Josh Plovanic's Writings and Thoughts

     I've learned that, at the base of reality, you can't really destroy anything, you can only break things into pieces. Yes, we usually consider breaking things an act of destruction, but at the fundamentals, the pieces of everything broken still exist. It gets into the law of thermodynamics that says energy can neither be created nor destroyed.        As a result, the pieces of everything broken and all the energy that makes up those things are indestructible, regardless of how many pieces they are broken into. All matter really is is just contained and structured energy with mass, and energy may be used to break apart matter, but energy can't destroy energy. Nothing can.        Even more profound, for me anyways, is the indestructibility of forms and ideas. Let's say a house burns down, and all that material gets broken and burnt and released into energy. If you have a memory or record of the form of that structure; its shape, i...

     Love, liberty, and glory. These things are my favorite aspects of God's nature. They form the main focus of my relationship with God, along with grace and mercy.       To me, the Creator is a god of boundless liberty. Endless freedom in an existence of the endless, infinite opportunities of countless worlds and countless realms. I believe He detests oppression and detests slavery, especially the forms of it that exist in this world. If God created an existence as big as I think He did, such abundance of resources, dwelling places, and opportunities would render oppression and slavery obsolete in the end.  You don't need oppression and slavery in a system that big. In terms of our world, I look to the book of Exodus for my understanding of God's view on oppression.  How He liberated the Isrealites in the fashion that He did. He hardened the heart of Pharaoh when He could easily have just had the Pharaoh let the Isrealites go from the get go, b...

They travel across the universe, from star to star, planet to planet, looking for worlds to repair and brokenness to fix. They are the great repairmen, restoring worlds to former glory, and mending broken systems and broken cultures. They are healers, helpers, builders, and inventors. They live by and die by the motto "Nothing is beyond repair." They see everything and everyone as repairable. Telling them something can't be fixed is akin to blasphemy, and that will only embolden them. The impossible is only difficult to them, and the more difficult the job is, the more excited they get. They relish in the glory of fixing the unfixable and repairing the unrepairable.   They particularly love fixing broken societies. Mending the destruction and corruption that often poison and cripple even the most noble and advanced cultures. The Repairers repair broken systems and broken governments. They are also excellent educators, great teachers who repair broken minds and restore the...

"I am tired and sick of war. Its glory is all moonshine. It is only those who have neither fired a shot nor heard the shrieks and groans of the wounded who cry aloud for blood, for vengeance, for desolation."          -William Tecumseh Sherman, Civil War General From an early age, I found warfare fascinating. The movies I watched, the books I read, the video games I played. I was engrossed in warfare from almost the time I first learned how to talk. My favorite movie was Star Wars, and my fantasy life as a kid included many a war game or two. In our culture, we immerse males into at least a modest exposure to the ideas, history, and strategies of war from a relatively early age. I was no exception. Even the sports we play and the games we play as children teach, to some degree or another, strategies, discipline, and mindsets that are useful in battlefield and conflict scenarios, even if we never use them in such a way. It's hard to be a superpower and get that p...

     "Jesus looked at them and said, “With man this is impossible, but with God all things are possible.”   -Matthew 19:26      In recent months, much of my writing and thinking has been more optimistic. Even in the face of an uncertain world becoming more unstable and more disorderly as time goes on, my optimism and outlook has actually increased to some extent.  Especially when I meditate on God's limitlessness, whether it be his boundless grace, boundless mercy, or perfect justice.  I look at the miracles of Jesus, and I see acts of healing and acts of restoration. Jesus used his power, mostly, to fix things. To repair and restore brokenness, and to heal sicknesses and blights.  He is often called "the Great Physician." The perfect doctor of sorts, but he was also a Great Restorer. A fixer of a broken world and a remedy to a great injustice. The example He set for me when He rose from the grave was not just His own glory and victory o...

"Thought is not reality, but it is through thought that our realities are created." -Sydney Banks  The philosopher should be king, as Plato the philosopher argued, because the philosopher would be the only one who can understand the perfect form of "the good," the ideal goodness in its perfect state. This truth, in Plato's thinking, would possibly lead to the ideal society.  In fact, most of human reality has been shaped by thought and thinking. Our governments and societies have been shaped by ideas about how to arrange our hierarchies and what policies we make with our laws. These ideas all came from the minds of people at some point, just like all ideas do. Even our empiricism and processes of inquiry that form the basis of our sciences were engineered by the thinking of philosophers. The scientific method itself was developed and pioneered by Gallileo. Thinking, and thought, is the foundation of all our fields of knowledge to some extent.   If you change you...

200 years. We've been in this sector of the Prime galaxy for 200 years. We were originally sent here on a reconnaissance mission, scouting the star systems here for dark life. Well, we found what we were looking for, and our recon mission quickly shifted in its objective to that of an urgent extermination mission. Dark life is the perversion of life, the anti-life, a dark experiment by the adversary after he and his followers rebelled against the True Creator ages ago. Dark life consumes, perverts, and drains star systems of their resources and value. It sucks the goodness and quality of the worlds it infects, like a parasite, a wasting disease of a planet. I've been in the Orion Legion of the Heavenly Host for the better part of the last two centuries or so.              The Orion Legion's primary function was to scout for Dark life in the billions of star systems in this galaxy, and when we find it, we exterminate it and cleanse the worlds it infect...