—I really liked the Sikh religion, but decided it wasn’t workable because there was no nearby gurdwara (except for the one in Española that was at best a sect and probably actually a cult). It was important to me when I became Jewish that I could still entertain other beliefs, like Taoism or whatever. I knew of several Jewish Buddhists. Later I became aware of Tenrikyo and found a great deal to admire in Ofudesaki. It was always important to me that Judaism did not portray itself as having the only path to God. I said at the time that I felt like it was a good “broth” that I could mix other ingredients into to make a soup.

I wasn’t shopping for a religion when I became a Bahá’i, I just happened upon it during a time when I was growing more and more disaffected by my faith and my relationship with God. The character of my discovery of the Bahá’i Faith was a confrontation with one whole entity, rather than a winnowing down of a large set of possibilities. I would not have been open at that time to the possibility of becoming, say, Catholic, because my prejudices against it were still in place. And moreover, it was the Bahá’i ideas themselves that convinced me something interesting was going on there and it was worth a deeper look.

If you’re wondering about those ideas, the basic one is probably unity. It is not insignificant to me that the other Abrahamic faiths have adherents passionately trying to kill each other, in obvious contrast to their teachings. A unique fact about the Baha’i Faith is that it is the only one that has a distinct vision of kind of future world we should be building, and how to do it without violence or compelling anyone to do anything they do not want to do. It doesn’t rely on everyone becoming Bahá’i, or upon some kind of future supernatural or eschatological event. In my opinion, most other faiths of today are stuck between a fantasy foundational era and a fantastical dream for the future. They are either trying to recreate some bygone culture in which all the obviously outdated rules can be implemented (and ignoring the groaning of all the nearby nonbelievers), or they are twisting themselves into knots trying to find a way to repurpose their ancient books to suit the modern day, struggling to figure out which parts are baby and which parts are bathwater. Both sides are engaged in a kind of active waiting, hoping for a messiah to literally descend from the clouds and put all the pieces back together into something coherent.

…

I tried to return to daily Jewish prayer after learning about the Baha’i Faith. It’s difficult to ascertain exactly what daily Jewish prayer should be like, which is interesting, but in any event there is a moment in the Amidah where you pray for the temple and its service to be restored. I realized I could not actually pray for this, because it would mean replacing prayer with sacrificing animals. I’m no longer clear on why I was alright with praying for this before, either, but probably it was because I wasn’t doing daily prayer.

I don’t know if it was right before or right after this that I tried saying the Bahá’i daily prayers. I think I tried before and then stopped, because it was causing too much upheaval at home, and then I resumed. The hard part was different there and I realized it had something to do another area where Judaism had enabled me to persist in a certain bias, and that was my discomfort with the idea that God speaks to humanity through certain people.

Noah, Abraham, Jacob and Moses are all extremely ancient, so there isn’t anything like concrete archaeological evidence for them. This makes them practically mythic characters, and I could suspend my disbelief because the dust of age covered it all up. Nobody really knew what happened, nobody had anything like proof. I was comfortable with that, because it enabled the Rabbinic process of evolving the religion. But it also meant accepting that nobody has had anything like direct contact with God in 3000 years or more. Or that everybody has had direct contact with God, nevermind the contradictions.

In my notes from this moment in my investigation of the Bahá’i Faith, I can see my own struggle with the idea that Bahá’u’lláh is a Manifestation of God. Looking back on it now, it’s clear to me that this was a fight with my own ego, on three fronts: 1) if He were a Manifestation, it wouldn’t leave any room for me to disagree or find rationalizations for things that I didn’t agree with, and 2) it would mean that I would have to reconcile myself to the validity of Jesus, and thus, 3) my conception of the validity of Judaism would be undermined.

Point one took some time. There were a few things I disagreed with. But I came to understand them. I think this is a common experience for adults who become Bahá’i.

Point 2 is likely a problem for other American Jews. You have sunk a lot of time, effort, and identity into resisting the general cultural pull. You have to undo that, but you are undoing it for the sake of growing closer to God and your fellow man. It is probably the same, coming into the Faith as a non-Jew in Israel, or coming to terms with Mohammad as a non-Muslim in any predominantly Muslim country. Everyone who becomes Bahá’i has to set aside their prejudices and biases with respect to race, religion, gender, nationality, etc; this one was just harder for me than I expected.

Regarding point 3, it actually wasn’t that big of an issue. Although Shoghi Effendi later rescinded this instruction, ’Abdu’l-Bahá had told the Bahá’is not to abandon their former religious communities. Since the Faith confirms all the other Faiths, I did not feel like I was resigning being Jewish. In fact I still feel Jewish, although it’s a bit awkward for me because I converted to Judaism for the sake of the religion, and now I am Bahá’i. I do not feel like I am no longer Jewish, I just feel like it is no longer a central pillar of my identity, and certainly no longer a quality upon which I could base decisions about who to associate with or who I would find it easier to relate to or whatever.

