Increasingly, our online presences define who we are.   Our lives have a sort of virtual counterpart as we report on what happens in our “real world” lives to the rest of the world in online social forums such as Facebook, MySpace, and blogs.  As our lives become increasingly exposed to the online world, you can’t help but wonder which is more important:  your real life, or the life the world sees through your online presence.  Just as your credit score (a number), not your real-life financial habits, is the primary mechanism for determining your creditworthiness, for better or worse, your online presence in many contexts is the true essence of who your are, and the side of you that matters most.  For example, to what degree is your LinkedIn network used by hiring managers to decide whether or not you are a good fit for the company with whom you are seeking employment?

Despite differences in the perceived influence of our online profiles, most of us will at least go so far as to say that the content you create and post online is at least an important part of  your life and is content that you wish to keep and control.  But, as important as our online profiles are, we are generally happy to give up rights to our data and transfer control of it to third parties.  As an example, let’s take a look at the Facebook Terms of Use.

When you post User Content to the Site, you authorize and direct us to make such copies thereof as we deem necessary in order to facilitate the posting and storage of the User Content on the Site. By posting User Content to any part of the Site, you automatically grant, and you represent and warrant that you have the right to grant, to the Company an irrevocable, perpetual, non-exclusive, transferable, fully paid, worldwide license (with the right to sublicense) to use, copy, publicly perform, publicly display, reformat, translate, excerpt (in whole or in part) and distribute such User Content for any purpose, commercial, advertising, or otherwise, on or in connection with the Site or the promotion thereof, to prepare derivative works of, or incorporate into other works, such User Content, and to grant and authorize sublicenses of the foregoing. You may remove your User Content from the Site at any time. If you choose to remove your User Content, the license granted above will automatically expire, however you acknowledge that the Company may retain archived copies of your User Content. Facebook does not assert any ownership over your User Content; rather, as between us and you, subject to the rights granted to us in these Terms, you retain full ownership of all of your User Content and any intellectual property rights or other proprietary rights associated with your User Content.  (http://www.facebook.com/terms.php).

According to this, “Facebook does not assert any ownership over your User Content.”  While this in many respects takes care of the legal side of things, it does not really address the practical issues of data ownership and control.  Legally I “own” my Facebook profile, but how do I “get” it?  How do I “save” it?  If Facebook servers went down tomorrow (perhaps an unlikely scenario), would I be able to retrieve my profile?  What about the hundreds of pictures that I have uploaded?  Or my messages?  So, while I do retain ownership of content I create, Facebook does not guarantee anything about accessing it.  On the other side of the coin, what if I want to remove some or all of my profile?  Let’s say I log in and delete some of my messages.  Are they really gone?  How many backup copies exist on Facebook servers?

Before going on, allow me to interject  a couple of things at this point.  First, I realize that the last paragraph is starting to sound a little conspiracy-theory-esque.  I do not think that Facebook is out to get us or that anyone is planning on using our profiles against us, etc.  Nor is this intended to be a rant against Facebook and I do not have any issues with the way Facebook has handled my own content.  On the contrary, I imagine that the original creators of Facebook had no idea that the size of its user base would become so incredibly massive and questions of data ownership and control probably seemed relatively inconsequential in its early phases of development.  Further, the privacy controls of Facebook seem quite reasonable insofar as you can decide which people get to see what content.  The data policies of Facebook are in line with the data policies of almost every other service that hosts user-generated content.  In fact, you can make the same observations of many other sites, such as LinkedIn or your favorite blog site.

