ThinkBlog

http://thinkblog.org/summary.php

I’ve added a link here to the “summary” page, and although I know my way around computer languages generically enough to make the while() loop list all posts for the blog, I don’t know how to mess with the formatting. I’m shooting for being able to have a fully dynamic site map/categorical index where you can show posts by date, by category, or whatever you like. If anyone knows how, please don’t hesitate to contact me!

Also, I’ve fixed the titles of some old posts that were including formatting and obscuring the text. A little spring-cleaning on the ‘blog, if you will.

Incidentally, if you can recommend a five-star book on PHP for someone who’s familiar with C++, Java, HTML+CSS, and a couple of others, that would be most excellent. Contact me by email, forums, or comment. Thanks!

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0192833723/thinkblogorg-20

Book I

xviii.28

To tie in the above, here’s a theme I can identify with and uphold: “To be far from your face is to be in the darkness of passion.” Indeed, to be far from the Lord’s countenance is to go into a pitch-dark room and to try to light the darkness with a match and some styrofoam: the choking fumes all but crowd out the dirty light, but if we in our sins pursue those sins to try for greater light, the fumes become greater until we are diseased, dying, and suffocating. All the Lord’s blessing (oxygen) will have turned to soot and death. That’s what it is to chase passions; that’s the way I was humbled. I’m not sure how others come to a point of wisdom, but I never grew so quickly as when every carnal pleasure of which I partook turned to filth in my arms, in my mouth, in my body. Months of self-abuse leave me with a reminder: often a certain kind of Flowers for Algernon feeling in regard to my memory and general sharpness. To my unquiet horror I see my former self as more acute than I now, if even by such a small degree that others can’t perceive it (but I will rise to a place of greater fullness even so: a blind man’s hearing is razor-sharp). By the grace of God. What a powerful lesson, to learn that passion is darkness apart from God.

xviii.29

Plato’s idea that it is better to suffer than to do wrong…. Even though it’s a great pleasure to analyze the words and actions of others to derive their thoughts therefrom and predict behavior because of that, may I never be so caught up in analyzing another’s pain that I don’t extend the hand of fellowship to help him. There is the danger that could come about if I were to be a counselor: the temptation would be strong to treat Case No. 005707 as just that–a numeral symbolizing a particular cocktail of neuroses–as opposed to a delicate human being. I’d like to think I’m strong enough, sensitive enough never to do so. Ah, but pride comes before a fall.

I wonder if most of the contemporary hatred of lawyers isn’t an expression–on a gradient of consciousness in the hater’s mind–of that last sentence, that lawyers are more concerned with image and winning a case than the person who, under their care, might be executed. (C.f. the immediately above discussion vis-a-vis using people [Ends v. Means] in a Kantian sense.)

References.
Augustine, St. Confessions. Henry Chadwick, trans. ISBN 0-19-283372-3 (Paperback).

OK, so when I’m procrastinating, I’m a sucker for little online tests that are absolutely the lowest rung on scientific validity and reliability. What can I do? I research statistics and scientific journals all the time, you have to have some spice sometimes. What are you?

The Lord You scored 13% Cardinal, 61% Monk, 38% Lady, and 59% Knight!

You are of the intellectual breed and yet you are also very interested in war. You are of the aristocracy and head the cavalry a safe distance from the carnage of the front lines. You believe in defeating your enemy with not only might, but also wit. You scored high as both the Monk and the Knight. You can try again to get a more precise description of either the Monk or the Knight, or you can be happy that you’re an individual.

My test tracked 4 variables How you compared to other people your age and gender: You scored higher than 3% on Cardinal You scored higher than 88% on Monk You scored higher than 36% on Lady You scored higher than 73% on Knight

[DEPRECATED: The old link at www.stud.fernuni-hagen.de/q3998142/pcchips/pccjs.html no longer works. Manuals can still be found at the pcchipsusa.com site.]

