Hollow Matrix - Long Live Your Memory

Hollow Matrix was a brilliant place (formerly known as Broadie Car Park).  It was a place where web developers gathered to share brilliant ideas, to help each other through development blocks, and to just find friendships.  It was also a place of violent drama.  A place I wouldn't send my daughter in the dead of night.

But all in all, it was a home to me for a decent portion of my life.  But, alas, it seems that the time has come, like the bubble pop of the dot-com boom.  The bubble really popped long ago, but now, the day has come when finally hollowmatrix.com has outlived its existence.  One thing is, I hate when I go to a website and find that it has been replaced by a search.com.net.co.uk url just looking for link click revenue, so hollowmatrix.com is forwarding to my own website and will for the foreseeable future at least with a memorial here that you can read.

Why I Am Leaving Catholicism

Though I have not filed a Actus formalis defectionis ab Ecclesia catholica, it should be clear to many that I have left the Catholic Church. None in the Church has yet ask me why I have left (which is a matter of curiosity and some concern to me), however, I feel it is good to let these things be known.

I should start at the beginning to tell what caused me to question the Catholic Church. When I was a child, I was raised as a Catholic but found little use for it as I became an older teen and young adult. I abandoned it in favor of the moral relativism I found in the media and among some of my "funner" friends. Somehow I was never able to shake the idea that there was a god out there, but as in the movie The Devil's Advocate, I found him an "absentee landlord." I stopped attending service and basically became a hedonist. After I'd had enough of the ill effects of the hedonism lifestyle and felt like settling down with the woman I love, I returned to Church attendance primarily in exchange for being allowed to have my wedding there (I'm sorry, but that's the honest truth), but after my wedding, I gradually fell away again.

The Trinity

In my endeavor to understand "The Trinity," I can kinda imagine it like, let's say I wrote (suspension of disbelief, guys) a mod ("modification" for those non-sims fans) for The Sims (a video game) where the sims (virtual "sim"ulated people in this game) had souls and free will and I were to make a special sim whose actions came entirely from my input (keyboard, mouse, etc.) and I felt everything that he would feel (neural input? then, I guess, I've invented the Matrix), in a sense, his soul was me, but his body was of course still virtual.

Because the sims are confined by their nature (even if they could comprehend as limitedly as humans do) to understanding only the sim world, they could never comprehend me, my state of being, my power or my location; they couldn't comprehend the unity and separation between my sim spawn (son, offspring, sim self, whatever). Phrases like "I and the User (to use a term from Tron) are one," "If you have seen me, you have seen the User," "No sim has seen the User but me," "I do the will of the User," "The User became a sim," "I am the son of the User," even, "I am the User," can all make sense being said by (or of, with proper pronoun change) this character with this analogy. "That's me as a sim, he turned out well," might be more familiar. I would definitely have the body of a sim (especially from their perspective) while still maintaining my full Userness (hey, I can pull the plug if I have to!).

Of course, with any analogy, there are holes and this surely has some; I mean, I don't know every in and out of the hardware and program running all this stuff (though if I were to somehow program a soul, I would probably need to), and clearly, I'm relying on God for my own existence, but it wouldn't make sense for that to go up infinitely.

I thought this analogy up because in reading the Bible, it seems like a lot of passages make sense if read as Jesus, Lord, Yahweh, God, Holy Spirit, etc. are all different names of the same God, but also, as God interacts with Himself, He refers to Himself in the second or third person or in plural. Anyways, just a thought.