The underlying issue here is bigger than just control over your social networking profile.  What I am exploring here is whether we need a technological and cultural shift in the way we think about user-generated data–including who owns it, who controls it, how it is accessed, and where it is stored.  The typical approach for architecting a site that delivers user-generated content is for the site to host both the application and the data.  The reasons for this are many.  For one, there is much technological inertia in that direction.  It fits the typical design pattern for building a web site:  get a web server, get a database server, get them to talk, and presto–you are ready to go.  Having the data close to the application is perhaps the basic premise for ensuring efficiency of data operations.  Consider the fact that Facebook serves over 15 billion images per day.  On average, that’s over 170,000 images per second.  You absolutely have to have the data close at hand to get that kind of throughput.  Also, most users are not really interested in managing their own data to begin with.  And, if site developers wish to make a change to the application (such as adding a new field to the profile) they can do so with ease because they have control over both the application and the data schema.  So, there is clearly good reason for sites like Facebook to manage the data for you.

But, let’s imagine another scenario.  Let’s say you are signing up for a new Facebook account.  After putting in some basic information, you are presented with a prompt:  “Where would you like to store your profile information and other user-generated content?”  You are then given a couple of choices:  1.  Have Facebook maintain my profile data.  2.  Allow Facebook to access my personal “cloud” storage area.  You select option 2.  At this point you provide Facebook with credentials to access part of your personal storage area “in the cloud.”  Facebook would then access your storage area and configure it as required for the application.  All of  your Facebook user data would be stored there and accessed by Facebook as needed.  To be clear, the user experience on the site would be no different than if Facebook stored all of your data locally.  But, in fact, your data is now sitting inside a storage area that you own and control.

Is such a thing technically possible?  Would Facebook ever agree to it?  Is there really a need or a demand for this?  I have much more to say on this subject, but let’s leave it here for now.

Some related links:

http://www.eweek.com/c/a/Enterprise-Applications/Who-Owns-Your-Social-Data-You-Do-Sort-of/

http://www.dataportability.org/

There is a lot of richness in the everyday things, but we often miss it.  

Consider a documentary that Maria and I watched the other night called Helvetica.  That’s right–a documentary about a font–or “typeface” to be more precise.  And not just any typeface.  It’s a typeface that is so ubiquitous that even if you stop at some random time during the day, no matter where you are or what you are doing, you can probably find something written using Helvetica–signs, newspapers, magazines, T-shirts, advertisements, logos (American Airlines, Jeep, Microsoft, and Panasonic to name a few).   It’s on street signs throughout the country, including, for example, all the signs for the New York City subway.  NASA has it on the side of the space shuttle.  I guess that means it’s among the first fonts to be used in outer space.  (Who knows?   Maybe it is the official font of the universe.)  It’s a typeface that is not supposed to say anything except what the text itself says.  It was designed for clarity and neutrality. Maybe we take Helvetica for granted, forgetting that someone (or someones–Max Miedinger and Eduard Hoffmann, in fact) dedicated serious effort to create it.  

Now I find myself actively looking for this typeface when I’m walking about town.  It really is amazing how many signs use it.  Maybe I’m crazy. While other people are walking down the street thinking about “important” things, here I am looking at signs and thinking, “I wonder what font that is on that sign?”  But, there is something rewarding about being the only one on the whole block who can look at a sign and say, “Yep, that Crate & Barrel sign is written in Helvetica.”

If a documentary about typefaces doesn’t get you going, consider the article that I was drawn to in the New York Times flying to San Francisco yesterday afternoon.  On the front page were pieces about the financial crisis and reconstruction programs in Iraq–stuff that really matters.  But, in a later section of the paper was an article about walking.  That was the article for me.  The article is a review of a book entitled The Lost Art of Walking:  The History, Science, Philosophy, and Literature of Pedestrianism by Geoff Nicholson.  Pedestrianism has a philosophy!?  You better believe it does.  Did you know the Norweigans have more than 50 words for walking, 40 percent of pedestrians killed in car accidents are drunk, and Wordsworth walked more than 180,000 miles during his lifetime?  I guess the author of the book has written a number of novels while walking.  It’s a way of shifting our states of consciousness according to Iain Sinclair.  Certainly, those of us who sit at a keyboard typing the day away know the value of a good walk for shaking up the mental world.    