In the ongoing saga of the E206922 PS-1 PC Chips motherboards that are unfortunately not marked at all, I found this great site where you can figure out what motherboard model you have by plugging in information. For instance, Sanju has a PC Chips M747 according to this chart, a version 5.0 since it’s the only 1999 model. Fortunately, that doesn’t matter in this case, since according to the PC Chips discontinued manuals page, all manuals for M747 are the same.

This is the 36-page PDF for M747, all versions.

By popular demand (and innumerable search queries), I’ll do what I can to help out. I must say, though, I’ve since thrown out the old motherboard, so this is the best I can do so far. HTH!

http://selectsmart.com/PHILOSOPHY/

Those of you that know me will probably be unsurprised to learn that in my ethical stance I most resemble Immanuel Kant. Click on the title of this post to be taken to SelectSmart’s ethical counter.

1. 	Kant              (100%)
2. 	St. Augustine      (86%)
3. 	Spinoza            (82%)
4. 	Aquinas            (70%)
5. 	Jeremy Bentham     (70%)
6. 	Prescriptivism     (68%)
7. 	John Stuart Mill   (66%)
8. 	Ockham             (63%)
9. 	Ayn Rand           (62%)
10. 	Cynics             (56%)
11. 	Stoics             (53%)
12. 	Plato              (50%)
13. 	Jean-Paul Sartre   (48%)
14. 	Aristotle          (47%)
15. 	Nel Noddings       (37%)
16. 	Nietzsche          (37%)
17. 	David Hume         (35%)
18. 	Epicureans         (34%)
19. 	Thomas Hobbes      (27%)

This brings up an interesting question, I think. How much of what we do is consistent with the morality we (claim to) espouse?

http://www.evoice.com/

With eVoice, you’ll get a free phone number that delivers voicemail messages to you as email attachments.

This is a neat little trick that does exactly what it says it does. As far as I know, you can’t choose your area code unless you pay, but what with nationwide cellphone coverage in the U.S. quickly becoming the norm, that shouldn’t be a major issue.

Incidentally, you can now leave me a voicemail at +1.5126840742 (inside the U.S., (512) 684-0742). I look forward to hearing from you!

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0596007973/thinkblogorg-20

The latest edition of O’Reilly’s Python Cookbook features a snippet from one of our forums’ own valued contributors, Eric Rose. You know O’Reilly’s books are top-notch; and you know if you need to learn a language or stay up on the latest tips and tricks, there’s no better resource.

Sink your teeth into some serious coding material. Support your local coders. Buy the Cookbook.

You may or may not have heard the message before of this Christian holiday (etym., “holy day”) called Easter. Here it is, in a nutshell, followed by an explanation why this is the crux on which the point that God Himself is making to all creation rests.

It is the Christian confession that God made us, His people, sinless, meaning, without moral defect, from the beginning. We fell from that when we chose something contrary to what God had decreed; therefore, we are in a state of sin. (”Sin” comes from the Greek word meaning to shoot an arrow and miss the bull’s eye.) Every person is in this state of moral hopelessness before God, because He’s perfect, and we’re not. That’s not mean, that’s just the facts. Because of this error, we cannot approach God. Therefore, He made a way for us to commune with Him, through the miraculous death and resurrection of His only begotten Son, Jesus Christ. God, in Christ, loved you enough to die for you, taking on Him your personal sins so you could be right with Him.

This is possible because Jesus Himself is sinless, and because of His love He doesn’t want you to perish apart from Him. You don’t have to: because He had lived sinlessly, He could take your sin into Himself and even so, raise Himself from the dead. He has conquered death and, if you believe in Him, you have too; that is the message of the holiday we call Easter. This death and resurrection of the One who is “fully man and fully God” is the crux of the faith. (Incidentally, I would love to explain this more in-depth to anyone who cares to ask.)

I submit to you, gentle reader, that the death and resurrection of Christ is the ultimate expression of why God deserves all glory.

