ThinkBlog

Christians, how do you feel about Halloween? Should it be celebrated, and if so, how and to what extent? Does it really glorify demons as some have conjectured, or is it a harmless commercialized holiday?

Another bit of mail from early 2004 to the Philosophy Club at GTC’s mailing list. It’s recently become relevant again to some things that have been going on in Bible study and to the questions flying around in my head.

If the Bible is the main source of Christian knowledge on
God, a Christian theoretically would consider the Bible a
prime source of morality. That is, if that said
Christian believes his or her morality comes from the
Bible or Christianity.

The one and only source of knowledge of God is God Himself as He expresses Himself through the Word. Jesus is called the Word of God; so when we speak with Jesus in prayer, we are then also receiving the word of God, and a source of knowledge there also. God will never contradict something He’s already said–this is a crucial point–so we check out everything we hear in prayer with the Bible, so we know it’s accurate and sound. Let it never be said that God wants mindless flunkies who don’t question and are never skeptical: honest skeptics (those who want real answers and for whom their questions present genuine barriers to faith–and are not just an intellectual smoke screen that sum up to be an excuse not to have to believe in someOne that might change their lifestyles) are special in God’s sight. Luke the physician records, “Now the Bereans were of more noble character than the Thessalonians, for they received the message with great eagerness and examined the Scriptures every day to see if what Paul said was true.” Paul was a first-century theological teacher. Could they trust what he told them? They checked it out in Scripture to be sure. Now, why would they be more noble if God didn’t love and approve of people questioning Him? To ask God a question is to provide Him with an opening to display His wisdom and might in our minds, hearts, and lives–keeping in mind that this question must of course be genuine.

That’s a bit of a tangent, but I just wanted to make clear that (1) prayer and the spiritual ministry of Jesus is as important as the written Word; and (2) God rejoices over an honest skeptic.

That being said, if all of the
Bible reflects truth, how does one reconcile such
apparent contradictions? In my opinion, they serve as a
source of invalidation for the Bible. However, I’m
curious as to how a Christian approaches this issue.

I wonder at the objectivity of bringing a generalized claim to the floor without evidence, but to answer your question as to how a Christian approaches this issue–well, by taking each apparent contradiction in turn and seeking out the answer. God is not afraid of our toughest questions, although men (like myself) may not be adequate in speech or knowledge to convey the answers ourselves. “Seek and ye shall find….”

Technorati Tags: epistemology, Christianity, apologetics

This year (last night), I went to a Halloween party dressed in my dad’s old fatigues from the Army reserve. Other than being a commentary on how well U.S. Army-made clothing holds up after thirty years, I’m sure it also says something about how things change and yet stay the same….

“No man sins more unreservedly than he who sins in desperation, believing that there is no pardon for him from God.” —C. H. Spurgeon

I certainly found this to be true in my own life. I was sharing my testimony a couple of weeks ago and I realized that during those dark years of my early college career during which my ignorance of the eternity of “eternal salvation in Christ” I became an altogether reckless individual. As much as we Christians are bad about trying to earn our salvation and depending only half on His grace and half on our own “goodness,” hell hath no greater friend than the Christian who believes himself to have been forsaken. Thank God that His grace is beyond our power to throw away or nullify!

This is a no-nonsense Perl script that can be cleverly inserted into a cron job or just run from the commandline at any time on your Linux or Windows box (assuming you have Perl). As I said on John’s post, people on Digg are downplaying it because WordPress “automatically” does this, but what about if you want to use something other than Ping-O-Matic (another option is Pingoat)? Especially useful if you have multiple blogs or are administrating a multiple-platform blogging community.

read more | digg story

If you’re running Gaim under Windows and it hangs, remember to check to see if the TCL/Tk DLL might be the offender: I spent fifteen frustrated minutes uninstalling or disabling everything from codecs to antivirus software before I remembered that tcl.dll (under %GAIMDIR%\plugins\, where %GAIMDIR% is by default “C:\Program Files\Gaim”) causes Gaim to hang on my machines consistently for some reason. Renaming it tcl.dll.NO made Gaim skip it.

If you start Gaim and the process is running without complaint and without crashing, but never appears, it has likely hung on the TCL DLL; you can check this by opening a command prompt (Start -> Run… -> “cmd” [Enter]) and running gaim.exe with the –debug option on.