So, next time you take a stroll, be sure to remember that you are not just putting one foot in front of the other, or going from point A to point B. You are participating in a “lost art” that has benefits other than mere transportation.  And while you are on that stroll, keep your eye out for Helvetica and other remarkable, everyday things.

A perfect intelligence would not confine itself to one order of thought, but would simultaneously regard a group of objects as classified in all the ways of which they are capable.  

Stanley W. Jevons, 1874.

We have known for some time that we humans tend to mentally categorize objects in order to facilitate our understanding of the world and to enable reasoning capabilities.  Linguists and cognitive scientists suggest that categories are useful because they allow us to infer unobserved properties from observed properties.  While it is certainly impossible for us to know everything about an object, we can observe only a few things (e.g., furry with four legs and barks) but still determine a lot about the object (e.g., this is a dog and most dogs are nice so I should not run away).

Meanwhile, the Web can be seen as another “world” of observable objects.  The massive scale and complexity of the Web makes it essentially impossible for humans (and artificial cognitive agents) to come to grips with all but a very small slice of the content available.  It is truly information overload.  As one way to cope, Web scientists envision a “Semantic Web” in which content is given explicit meaning—a level of semantics greater than that provided by HTML, and through which intelligent agents can reason about the content found there.  

The task of creating a more intelligent Web is one of categorization.  Just as humans tend to work in categories as the basis for higher level reasoning, cognitive agents rely on categories to reason about objects on the Web.  To be sure, much work has already been done along these lines to project us toward the Semantic Web vision.  The notion of ontology as a formal description of concepts has caught on like wildfire.  The first set of standardized ontology languages has already emerged (e.g., RDF, OWL) and researchers continue to work on improving the expressivity and reasoning capabilities of these ontology languages.  While the need for formalized ontologies has gained enormous acceptance, there are still critics as to whether such an approach is even feasible given the scale of the Internet.  Who is going to classify the Web?  There are far too many objects and far too many categories for any individual or large corporation or government to make sense of it all.

Meanwhile, another phenomenon that has recently gained popularity is tagging.  Tagging—at least as far as the Web is concerned—is simply the unstructured, unconstrained labeling of objects (e.g., such as web pages, books, people, etc.) by people on the Internet.  While tagging is certainly useful personally (in the same way that labeling jars of spices in your kitchen is useful), much of the power of tagging is based on the fact that a single item may be tagged by hundreds or thousands of people.  Presumably, many of those tags will agree, but there will of course be some outliers.  But, despite the informal, unconstrained nature of tagging, it is still a form of categorization designed to help us come to grips with the Web.

…

Because each kind of categorization supports fundamentally different kinds of purposes and reasoning capabilities, it is unlikely that one scheme will emerge as the “end-all” mechanism for categorizing objects on the Web.  Instead, the Semantic Web will emerge as a synthesis of categorization schemes, where each scheme provides only the specific reasoning services that it is good at, and leaves the rest to other schemes.  The unanswered question, though, is how the different schemes will interact to form a fully integrated system.  In this article I present some possible interactions among categorization schemes found on the Web.

The full article is available here:  Categorizing the Web.

The Earth System Curator is a National Science Foundation sponsored project developing a metadata formalism for describing the digital resources used in climate simulations. The primary motivating observation of the project is that a simulation/model’s source code plus the configuration parameters required for a model run are a compact representation of the dataset generated when the model is executed. The end goal of the project is a convergence of models and data where both resources are accessed uniformly from a single registry. In this paper we review the current metadata landscape of the climate modeling community, present our work on developing a metadata formalism for describing climate models, and reflect on technical challenges we have faced that require new research in the area of Earth Science Informatics.

Available on SpringerLink.

First, a bit about cloud computing, and then some extrapolative thinking on what its impact will be on e-science.