There is a place where Paul writes to the Corinthians for the first time and says, “For, I think, God has exhibited us apostles last of all, as men condemned to death; because we have become a spectacle to the world, both to angels and to men” (NAS 1 Cor 4:9). I think that’s true of all of us in a sense, that Christians are a spectacle of themselves, and that the whole of history is a spectacle in itself, and so on.

That word, “spectacle,” is transliterated theatron, whence we derive “theater.” I think that’s a very interesting point. I’ve held that verse in mind as I’ve read the Bible, and even as I’ve lately read some of Baruch (Heb.; Lat. Benedictus) Spinoza’s Ethics, and a theme kept recurring.

It tickles me that Spinoza defines the world via mathematical proofs. Just as Euclid ended his geometrical proofs with “q.e.d.,” which in Latin means “which was to be demonstrated,” so does Spinoza. And he’s right: if you follow him logically, accepting his definitions and axioms, you are forced to arrive at his postulated conclusions, which he “was to demonstrate.”

There is something, I think, that God is demonstrating to all creation, and at the heart of it lies this crucified and risen savior, “to Jews a stumbling block and to Gentiles foolishness.” At the end of it all, not that He needed to prove His glory other than simply being, He will have demonstrated with inconceivable profundity and with perfect precision that He alone is to be glorified, Amen.

Yes, the Christian confession is about the love of God, and about faith, and of hope, and so on. But I think that ultimately, it is going to be certain that a theme has emerged: at the point at which God will sort everything out, sift the chaff, cut the unfruitful, all of this—at that point, when “before [God] every knee will bow; by [God] every tongue will swear” that Christ is Lord, and He has revealed Himself—it will be impossible to say otherwise than, “Glory to God alone, and all to Him!” This is the Christian confession, also, and will be the confession of all. Though He be reviled by some now, they will nevertheless confess His glory ultimately; and though some Christians doubt His love or justice, when he “comes in power,” they will give Him glory as well.

And so I submit to you that this is what the resurrection looks like from the eschaton: when all is said and done, nothing in which the breath of life has been breathed will say aught but this:

Christus resurrexit—vere resurrexit, quod erat faciendum;
soli Deo gloria, quod erat demonstrandum!

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0192833723/thinkblogorg-20

Briefly: I agree with Augustine in several senses, that the pursuit of entertainment for its own sake is or can easily become a vice. This was an off-the-cuff rant, and I haven’t revised it so please forgive the odd (lack of) flow.

Book I, §xvii.27

Augustine makes the point that the most honored individuals who engaged in recitation were those who identified most with the fictitious characters, which must have seemed to him a double sin: dedicating the mind to the memorization of vain fictions (wasting time) and then applying a false emotional state to those fictions (lying). This is really very similar to how I feel about movies and most books, though of course my peers would scoff at me for that, and have. It’s not that reading pop fiction for the distraction is *sinful* per se, not that watching movies for their own sake and for pure, basal entertainment isn’t morally upright; but this to me is a vice easily avoided. I spent years of my childhood watching TV, diving into the story as far as I could so that I could escape reality; then I jealously guarded my time with the Nintendo, and snapped ferociously at anyone who would interrupt that escape from reality (which had at that point become a kind of “literally virtual” reality), intentionally or un-. Then it was books, and movies. But somehow when I sobered & cleaned up after Clemson, the more foolish watching these things, playing these games, reading grocery-store fiction seemed not only superfluous but unacceptably suppressive of my personal growth. All I could equate it to was a mild, mind-altering drug or like unto sleeping or eating when the biological need wasn’t there: onanism, all of it.