…

To return to the original question, why didn’t I ever become Christian? The answer is that I did become a Christian, when I became Bahá’i. A profoundly ignorant Christian though; I have only read the gospel of Matthew. I don’t know as much as I should, but Bahá’u’lláh confirms Christianity, so it is true, at least in its core, and He would not want anyone to spend much time disputing with believers about which parts are which.

I no longer feel excluded from any faith. The whole idea of choosing a Faith seems deeply strange to me now. I think is partly because Bahá’u’lláh completes them all. Perhaps the deeper reason is that making distinctions between religions is fundamentally about excluding people: grouping people together to create tribes and thus infighting between tribes, and that now seems so obviously contrary to what God desires for us.

September 12, 2025

The Purpose of Design Patterns

This is kind of a response to “If I hear”design pattern” one more time, I’ll go mad”, but I confess I did not read the original deeply.

The purpose of Design Patterns (as I understand the book and the concept) is not to provide you with a bunch of ready-made and formulaic solutions to unthinkingly apply. It is to show you examples of how to approach problem-solving in an object-oriented manner, in the hopes that you will internalize the process of discovering abstractions. In almost every case, a pattern is not a certain object or interface. It is a style of interaction between two or more objects that the pattern embodies.

Let’s take the command pattern. If your commands are also mementos, you can use it to implement an event-sourced database, or write-ahead log. If your commands have an undo method, you can implement an undo/redo stack. Commands are reified; perhaps they can be passed around the network or stored, perhaps they can be added to queues to be executed in batch or in threads. The question is, what else do you need the command to do, besides be executable? If there isn’t anything, then a command really is no better than a function, and obviously you get no benefit from creating the abstraction.

Similarly, a singleton can be an improvement over global state because at least access to that state is mediated by the methods of the singleton itself. If I had some element in my system that was not threadsafe, but the rest of the program was organized using threads, I might make it a singleton just to ensure that locking and unlocking happen correctly. I don’t usually find I have to use singletons, but again, the pattern exists not to be blindly copied, but to help you think about how to approach a problem in an object-oriented fashion. And also, it is the interaction between other systems and the singleton that might provide the real value; for instance, being able to mock the singleton in testing is probably easier than mocking a tremendous amount of global state.

About abstract factories, I would say, much like monads and monoids and elements from category theory, it’s much easier to understand in terms of a few worked examples. Just because something is hard to understand in its abstract form doesn’t mean that it is hard to understand. But also, maybe more to the deeper problem, sometimes things that are hard to understand are still good and worth understanding.

September 8, 2025

On Partisan Politics and Gerrymandering

As a Baha’i, I had to rescind my party affiliation because it is an aspect of partisan politics, which is forbidden. That doesn’t mean I can’t or don’t vote; on the other hand, election and democracy is as important to the Faith as avoiding partisan politics. These seem like irreconcilable ideas but it fundamentally means something quite simple. You need to vote for whoever you think is going to do the best job at governance. Party affiliation is fundamentally a way of creating tribes, and if we want unity, we must stop creating or investing in tribal affiliations.

For some reason gerrymandering is on my mind. We can probably all agree that gerrymandering is fundamentally wrong. It occurred to me recently that the only reason gerrymandering is possible is because of party registration. Your vote is secret. You can create a district and see what votes happen there; perhaps even polling stations can be separated out (I don’t really know) but the factual basis that enables gerrymandering is party registration. So maybe don’t do that and you’ll see less (or at least less effective) gerrymandering.

The counterargument is that you want to vote in the primary. The last election shows that such votes are an absolute farce, since neither of the major parties actually asked the voters in a meaningful way who they wanted on the ballot.

In some states, anyone can vote in a primary. This is a good idea because it dilutes the problem of playing to your extremes during the primary and the middle during the general election. If you have to play to the middle during the primaries too, we’ll all have more moderate candidates to choose between in the general election.

In a situation where enough people refuse party registration, parties will voluntarily choose to allow anyone to vote in the primaries, simply because otherwise the party members will choose people completely unpalatable to the general population. Right now, about two thirds of the country is registered with one of the parties. If the situation were reversed, where one third were registered with one or the other, the independent voice would be more important than the party die-hards.

This seems to me a good strategy for de-escalating the partisan nature of American politics.

September 3, 2025

Causality

I recently read most of this famous article, Demystifying Dependence. This is a pretty transformative paper, in my opinion, as a Nix user who is interested in what “dependence” means, and as a software engineer. I also greatly appreciated the didactic method of providing nine stories and then investigating what we can learn about dependencies from them in the new framework.