Cloud computing is a buzz word that we are hearing more and more recently.  It’s one of those terms that people latch onto because they know there is really something lurking there, but they can’t really place their finger on what it actually is.  Wikipedia says cloud computing is “a style of computing in which IT-related capabilities are provided ‘as a service’, allowing users to access technology-enabled services from the Internet … without knowledge of, expertise with, or control over the technology infrastructure that supports them.”  The term cloud is presumably used as a metaphor for the Internet since it is usually depicted that way on network diagrams.

While I’m not sure if that definition would jive with everyone, it’s in line with Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud offering (EC2).  Amazon describes EC2 as “a web service that provides resizable compute capacity in the cloud.”  Essentially, you can design the computational architecture that you want and Amazon will provide it to you as a service on a pay-as-you-go basis.  Need 100 Linux nodes, but only for a week?  No problem–you only pay for what you use, and when you are done, just terminate your nodes and forget about them.  You choose the machine image that you want, the software, the memory size, and the required storage capacity.  Apparently, it can be configured very quickly so you can quickly scale your computational capacity with a very small incremental cost.  I admit the EC2 model is very impressive if it works as they state on the home page.

Assuming cloud computing services such as this come into the mainstream, there will be huge impacts in many domains that rely on IT infrastructure.  E-science is one area that might be radically transformed.

Much of what is impeding scientific progress are the computational and technical issues involved with conducting large scale simulations.  Incompatibilities among computational environments hinder the sharing of experiments and results.  Repeatability, a key tenet of the scientific method, is nearly impossible with respect to e-science computations (at least repeatability by other scientists in other labs using a different computational environment).  The cloud provides a needed layer of abstraction so that scientists can think about science and not about computer science.  Therefore, portability is a prerequisite to repeatability in the realm of e-science.

In almost all domains of e-science, results are disseminated by scientific publications in conferences, journals, and the like.  While many journals have moved to an electronic format, the underlying paradigm is still the same:  results are presented in a summarized format (e.g., plots and averages), but little information is provided on how to reproduce the computations that led up to the results.  And this is understandable.  It might take literally months of tweaking configurations followed by months of processor time followed by months of post-processing and analysis before the results are finally in.  How could you possibly provide enough information for someone else to reproduce the same experiment?  And even if you could, how do you get around the fact that everyone’s computational environment is different and your code might not even run on another platform?

The cloud computing platform sees the computational environment (e.g., operating system + compiler + processor + software + …) as a first class object that can be created, registered, shared, searched, and otherwise manipulated.  For example, Amazon’s EC2 service provides a registry of “Amazon Machine Images” that anyone can access and instantiate.  Custom AMIs can be added to the registry.  This is a paradigmatic shift because what used to be the “infrastructure” has been ripped out and parameterized.  (Imagine being able to change the foundation of a building with ease).  The computational environment becomes another configuration parameter to set along with your experiment’s scientific parameters.  In this sense, the cloud computing platform can be viewed as the “meta-infrastructure.”  Sure, it is an infrastructure at the same time, but for the first time it is an infrastructure that we can safely ignore.

The advantage to e-science?  With a parameterized infrastructure afforded by the cloud platform, we are well on the road to sharing much more than just scientific results.  Instead, we will share the experiments themselves–descriptions of scientific computations that anyone can execute and examine to validate results and extend them.  Admittedly, we have much work to do before this vision becomes a reality.  But, maturing cloud computing services like those offered by Amazon are a big first step toward a better way of doing science.

Some days my wife packs my lunch for me.  She likes to give me a cookie, but the snack size baggies we have are shorter than the diameter of full cookie.   So, she has to fold the cookie in half to fit in the baggy.  Pretty cute, huh?

“When I think in language, there aren’t ‘meanings’ going through my mind in addition to the verbal expressions:  the language is itself the vehicle of thought.”

Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations

Think about that!

Modern search engines are best equipped to handle the so-called “surface Web.” However, sitting below the static content on the surface of the Internet is a wealth of information that is much harder to index. This body of information has been called the “deep Web” because much of it is hidden in databases that can only be accessed via online forms that–while easy for humans to fill out–present a challenge for automated agents such as web-crawlers who need to determine what information is hiding behind the form.