Let us analyze this for a moment. Take literature on the level Augustine was (presumably) describing. Is it a worthy endeavor to memorize poetry or stories and repeat them with great feeling and interpretation? Yes, there is a sense in which this is uniquely efficacious to an end involving the entertainment of others. Or again, if by memorizing poetry/fiction I can calm myself (Jung’s mandala-drawing and other such ritualistic behavior) or provide catharsis through identification with a character whose experience can cause me to scour my own heart of all the repressed emotional scum, or draw on another’s experience to help another–then this is also ultimately helpful, though in a drastically reduced way. But reading for the sake of letting one’s eyes flit across a page and for generating an artificial emotional experience (likewise for movies, likely more so) seems unhelpful at best, desensitizing at worst. Just like a drug, the more an emotional response is stimulated by a medium, the more an individual desires and seeks that response through similar or identical media. What are these experiences but drugs native to the brain? An ex-girlfriend of mine would almost sneer at me for making it a point to analyze a movie to its core and being insufferably bored if it was as shallow as most of the movies out there, because her primary purpose in Consuming these pictures was for the escape in itself, for the socially-acceptable drugs of serotonin, norepinephrine, adrenaline, &c., and cocktails of each of these intermixed.

Now, this evaulation should be counterbalanced in three ways. First, by noting that there is a great volume of literature and media that can be understood as didactic or be forced into that role, even if the author meant for it to be a mindless drug-delivery device (e.g., “Terminator 3″, “Lock, Stock, & Two Smoking Barrels”, &al.). And furthermore the vast majority of literature, especially, is meant to be read closely but (here’s an irritation) is used as an escape only, no higher thinking involved. Like a locked pantry full of food in a dark house to which a vagabond has recently been invited; if only the poor fellow would search for the light switch or even bring his own flashlight and avail himself of the key lying on the counter with a note hidden only by the thin darkness, he would eat to near-surfeit and have plenteous leftovers to which to return. But mainly I’m concerned with the consumerist attitudes of pop fiction and cheap (content-wise, not monetarily) movies. Second, that I again stress that this doesn’t make such reading or partaking sinful, just—in my mind—almost unconscionably wasteful. Not so much of time—because everyone needs to take time for some things, recreation included—as cognition and memory, CPU cycles that draw dead-end Wattage and gigabytes of trivial data on a finite hard drive with a finite lifespan. As it were.

So what is the difference between this and any other type of recreation? Well, you don’t learn how to deal with emotional difficulties by smoking cigarettes; you don’t understand how to connect with your kids by drinking excessively, and alone; and you don’t learn how to do anything but develop a more precise idea of what gets you off emotionally by watching movies and reading books for the sake of escape, any more than sleep for its own sake helps you deal with anthrophobia. In each of these situations there is a more constructive, and only slightly more difficult, way of coping: emotional difficulties, over time, are life’s way of making us stronger and can be endured with prayer, deep breathing, and development of one’s interests and friendships; if you can’t connect with your kids you can take the time to do something recreational for the both of you while having a “bonding moment” (think fishing, museums, road-trip conversation, sports, whatever); if you’re developing a better idea of what is maximally emotionally stimulating and seeking that out, you’re on that short road to unfeeling burnout and existential bitterness; and the way to conquer any fear is to face it gradually and with patience.

Thirdly, my harsher evaluation and subsequent not-quite-counterpoints should be balanced with a level of common sense and leniency. I enjoy a relaxing evening reading some minimally intellectual things, the occasional round of beer or glass of wine, the meaningless web page I’ll never visit again and was only an enormous time-sink. But all of these, and the harder alternatives that are in their family (i.e., “drugs” or escapes be they professionally pharmaceutical, streetcore, or naturally-occurring) must not be abused, and our culture makes it a habit (so to speak) to do just that. We read fiction that abuses our native tongues and our very minds, watch R-rated sex-laden slasher flicks and attend dance and rock clubs, drink and smoke to dampen the stimulation, quaff coffee to wake back up and then some, and sleep when all else fails. What are we doing? Only escaping reality.

The point is, where I agree with Augustine here is the sense in which we can control or limit these stimuli, especially when it involves the wasted application of our minds. Schools dedicated to rhetoric like A describes, classes in which high marks are a function of popularity based on emotionality—well, they sound rather like high schools and emo shows around the country, and I’m not surprised his soul was scorched to the point of calling all the excess involved sinful.