A couple of years ago, when I was Secretary of the Philosophy Club at GTC, I fielded a somewhat-sarcastic question about shellfish and Jewish dietary laws with a serious response, since I figured it deserved an answer with more gravitas than the spirit in which the question had been asked.  I mirror that question/response below unedited because it came up again in a Bible study this past week and I was reminded that I never did put that on here.  It’s a little outside of my current style, and it was written as a mostly-casual email, but I stand behind the concepts expressed.

I posited the immutability of God, to which someone replied something to the effect that His laws sure have, so what does that say?  I answered that the spirit in which those laws were written has not changed; and that furthermore to interpret the OT and NT theologies as being temporally distinct is to tacitly admit that their Author has shifted views.  Thus began the discussion. [If you find an error of any sort, kindly bring it to my attention.]

[Someone] wrote on 2004/03/04 17:41 ET:

> So, you would agree then that eating shellfish is
> still an abomination to God?

For those of you who are unfamiliar with what [the questioner] is talking about, he cites Levitical law that prohibits the eating of pork, shellfish, and other certain meats and such things. This was highly important to the Jews before Christ’s incarnation.

You touch on an extremely important and very exciting point—! It is important to understand for what Levitical law was put into place, and why there were all these specific ritual regulations.

Follow me on this. God has made an everlasting covenant with those who love Him and believe on Him. The Lord is the author of life and of *diversity* and has chosen to exhibit and express His covenant of love to us humans in several different stages through the millennia, according to what we could best understand.

The Jews of Abraham’s day, and of Moses’ day, were a very sensate-focused people. They were good with their hands; hard workers, agriculturally and creatively; carpenters, craftsmen, everything. Even their language is highly concrete: there are no abstractions in the Hebrew tongue insofar as words are concerned—that is, they had not the words to express what we consider abstract concepts. Take, for instance, the alphabet. Each letter corresponds to not only a letter, but also a concrete meaning tied to a symbolic meaning that they could not otherwise express. The second letter, for instance, “Bet”—looks like the roof, floor, and side of a house, and it stands for “house” (how ’bout that!). Symbolically, it means “place of dwelling,” “shelter,” &c. Whole words were the same way. When in our language we read, “The Lord is slow to anger,” in Hebrew this reads “I AM [the name of the Lord] is slow to nose.” Slow to nose?! you might say. Yes, think about it: when you’re angry, you begin breathing more heavily and your nostrils flare! Other examples include “horn” for “strength,” and “breath” or “throat” for “soul.”

So what’s the point? Well, just as their language was highly concrete, so was their connection to understanding sin. Over and over in the Old Testament (and the New, for that matter!), there are places where God makes it clear that He desires for His people to abstain from immorality. Well, how does He convey that to a people who don’t have any abstract words? God wants to reveal His truth to everyone, so naturally, He will reveal it to His people however they can best understand. In the ancient Jews’ case, this was through physical actions of either Doing Something or Not Doing Something.

For instance, the reason Jews even today will on proscribed days eat only bread without leaven (yeast) is because yeast is given in the Bible as an analogy for sin. Yeast, like sin, works itself through the dough, ferments (rots) it, spreads like bacteria on a petri dish, and is dog gone near impossible to extract from dough into which it has been worked. So to make His people understand that they are to be set apart morally (”holy”) from those around them, and pleasing to Him, He would have them abstain from dough with yeast in it to remind them that they are to make sure their souls and lives did not contain sins that would end up destroying them.

So then! we come to the shellfish and unclean animals. Just as with other physical demonstrations of purity, outpourings of their spirits that they otherwise would have trouble expressing (i.e., verbally as we often do), God gave specific instructions for them to eat certain things and abstain from others, as further illustrations on a concrete level of spiritual truths that they would otherwise had immense trouble grasping. There were two categories of animals: those that were acceptable for eating and sacrificing to the Lord, and those that were not. The ones that were, were called “kosher”—that is, “clean” or “whole.” The ones that were unacceptable were called “treif”—that is, “unclean” or “ripped.”

Shellfish, pigs, vultures, spiders, flies, bugs, rats, and mice are example of these “treif”—unclean—animals. What these all have in common are that the eating thereof or touching of their dead carcasses (also forbidden by Levitical law) would have contributed exceedingly to the spread of communicable diseases. Pigs will eat anything on the ground, just about; shellfish are the pigs of the ocean; vultures scavenge the dead carcasses of just about any meaty thing; and bugs and spiders could not only sting/bite to death but were also (as now) carriers of various pestilences. So there are health concerns for the Hebrew people back in the day: God was giving them these strict dietary laws, in part, because by abstaining from unclean animals they would keep themselves healthy and from disease. These dietary laws are often still practiced by both Jews and Gentiles (non-Jews) alike today, because by doing so one will be quite healthy. (Don’t believe me? In the US alone, three of six [50%] of the most common food-borne parasites in humans are associated with eating pork, the animal considered among the “most unclean” by the ancient Jews.)