The surprise in the paper is that dependence can be analyzed in terms of causality. The authors show how using a new framework called “Halpern causation,” a definition of causation from a subdiscipline called “actual causality.” The treatment is really interesting. One of the big “a-ha” moments is realizing that you cannot discuss causality without talking about counterfactuals. To paraphrase the math:

1. Create a model of the world in terms of input variables (“exogeneous”) and derived variables (“endogeneous”)
2. Figure out the variable configuration for the event that happened
3. Find a variable whose setting, if it were inverted, would lead to the opposite outcome

That variable is the “but-for” cause. It turns out not to be a perfect model of causality. They give an example: suppose we are worried about watering some grass, but we don’t want to water on days where it rains. We ask after a rain, why is the grass wet? According to the but-for definition, imagining a counterfactual world where it did not rain, we still have wet grass, because the sprinkler system would have come on. The authors then introduce a more sophisticated definition of causality called Halpern-Pearl causality which fixes this problem, using the idea of a contingency, which forces certain settings of variables. These settings are called witnesses to the contingency. The jargon alone is quite fun.

It does make me want to think about the Chornobyl accident in terms of actual causality. For instance, the roof being made of flammable materials made the disaster worse, but it was not a but-for cause of the explosion. But we could use these definitions of causality to answer questions like, was graphite-tipping the control rods an actual cause? It wasn’t if (and only if), holding everything else about the accident the same, the accident plays out in the exact same way without them.

August 20, 2025

A Few More Shavian Notes

A few other things occurred to me.

A major benefit: Tragedeigh naming is basically impossible. Is it Cate or Kate? It’s 𐑒𐑱𐑑. I also kind of like that you can see visually the irritating rhyming of my daughter’s friends names: ·𐑧𐑤𐑰-·𐑨𐑤𐑰-·𐑨𐑛𐑰, ·𐑧𐑤𐑰𐑨𐑯𐑩-·𐑭𐑮𐑰𐑨𐑯𐑩-·𐑭𐑛𐑰𐑨𐑯𐑩.

If you want to practice, there is a very nice addon for Firefox to convert a page to Shavian, in total or by replacing N (25, 50, 100, 200,… 500) common words. I don’t recommend trying to read a Wikipedia page about phonetics with “auto translate” enabled but otherwise it seems to be super useful.

In fact, a significant problem of learning another orthography like this is going to be that I have spent my entire life reading English text without sounding it out. My brain has a lot of experience. A more logical orthography might be a huge improvement, but beating decades of familiarity with another one is going to take time. This approach seems like a brilliant one, because you build up experience in a similar manner; as you get used to seeing common words mixed in with English text, hopefully you just get familiar quickly. Or maybe it backfires because your brain can fill in lazily from context. I guess time will tell.

The IPA/Shavian correspondences ʌ-𐑳, ʊ-𐑫 and u-𐑵 seem like a bit of a missed opportunity. I think IPA already had ʌ (Shavian 𐑳) before Read came up with the scheme, but I don’t know whether he was aware of it or cared. Not a huge deal either way.

There is actually a distinction which used to be phonemic that is not preserved in Shavian, which is the w/wh distinction, (in IPA, w/ʍ). Sometimes people exaggerate this (“a hwale is in trouble!”), but the distinction evidently still exists in some places, but probably not where Read was working on Shavian. So you can’t distinguish witch and which in Shavian writing.

July 24, 2025

The Shavian Alphabet

I’ve been spending some time the last few days learning the Shavian alphabet. There’s a great learning application at shavian.app.

What’s the point of this? I mean, fun mainly. One point of this alphabet is to have an actually phonetic (or phonemic to be precise) representation. English has a lot of phonemes, but not a lot of agreement on what they are or how they’re realized; Wikipedia doesn’t give an exact number but lets you add 24 consonants to as few as 14-16 vowels for the General American dialect or as many as 20-25 vowels in the Received Pronunciation, yielding as few as 38 or as many as 49 distinct phonemes, meaning we are missing symbols for between 12 and 23 phonemes, depending on how you count. Are there benefits to writing what we actually say?

Before seeing this particular attempt, I sort of assumed it couldn’t possibly work because the sounds of Indian English differ substantially from American or British English. I am singling out these three because you can make a strong argument that any of these should form the basis of a new English spelling standard: Indian, because it has the most speakers; British, because it is the original recipe; American, because of cultural imperialism. None of these would be very satisfying.