But even if a web-crawler could determine how to fill out a form and could extract and index the “deep” content from a site–would such an index contain the full information potential of the Web?

Contrary to what you might think, the end goal of submitting a query to a search engine is not to find a particular web page. The goal is an answer to a question. How do I get from my house to the store? What time is a certain film playing at my local theater? While some kinds of questions are getting easier and easier to answer, most questions are far too sophisticated to ask a search engine and expect to get an accurate answer. For example, try Googling “How many Starbucks are between 2020 Broadway and 1732 W. 53 Street?” You’re not going to get the result you are looking for. Nor will you be directed to a web page where you can easily find the answer.

It seems unreasonable to ask a search engine these kinds of questions. Why?

• For one, most search engines are keyword-oriented and you cannot really think of a way to write down the question. We’ve been bred to think of searches as sets of keyword combinations. What words can I put together to find the pages with the information I seek? Unfortunately, most real questions cannot be formulated as a set of keywords.

• Another issue is that search engines are designed to return web pages. But since our primary need is answers–not web pages–search engines should be “answer-oriented” not web page-oriented. So, assuming we have solved the first problem–that is, specifying the question in a manner that the search engine can understand, we wish for the search engine to take the necessary steps to give me the answer I am looking for.

So, we see that the problem boils down to two measly problems: the input is wrong and the output is wrong! Yikes!

Let’s explore what we mean by “answer-oriented” a bit. One way of thinking about an “answer-oriented” search engine is the following. Assume my question is: How many movies has Francis Ford Coppola directed? Let’s say that using its web index, the search engine is able to find some relevant pages based on keywords in the question. Now, the obvious next step would be for the search engine to scrape the page for the number I am looking for (perhaps using the hint “how many”) and return to me that number. Now, this would be a helpful feature, but in reality it doesn’t do much for the searcher who could within a few seconds do a manual grep of the page and find the number he or she was looking for. But this entire scenario is still based on our current search paradigm–namely, that the results of searches are web pages.

Now here is another scenario. The user poses the question: How many Starbucks restaurants are between my house and my office? The first thing to note is that in all likelihood, no web page actually exists anywhere containing the answer we seek. It is also unlikely that there is a “deep Web” database somewhere with a row in it containing the needed information. But, it is highly likely that all the needed information is in fact available online. Certainly we could find the route from my house to the office using a mapping web site. And, we could find the addresses of Starbucks locations in the area. But what we need is more than information retrieval. We need information synthesis. Answering the question requires some computation. The hard question we’d like to answer is: can a search engine be smart enough to perform the needed computations (or outsource them) and then return the result?

Some challenges must be overcome to achieve this:

• The search engine must “understand” the user’s question. As it stands today, search engines don’t really accept questions–just words. The words are string matched against an index. There are hardly any semantics associated with the query, and therefore the search engine has a very shallow understanding of what the user really wants.
• The search engine must index more than just web pages. It must also index services that can perform computations. The search engine must also understand how the services work, most likely by having a description of the service interface. Alternatively, the search engine could somehow outsource the finding of the needed service. (UDDI could be considered a rudimentary version of this, but it is a “registry” based technology where the service provider must actively register the service. Instead, services should be “discovered” dynamically by the search engine so that a massive index can be built just like the index of static HTML pages. Obviously UDDI has not really caught on. When is the last time you searched a UDDI registry?)
• If the answer to the query is not found on a static web page, but requires a service invocation, the computational resources must be allocated for the service to run. This search engine itself may take responsibility for assigning resources, or the service request could be floated into the “cloud” where processing would be assigned in a distributed fashion and the result returned asynchronously when it has been computed. (A side issue is the ability to estimate the computational cost for answering the question. Lower cost questions could be answered quickly, perhaps by the search engine itself. Higher cost questions would require more resource allocation and the result may not be returned for some time. Good estimation is essential here.)