But of course, it doesn’t stop there! God was also illustrating concepts about spiritual health to His people. God’s chosen people whom He loves and who love Him are to be set apart morally, to not pollute their minds and souls with that which does not bring them closer to Him and help them illustrate His awesome love to those that don’t know Him. Eating with someone, or eating something, showed to the Jews an extremely intimate communion. To eat with someone was to commune with them on a level for which we in Western societies have nearly lost an appreciation. We are not to “eat” the spiritual “shellfish” of this world: we only allow our spirits to commune intimately with the “clean” spiritual food that feeds our souls and brings us closer to the glorious knowledge of our awesome and loving God. We are not to feast on “vultures”: not to take into our minds and hearts that which is dead and decaying, that which does not edify us to life and better understanding of Him. (Concrete examples might be participating in mockery and gossip, being around people who cast hateful curses all over the place, &c.) We are not to eat “spiders”: there are certain things to which each person is so morally vulnerable that to be “bitten” by them is to kill them spiritually—to deaden them to the voice of God.

What, then? you ask. Get to the point, Michael: has not God changed His mind, since you, even you, Christian, enjoy Irashiai Sushi Pub and Henry’s BBQ? And I answer thus. These dietary regulations served the purpose of keeping the ancient Israelites healthy both physically and spiritually. When Jesus came, He declared all foods to be “clean.” (Mt 7:14-23) This is because we (humanity) were at a level where we no longer needed physical restrictions to illustrate spiritual principles, and medicines and hygeine had begun to advance to the point that mortality would not necessarily be significantly increased by the partaking of certain foods. We can understand abstract concepts now, and we usually link abstractions with spiritual concepts though there is *not* a stepladder progression from concrete > abstract > spiritual, as some think (and I was once among them). Because we don’t need such constant, physical reminders of God’s laws as Christians—having God’s laws written on our hearts (Heb 10:16, Jer 31:33-34)—all foods are clean.

Take careful note, though, that God has not changed His mind in the slightest. Believers are still to abstain from spiritual “scavengers” and “spiders,” still to keep ourselves set apart from all the spiritual mud, gunk, nast, disease, and mind-numbing junk that this world throws at us. We are to live lives that please our loving and wonderful, morally perfect God. But we no longer are held to using our physical intakes as living illustrations of those truths. What has changed is neither the nature of God nor His morality for our lives, the lives for those who believe in Him—only the way in which that was physically expressed has been repealed to illustrate the powerful freedom that the Christian has in his Lord and savior.

Again, if I’ve been unclear, please let me know so that I can clarify; and, even though I love Judaic culture and language, I’m by no means an expert! Check this stuff out for yourself—and check out the Scripture verses, too. An onine, searchable, indexed Bible in 18 English translations (!) can be found here.

Technorati Tags: God, dietary law, shellfish, Judaica, Christianity, religion, immutability

I was relieved to find that the GRE (the grad-equivalent of the SAT—it’s even by the same people!) has only sixth-through-ninth-grade maths on it; but in my review of some old concepts, I stumbled across factorials, which I last dealt with in programming recursive methods that would take a value and return its factorial only after a memory-and-proc-intensive computation. The factorial of any number is defined as that number times one less than it, times one less, and so forth, all the way down to 1: or, 1 times 2 times 3 and so on until we get to the number itself. Hence, Five factorial (written “5!”) equals 120, because 5*4*3*2*1==120.

But what about 0! ? Prima facie it makes sense that 0! would be 0, because 0*1==0, but it’s not. There is an explanation (which for the curious can be found here) as to why 0!==1, but I think we can all agree it doesn’t seem immediately intuitive.

This provides a funny, perhaps ridiculous, yet telling illustration of Creation. God created ex nihilo Being, i.e., all that exists, by speaking. If we may exercise a bit of comedic license, we can say that God shouted (!) at zero (nothingness) and 1 (Being) was the result; and at first it doesn’t make intuitive sense, but if we know the underlying algorithym (God’s character) everything just falls right into place.