Shavian addresses the problem by being overtly phonemic and basing pronunciation on words. This idea is not that far from the idea of lexical sets. The original definition from 1982 yields 27 phonemes, and this table shows the agreement between these and Shavian:

You can see from the chart there are only a few examples that are not distinguished by Shavian, but having separate characters for rhotacized vowels seems clever to me, since they should occur in relatively predictable ways but can be pronounced with or without the R sound. I think it’s worth appreciating the cleverness of this approach, which prefigured lexical sets by a few decades, and yields an alphabet uniquely suited to English despite the plethora of local realizations of its large and fairly unique phonetic set.

Using Shavian, I am made pretty aware my accent and how it differs from the Received Pronunciation. For instance, when I say the word “been” it rhymes with “bin” and not “bean.” The words “caught” and “cot,” I pronounce the same, but if I imagine a British accent I can sort of imagine how the sounds differ. There are some standardized “spellings” for words that requires one to think in RP, or at least an accent with more vowels than my American accent affords, although using or not using standard spellings seems not to be a contentious issue within the tiny Shavian user community.

I think the majority of L1 English speakers are probably unaware of some of the phonemes. The obvious ones that come to mind are θ/ð. It’s not easy for me to guess which one I am using in a given word, and as far as distinct phonemes, there are not that many minimal pairs for this set (ether/either seems to be one of the few). I think most L1 English speakers think of this as “the TH sound” and wouldn’t do much better than me at guessing without a finger to their throat which they are using in a given word. Another example might be the word “think,” which phonetically contains what we English speakers would call “the -ing sound,” in Shavian you have to encode that but if you were thinking in terms of the normal Latin spelling you wouldn’t realize it.

I have frequently said that English suffers from an overabundance of shwa sounds. I think now that isn’t technically correct. Shavian helps show that what Engish does have is an abundance of vowels, and consequently many are not that different, and/or located near the middle. It’s fun to click around the vowel chart on Wikipedia and try and find one that doesn’t have an entry for some form of English; I didn’t find one but didn’t do an exhaustive search.

Aesthetically speaking, it’s pretty good looking, especially at first blush. It’s distinctive, it’s cool that there are 48 characters we can distinguish without picking up the pen. It doesn’t really look like anything else. Another plus is that the name would make one think it was designed by an Armenian, which it certainly wasn’t. It’s quite wise, in my opinion, to use certain letters as single-glyph words (for “the,”-𐑞 “to,”-𐑑 “are,”-𐑸 “for,”-𐑓 “and,”-𐑯 and “of”-𐑝). The sound-shape correspondences are interesting but not necessarily super helpful for remembering sounds. Most alphabets (Inuktitut is an exception) don’t have every possible permutation of each shape. In my five-day-old opinion, some of the shapes are not easy to write. I have noticed, as others have, the funny fact that the glyphs for “h” and “ng” are in the voiced and unvoiced categories respectively, which seems wrong, although the decision was apparently intentional. I don’t think it’s worth litigating these things, although they are curious. For instance, you’re better off learning Esperanto than Ido even though Ido is probably “better” in various ways, because it’s better to just pick something and get the community going around it rather than constantly nit-picking, creating minor refinements, and fracturing the community along the way.

An interesting benefit is that overall, text typically takes about 1/3rd less space to write in Shavian. Here’s an example:

Where does this reduction come from? I’m not a statistics person but I’ll guess. Small words becoming one character or two is certainly a big help. Another significant help is that many small words have a lot of silent letters, “through” being the best example (it becomes 𐑔𐑮𐑵, beating the slang “thru” by a character). On the other hand, there is no “x” character, so words like “exist” can actually become longer (“𐑦𐑜𐑟𐑦𐑕𐑑”). Probably in many cases, it’s simply digraphs like “sh” and “ch” or dipthongs like “ou” and “er” creating a small benefit across many words.

Thinking about Shavian reminded me of when my daughter was very young and very desperate to write. She would spell things “phonetically” wich yuzuly rezultid n smthin hahrd tu red. Would this have been easier? It’s twice as big, so maybe the alphabet would take twice as long to learn. But it is uniform—apart from the distinctions mentioned earlier—so after learning the alphabet, reading would be entirely a matter of practice, getting faster, and learning vocabulary. That’s got to be worth a year or two of education.

A downside which only a great speller like myself would point out is that there is tremendous historical information in the way we spell things. The first part of the words “function,” “funny” and “phonetic” sound the same, but you can tell by looking that one comes from Greek and the others do not, and that the latter shares some meaning with words like “phonograph” and “telephone.” This information is purely written. But it also tortures students and led us here, where fixing spelling is a significant benefit of using a computer.

Shavian is unlikely to unseat English’s Latin-based orthography, but it is fun, fairly easy to learn, unique looking, and has various advantages. Wide usage is not one of those advantages but perhaps it will increase! It’s probably a better spelling reform than just reintroducing ð and þ.

July 23, 2025