In addition to answering the question of whether religion exists for the sake of man or the sake of God, Abraham Kuyper addresses the Christian’s attitude toward several spheres of life: religion, politics, science, and art. It is important for the Christian to consider his or her own position with respect to these spheres. How should the Christian view science? What is the Christian’s role with respect to politics and the government? What is a Christian’s role in the arts? These are big questions. How many of us have taken the time to really answer them?

In John 17, Christ is praying for His people. In it we learn of His desire that we remain in the world, while not being conformed to it.

My prayer is not that you take them out of the world but that you protect them from the evil one. They are not of the world, even as I am not of it. Sanctify them by the truth; your word is truth. As you sent me into the world, I have sent them into the world. For them I sanctify myself, that they too may be truly sanctified. John 17:15-19.

Denver Botanic Gardens

We only heed the easy half of the command to live in the world, but not of the world–and it’s not the half you originally thought would be the easiest. Many of us have found it easier to live not of the world by living outside the world.

What does it mean that Christ has sent us into the world? It’s a delicate question. Based on this passage and others, I think that living in the world comprises a bit more than just being here physically. Somehow, we must be involved with the world, without being of it. It is hard to know exactly how this command should be realized in our own lives. But, I think that struggling with this command has a God-ordained purpose. The tension is supposed to be there: how can we be involved enough in our world to be a transforming influence without being conformed to it? It is in the struggle that we learn about ourselves and our relationship to the world. This struggle is part of the richness of the Christian life. If we ignore it, we are missing out.

What we seek is cultural transformation. Unfortunately, when it comes to cultural transformation, many Christians make it a priority not to get involved. We avoid certain parts of town for fear of what we’ll see. We don’t go to neighborhood meetings because we’re afraid our neighbors will discover who we really are. We only attend Christian musical performances. We send our kids to schools with “Christian” in the name as if the study of science, language, mathematics, and history are not God-glorifying in and of themselves. When it’s time to send them to college, our primary concern is who will influence our kids, not who our kids will influence. At the end of the day, we are so worried about worldly conformity that transformation goes out the window.

The Boy and a Frog (Elsie Ward Hering, 1898)

In Genesis, God gives us what Nancy Pearcey calls our first job description: “Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and subdue it.” I contend that being fruitful includes, but is more than, just having babies. Being fruitful is producing fruit: working with your hands, creating useful things, studying Creation, building things, developing governments and societies, painting, drawing, writing, researching new medicines, writing computer programs, dancing, singing–all of these things, as long as they are done for the Glory of God–are part of being fruitful. In doing them we reflect the creative nature of God, and maybe even paint a faint picture of the redemption of what was once pronounced “good” and what one day will be restored to its full beauty. Transforming culture really is painting a picture of redemption. If you are a Christian, what picture are you painting? Are you even painting at all?

In his book, Lectures on Calvinism, Abraham Kuyper (rhymes with “diaper”) poses the following question: Does religion exist for the sake of God, or for the sake of Man? I contend that this question is one of the weightiest questions that you will ever answer. Before you read on, think about it for a second. Both the theist and atheist alike have an answer to this question. What is your answer?

A slightly different, but related question might be, “What is the purpose of religion?” While talk of spirituality and religion is common today, it is rare that spiritual discussions will be centered around the essential question of the purpose of religion. Instead, we are content talking about the ins and outs of particular religions, whether New Age people are allowed to eat pork on Tuesdays, whether your church baptizes babies, or how happy you are with the recent changes to your worship service.

While religion and spirituality are on the mind of the postmodern individual, how often do we consider the purpose behind it all and make concrete statements about why we are spiritual? With respect to Kuyper’s question above, it seems that the pervading yet tacit assumption is that we are religious because we have certain needs (e.g., the provision of hope or comfort or stability, etc.) that can only be met through religion. If this is true, then most would have to answer Kuyper’s question: religion exists for the sake of Man.