I had a young lady come into the Vitamin Shoppe (my “day job”) the other day asking after some multivitamins “that don’t stink.” I asked her what she meant, specifically, and pointed out several different kinds of multis that we carry—she wrinkled her nose at each of them and said “That! That’s what I’m talkin’ ’bout. They stink!” My coworker then asked incredulously, “But ma’am, shouldn’t you take the vitamins even if they smell a little bit like vitamins, if it’ll help you feel better?” She replied in the negative as though the answer were as obvious as her standing before us.

I tried giving her the benefit of the doubt: I figured, well, maybe she just doesn’t understand the foundations of our objection to her objection, right? So I tell her plainly, “But ma’am, aesthetic considerations should never come before your own good health.” Surely that’s something to which we can all agree.

She cocked her eyebrow at me with all the seriousness and candor as if I had suggested to her she dumpster-dive for a seven-course meal. “Sure they should!”

I admit, I was flabbergasted. I don’t even use that word, let alone exemplify it, but maybe once or twice a year! Later, when I had time to laugh it off outside of her presence, I realized that I was genuinely curious to hear her justification of that. It’s a matter of course to hear someone justify doing something that feels good in the physical realm while being detrimental to one’s mental or spiritual faculties (e.g., smoking pot, overeating, fornicating, &c.)—but to hear that matters of taste (primarily a physiopsychological and highly subjective value judgment that may or may not affect anything but whether people laugh at you for wearing a black belt with brown shoes) win out over matters of one’s own good health (also physiopsychological, and arguably foundational to other kinds of well-being and societal usefulness) was just a little too much.

Isn’t this one reason why Europeans hate Americans? That our selfish, fat, concupiscently inclined bodies rule where better judgment ought, even in matters as simple as taking care of ourselves on a basic level?

Went to the state fair yesterday with a friend, where an amusing thought struck me as we strolled beneath the creaking, flashing rides.

You enter from the larger reality—in this case, the city of Columbia, SC or, more broadly, the state itself—and don’t quite know what to expect. You come in. There’s a lot of food the eating of which feels really great for that moment and the penalty for which is an expanding waistline and gastrointestinal distress the likes of which could fell pachyderms. There are many distractors: sirens blaring, lights flashing, rides running, workers shouting their a priori approval of your skills at whatever rigged game they’re standing before to entice you to spend wads of cash on meaningless oversized schwag that somehow seems really important at the moment. Everything seems urgent, controlled chaos. The amount of work it took to throw this expensive multifaceted party is almost inconceivable—and it’ll all be over in a few short days, mere moments in which children cry and laugh; in which children of all ages eat and overeat all sorts of things that even a McDonalds junkie wouldn’t touch more than once a year; in which fun will be had, people and jackets will get lost and found, and then—they’ll tear it down for another year.

And it hit me: the fair is like Creation. Insofar as we may attribute “labor” to omnipotent deity, God labored for six days to separate the waters, to scatter the stars in the heavens, to make plants and fish and man. People enter not knowing what to expect, get distracted by all sorts of things that at best don’t matter in the grand scheme of things, eat too much, are unhealthy—then POOF, everyone has to leave the fair sometime and go out into the larger reality, and at the end of time the fair is taken down, and that’s it. All that hullaballoo for just a short burst, in terms of the long run. (Of course if I held to the Greek conception of time, the analogy would go further: the universe would be remade and unmade, time without end, in a cyclical pattern. But I digress.)

Briefly.

I saw this with my roommate last night, and I have to admit that I agree with his assessment: it was one of the most violent movies ever put to film. The acting was superb; the casting was practically perfect; the setting was just grim enough to pull it off. In short, it was a near-perfect film—except for that nagging little fact that I now know and cannot forget exactly how it looks when a man gets shot point-blank in the face (or from the side, or from behind, or slightly at one angle and downward…).

This is the first movie in which Leonardo DiCaprio doesn’t look like the delicate MTV playboy that everyone seemed to love so much in Titanic (though I still wouldn’t know, having never seen it), Matt Damon proves once again how gifted an actor he is, and Jack Nicholson is your typical sleazeball, R. P. McMurphy all over again only without the charm. Mark Wahlberg unexpectedly steals the show.

But the real question is why there’s a trend in American cinema toward violence while sexual intercourse remains (much more) taboo. Everyone from the Euros to the Aussies are laughing at us because we send nearly one million complaints to the FCC because of one flashed boob at the Super Bowl while we think nothing of prime-time stabbings, shootings, gang violence, and so forth. This movie seemed to sum up in caricature that mindset: there was one “suggestive” love scene which was by no means explicit nestled between more than two hours of highly tense scenes involving loss of identity, self-hatred, and militaristic acts of violence. Why is that? Why are we so afraid of sex but seem to have a fascination with violence?