References.
Augustine, St. Confessions. Henry Chadwick, trans. ISBN 0-19-283372-3 (Paperback).

http://thinkforums.org/

The forums have been updated with many new helpful mods, and slowly new visitors are trickling in. Added a few forums, consolidated a few, that sort of thing. Hope you enjoy the new stuff. More to come!

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0192833723/thinkblogorg-20

xvi.26

“If we failed to drink [of the wine of error], we were caned and could not appeal to any sober judge.” To hear some tell it, this is a sign of the eschaton, impending doom, &c. TC & I have had a stimulating discussion regarding how this sort of interpretation of the Bible ignores church history. Notice that God drew Augustine out of this error, though–He doesn’t need sober judges to accomplish His purposes. (Calvin: “But who sees this? Only faith and spirit.”)

References.
Augustine, St. Confessions. Henry Chadwick, trans. ISBN 0-19-283372-3 (Paperback).

I’ve been getting the oddest spam lately. What is this? Does anyone have a clue where this stuff is coming from? They all include punned From: headers, and common proverbs or adages in the body of the mail. (Consequently they are getting through the spam filters that check percentages of “BUY NOW” kinds of language and excess markup-to-text ratio, maddeningly enough.) Behold (emphasis added):

From: “Chiggers H. Comparison” <caginess@bambozzi.com.br>
To: [me]
Subject: Greetings, white man!
Date: Wed, 23 Mar 2005 03:50:57 -0800

Let’s be having you!

thermostat

[picture]Vaarwel Sometimes adversity is what you need to face in order to become successful.

A coward is a hero with a wife, kids, and a mortgage.
Life is a tough proposition and the first hundred years are the hardest.

The dog that trots about finds a bone.
Art is either plagiarism or revolution.
In every ascetic morality man worships a part of himself as God and for that he needs to diabolize the other part.
Love bears it out even to the edge of doom.

Christianity demands a level of caring that transcends human inclinations.

In that way imagination and intelligence enter into our existence in the part of servants of the primary instincts.
It took me a long time not to judge myself through someone else’s eyes.

If the single man plant himself indomitably on his instincts, and there abide, the huge world will come round to him. Temperance and labor are the two real physicians of man. Non-cooperation with evil is as much a duty as is cooperation with good.

America: It’s like Britain, only with buttons.

Never have children, only grand children.
Look for the good, not the evil, in the conduct of members of the family.

Acquire new knowledge whilst thinking over the old, and you may become a teacher of others.

[picture] Charming people live up to the very edge of their charm, and behave as outrageously as the world lets them.

What do you make of all that?

I’ve been trying to memorize Romans 5 lately, and I found myself repeating the first five verses (all I know so far) through gritted teeth as I ran the couple of miles up and around back to my apartment. “… tribulation … perseverance … proven character … hope.” It occurred to me, the reason sometimes I get so downhearted in my own walk is that I’m being too spiritually cushy: I get comfortable with sin, I compromise, I let the thorns of this world choke out love for God.

It was a good run, though I’m not sure I’ll be in shape enough for the Bridge Run.

Now that I have BBClone up and running, I can see who’s hitting my site for what again, and I tell you, this is some fun stuff. Let’s see what I can do here. First off, Serbian queries are consistently odd (no need to go into details), but that’s probably just me. I’m sure “libz.a” is odd to some people, too. Nevertheless, here are some things with which I can help!

• Aaron Beck has done a great deal of work on developing his “Automatic thoughts” theories. One of the best books I’ve read on how this can play out in relationships–and what to do about them–is Love is Never Enough: How Couples Can Overcome Misunderstandings, Resolve Conflicts, and Solve Problems.
  