Kuyper says we have an “egoistic religion” with only one god at the center. You guessed it: ourselves! We choose what spiritual activities we will participate in based on how well they address our felt needs. We shop religions like we are buying a new car or digital camera. We present many religious “options” to our kids so that one day they can decide which one will best suit their own needs. We leave churches because we are not “being fed.” Who is being worshiped in all of this? We have put ourselves at the center. We are religious for the sake of Man.

And what I fear the most, is that a vast majority of the “spiritually minded” would agree with the above statements, and really have no problem with it.

After exploring the nature of religions in past societies, Kuyper goes on to say about them:

…in all these different forms it is and remains a religion fostered for man’s sake, aiming at his safety, his liberty, his elevation, and partly also at his triumph over death. And even when a religion of this kind has developed itself into monotheism, the god whom it worships remains invariably a god who exists in order to help man, in order to secure good order and tranquility for the State, to furnish assistance and deliverance in time of need, or to strengthen the nobler and higher impulse of the human heart in its ceaseless struggle with the degrading influences of sin. (p44)

Thank you Cosmic Helper for being there when I need you.

Kuyper goes on to say that “this is the fatal end of egoistic religion;–it becomes superfluous and disappears as soon as the egoistic interests are satisfied.”

Goodbye Superfluous Helper. I’m feeling much better now.

We see the results of this around us. People jumping from one religion to another. People picking and choosing a little of this religion and a little of that one. A rigorous prayer life during times of need. And the goal of it all? Fulfillment? An escape from guilt? Moral guidance? Ultimate happiness?

The perspective of Calvin was a bit different–actually “diametrically opposed” according to Kuyper. Kuyper claims that while religion indeed produces certain fruits for the benefit of man, we have assumed that those fruits are in fact the very essence or purpose of religion. Kuyper states: “Of course, religion, as such, produces also a blessing for man, but it does not exist for the sake of man. It is not God who exists for the sake of His creation;–the creation exists for the sake of God. For, as the Scripture says, He has created all things for Himself.” (p45)

Initially I was put off by saying that we exist for the sake of God, as if the only self-existent and independent Being were somehow dependent on mankind for anything. But, here we do not provide anything to Him that He does not already own. Instead, we worship to fulfill our created purpose–namely, to bring Him glory. Religion truly is for the sake of God. Kuyper goes on:

The starting-point of every motive in religion is God and not Man. Man is the instrument and means, God alone is here the goal, the point of departure and the point of arrival, the fountain, from which the waters flow, and at the same time, the ocean into which they finally return. To be irreligious is to forsake the highest aim of our existence, and on the other hand to covet no other existence than for the sake of God, to long for nothing but for the will of God, and to be wholly absorbed in the glory of the name of the Lord, such is the pith and kernel of all true religion. “Hallowed be thy Name. Thy kingdom come. Thy Will be done,” is the threefold petition, which gives utterance to all true religion. Our watchword must be,–”Seek first the kingdom of God,” and after that, think of your own need. First stands the confession of the absolute sovereignty of the Triune God; for of Him, through Him, and unto Him are all things. And therefore our prayer remains the deepest expression of all religious life. This is the fundamental conception of religion as maintained by Calvinism, and hitherto, no one has ever found a higher conception. For no higher conception can be found. The fundamental thought of Calvinism, at the same time the fundamental thought of the Bible, and of Christianity itself, leads, in the domain of religion, to the realization of the highest ideal. Nor has the philosophy of religion in our own century, in its most daring flights, ever attained a higher point of view nor a more ideal conception. (p45-46)

Take a moment and examine your worship; examine your spirituality. Who is at the center? Who is the object of your worship? Do not forsake your highest purpose for the sake of your own comfort. May we be religious for the sake of God, and may our highest and best purpose be the glory of God! Soli Deo Gloria.

Lectures on Calvinism is available in its entirety right here.