HOUSE: … I convinced her she’d be better off without me.

WILSON: You’re an idiot. You don’t think she’d be better off without you.

HOUSE: Right.

WILSON: You have no idea why you sent her off!

HOUSE: —Don’t do this—

WILSON: This was no great sacrifice! You sent her away because you’ve got to be miserable.

HOUSE: That kind of psycho crap get your patients through the long nights? Or’s it just for you? Tough love make you feel good, helping people feel their pain?

WILSON: You don’t like yourself. But you do admire yourself. That’s all you’ve got, so you cling to it. You’re so afraid if you change, you’ll lose what makes you special. Being miserable doesn’t make you better than anybody else, House. It just makes you miserable.

House, M.D. is my guilty little pleasure. I don’t own a TV, and as a rule I don’t watch television. But between this and 24 the small screen has me locked in, at least when it hits DVD. Anyway, I enjoy House because of moments like this in which I not only love/hate the main character, but identify with him to the point that for a second I don’t know whether the look on my face is a grimace or a smile. I think many in academia (and diagnosticians on this character’s level are inevitably still academics, whether abiding in the ivory towers or not) fall prey to this; or at least, I have. This sense of being damaged and proud of it, jaded and happy about it. “Better because I’ve hit bottom.” Tyler Durden syndrome, or something. I wonder: is this a problem for psychologists or theologians?

[EDIT: In the interest of gratitude, I should mention that it was my wonderful father who took pity on my non-mobile, technologically deficient state and offered me multiple hundreds of dollars more than I had asked him for to put toward what was initially supposed to be a crappy < $400 machine that would just barely cough through the ‘net with Firefox and maybe do some word processing on OpenOffice. It was a great blessing to have had him offer enough to purchase a machine that I’m certain will last me happily for several years. Thanks, Dad. ]

I didn’t want to pay hundreds of extra dollars for a name brand laptop, so I went with an Acer Aspire AS5102WLMi, and couldn’t be more pleased. Sharp, high-contrast screen, dual-core AMD64 proc, and 2GB of RAM … they even kindly pre-partitioned the 120GB hard drive off in halves for me, so I can slam a little Gentoo when I’m able to reward myself for finishing the GRE!

On the other hand, UPS lost my package for almost a week. That was a remarkably infuriating experience, but I learned a little patience: when I finally gave up six days later and took a nap mid-day, it arrived.

I don’t have much else to report on this, other than that I’ll be taking detailed notes when I do put Linux on it, and let my readers know of any and all problems, solutions, regrets, and other such nonsense.

I attempted in vain for an entire night (until the morning, naturally) to do everything in my power to get the RaLink RT61 chipset on this Linksys card running. I’d bought it at a local Wal-Mart for $50 because I was too impatient to do my homework like a good little geek and go to NewEgg like I had for the new laptop. (More on that later!)

RaLink provides drivers for this chipset, but the three options—NdisWrapper, compile the driver natively and install as a module, and the beta software available out there is apparently so beta it should be considered alpha to most who don’t want to pull their hair out.

If you want to do your own research, check out NdisWrapper, the above RaLink URL, and Google “Linux RT61“.

(Be sure to check your version number, though; v4.0 of this card uses the older, more stable and more community-supported RT2500 chipset.)

Round two? The EDIMAX EW-7325IG from NewEgg, with a Linux-compatible Atheros chipset. We’ll see how it works out.

A while back, I found this on someone’s MySpace. Despite the trite, anonymous nature of the text, it seems this contains more truth than most MS memes. What do you think?

As we grow up, we learn that even the one person that wasn’t supposed to ever let you down probably will. You will have your heart broken probably more than once and it’s harder every time. You’ll break hearts too, so remember how it felt when yours was broken. You’ll fight with your best friend. You’ll blame a new love for things an old one did. You’ll cry because time is passing too fast, and you’ll eventually lose someone you love. So take too many pictures, laugh too much, and love like you’ve never been hurt because every sixty seconds you spend upset is a minute of happiness you’ll never get back.

I really enjoy texts like this. Give it to me straight, Doc. Don’t sugar-coat. But often things that are meant to be straightforward are just angsty; this seems beyond angst. The unfortunately saccharine ending (your typical “dance like no one’s looking” nonsense, as though that actually means something) detracts from the thought, but nevermind that. Again, I really want to know your opinion.