  

• “men and why they lie” is one of the funniest queries I’ve seen yet, and one of the most honest. Men lie for the same reason women lie. Actually, I’d like to know “why women lie” in this context, but when it comes right down to it, it’s pride, worry, selfishness, self-protection, or some other devious motive. I think that about sums up the reason anyone does anything wrong, though, don’t you?
• You can find loads of details on how human reproduction works here.
• In the movie the Passion of the Christ, there was spoken Aramaic, a “slang” Latin, and Greek.
• For my Brazilian reader, the English verb “to realize” along with any other verb can be conjugated automatically at this site (note that I do not endorse anything else they’re about, just found it through a Googling).

That’s it for now. Thanks for querying, and I hope you (all) come back often!

Lately I’ve had such a rough schedule, and it’s all because of myself. I can’t blame anyone but me for the fact that I’ve been fighting this, but it sure is taking it out of me.

I’ve never really been one of those people who stays up all night with literally no repercussions, to the point that I question whether there really ever were any people who could do this or can now without the help of drugs*. Ever since I was in high school, if I stayed up all night to, say, the thirty-hour mark, watch out: I became mean as a snake, or goofy like you don’t want to see, and then just straight up crashed. Naps don’t cut it. You can take a nap but still wake up exhausted, or in fact, worse off than you were before. I mean who are we kidding? If I’ve been up for a long time, there is a proportionately long time I’m going to be knocked completely out.

* I say this because I have claimed that I could stay up all night and not have it “really” affect me. This is true. But I cannot also claim that it does not affect me at all. I know good and well that I’m not at the top of my game right now, for instance, having been up for sixteen or seventeen hours after a certain amount of sleep that Wasn’t Enough. Sure, you can stay up all night, but can you really do that without it affecting your performance?

Thing is, when it’s nearly time to go to bed, it’s like everything suddenly kicks into high gear, usually because there’s so much I wanted to get done with the day and that I haven’t yet accomplished, so I end up staying up to get all sorts of little things done, not getting the Big Thing done, and then end up hating myself because I crash and sleep in the prime of day, right there in the afternoon. Today I’m going to probably go to my classes, then take a nap that lasts until, if I’m lucky, only early afternoon. Maybe I can stay up, but usually that involves drinking more coffee than my insides can take.

Part of this has to be lack of exercise. I used to run track and lift weights and all sorts of things, and lately I’ve been really, really slack. We’ll see what the next few days holds as far as PT!

http://bbclone.de/

Those of you watching the releases of BBClone hit-tracking software who, like me, had to stop using it at full functionality for a while because it was producing invalid CSS can rest easy. The latest release is more of a maintenance release than anything, but it’s impressively fast. Thanks, Olliver!

(By the way, in some CSS configurations the PHP defines still throw something off. Place the code for BBClone in the bottom of your stub file if you’re experiencing this.)

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0192833723/thinkblogorg-20

xv.24

May I echo this powerful prayer in my own heart! How many things I can learn from my boyhood if I’m willing to remember and give God the glory for it all (”in all things be thankful”; “He has not given us a spirit of fear but of power”), and turn whatever I am into someone who is able to give glory and service to the Lord. This is the first passage that struck me so that I was stunned by what he had to say; [this will help] “teach [me] how to pray.”

xvi.25

Homer “attributed divine sanction to vicious acts” in much the same way that we, in our naturalistic humanism, are self-referentially sanctioning our own actions, setting ourselves up as gods and acting accordingly. Here is the way of the “torrent of human custom.” Natural man sketches the outline of whatever god best pleases him and acts according to its standards, allowing them to flux as necessary so that the weight of unpardoned guilt doesn’t exhaust him. We in fiction write about heroes who have failings, but whose failings seem outweighed by their goodness, and they are of the same kind–if not caliber–as our own sins and good deeds. If we set up Man as god, as humanism and much of new age beliefs (”find the divinity within”) have done, who is our example? The whole of the human race, or any of its members. “Therefore, I am not a murderer on the level of Hitler, so I must be a good person; or I haven’t participated in adultery like Whomever, so I must be all right.” This is because “man looks at the outward things.”

References.
Augustine, St. Confessions. Henry Chadwick, trans. ISBN 0-19-283372-3 (Paperback).

http://www.christianitytoday.com/ct/2005/003/31.58.html

From the article’s introductory paragraphs:

Pentecostals and mainliners generally glide around each other like icebergs passing in the night. Over the years, Pentecostals have viewed mainliners with deep skepticism, judging them theologically lax and culturally spineless. Mainliners, for their part, have viewed Pentecostals—when they viewed them at all—with disdain, judging them theologically primitive and culturally unwashed. No one took prisoners.

This is a great article on what mainline Christians and Pentecostals can learn from one another. It reminds me of my recent endeavors to experience what I can in growing in Christ, while still trying to maintain balance and “sanity”; as I break the barriers of what I was brought up to believe about God by testing the Scriptures for myself (an ongoing process through which every Christian should go), I am constantly trying to find the balance between grace and legalism, what matters and what doesn’t, rigidity and responsibility.

There is a church here in Columbia, SC, that claims to have “no denominational walls.” I think this slogan and those like it just capitalizes on the college-age rhetoric of “fighting the Man,” not being categorizable, being oh-so-unique, a “real individual.” The insurgence of non-denominational churches can be a very good thing; but it can also lead to lackadaisical spiritual development and frustration in finding a good church.

Why? Denominations are not meant to be “walled-in” by any means, but to provide points of reference for believers. As long as we all worship the same Christ, we can praise God in His houses all across denominations and all across nations: an underground mission in China, a house church in Ethiopia or Tanzania, a cathedral in Milan, a Baptist church in Atlanta, or a Presbyterian church in Boston all share the “mere Christianity” of which C. S. Lewis wrote in his book by the same name.

There are certain ideas, though, that not all churches share, both tacit and explicit, about things that should be done to worship God. There is a theological position behind every liturgy, every song sung and word said and even posture struck in every church–whether the congregation is aware of it or not. Should we show respect to God by dressing in suits, being quietly reverent, intoning written prayers, singing hymns, and taking communion with wine? Or do we better show respect by clapping our hands, dressing however we feel so as to be comfortably unpretentious in God’s house, praying in tongues, shouting to the Lord our praise and dancing as David did, and taking communion with grape juice? These are just a few.

After a point, I think, it’s time to question everything that you do in your church. Why does your church do what it does? Why do you believe what you do? Is it Biblical? A non-denominational church that just sees well-thought-out denominational positions as mere “walls” knows not of the light atop the towers they uphold. Having grown up Southern Baptist, I now find that I agree with a great deal of Presbyterianism, though we worship the same Christ: and though I’m not fully sold on any single denominational position (mostly for suspense of judgment for want of knowledge), I am not therefore compelled to go to a non-denominational church, which gives me no more point of reference than each individual service or, in some cases, the individual church’s Articles of Faith.

If you attend a non-denominational church, wonderful. If you are affiliated with one or another denomination, wonderful. But never let either be an excuse not to dig into the Word and find out why you do what you do. You will, in questioning, grow in your faith in untold ways.

http://www.wired.com/news/technology/0,1282,66872,00.html/wn_ascii

In a world with millions of refugees, numerous war zones and huge areas devastated by natural disaster, aid agencies and militaries have long needed a way to quickly erect shelters on demand.

Soon, there will be such a method. A pair of engineers in London have come up with a “building in a bag” — a sack of cement-impregnated fabric. To erect the structure, all you have to do is add water to the bag and inflate it with air. Twelve hours later the Nissen-shaped shelter is dried out and ready for use.

Engineering at its finest. One one hand, I can’t believe someone hadn’t thought of this; and on the other, I can’t believe someone ever did! You can read the rest of the article at the link provided.

I wonder what this will/could mean for the homeless?