Archives for “General”
I just fixed my Google Reader widget in the sidebar just to the right of this text. I use Google Reader to share links to blog posts of special interest to me and the subjects I treat on this blog. I read a number of blogs’ RSS feeds daily (but not nearly as many as this guy!), so there’s usually quite a variety of material there.
So if you’re at all interested in what I have to say, you might like to check out my shared items where you’ll hear a lot more from people of varying degrees of like-mindedness!
Many of us prefer to stay at the threshold of the Christian life instead of going on to construct a soul in accordance with the new life God has put within. We fail because we are ignorant of the way we are made, we put things down to the devil instead of our own undisciplined natures. Think what we can be when we are roused!
There are certain things we must not pray about – moods, for instance. Moods never go by praying, moods go by kicking. A mood nearly always has its seat in the physical condition, not in the moral. It is a continual effort not to listen to the moods which arise from a physical condition, never submit to them for a second. We have to take ourselves by the scruff of the neck and shake ourselves, and we will find that we can do what we said we could not. The curse with most of us is that we won’t. The Christian life is one of incarnate spiritual pluck.
In anticipation of the last few hours of LOST, many are now asking which remaining questions need to be answered. I have heard from many fans that there are certain questions that must be addressed or they’ll consider the entire series a waste. The following is not intended to criticize those who are asking these questions, but I’d like to offer my personal response to that question.
LOST initially intrigued me because of the mysteries and the questions. For a very long time – several seasons, in fact – I would have thought I kept watching for the answers I sought. But in the last couple seasons it’s become clear to me that a major reason I continue to watch is the same reason I latched onto it at the beginning: the questions. It asks good questions. The episodes I am thrilled by the most are the ones that have me shouting, “What the—how…?!”
Related posts:- An (ancient) introduction to “faith in Christ” vs. “Christ’s faith” Originally inspired by this recent post by Doug Chaplin, I exhumed a paper I wrote in third year Greek while an undergrad (I estimate this to be c. 2000-2001). As...
- Dr. Ard Louis on science and faith: two videos I was intrigued by this short video showing Dr. Ard Louis (Oxford University) articulate a simple but profound critique of this fundamental aspect of the reasoning behind intelligent design. Read...
- More on what NT faith is about Under the typical Protestant understanding of “faith” as “not doubting something that one believes without proof”, I as a young Protestant could never fathom why God would be so tickled...
Christians coming to terms with evolution, including many ID advocates who acknowledge common descent, will often arrive at a midpoint of sorts between denial of evolution and all-out theistic evolution (or evolutionary creation) that acknowledges that we are by-products of evolution and seeks to hold the line on the most theologically problematic aspect of evolutionary theory: the historicity of Adam and Eve. For many, this is a comfortable resting place and they remain content acknowledging the deafening scientific consensus of common descent on one hand and believing in a literal first human pair on the other.
This is often done by positing a bottleneck of the population down to two individuals, often misunderstanding the unfortunately ambiguous terms Mitochondrial Eve and Y-chromosomal Adam. The more sophisticated (but odd) way of doing this is to allow there to have been more than two at the time of Adam and Eve, but to posit that the Fall event occurred to them uniquely, and that the effects have passed down to later humanity through descent from them.
Related posts:- The trouble with intramural accommodationism Can one be consistent in accepting both the common form of inerrancy as described in the Chicago Statement and universal common descent? This question is something I struggle with when...
- Dembski on theodicy and a young earth William Dembski, a father of the Intelligent Design movement, has recently become comfortable calling himself an old earth creationist who, as a good Baptist, accepts the historicity of Adam and...
- The Bible and the need for proof In his latest post, Mike mentions a Facebook conversation with someone puzzled by his rejection of inerrancy; I was involved with the conversation as well. As Mike described, this individual...
As a fairly new owner of a smart phone running the Android OS, I was happy to find a Greek NT resource for only $0.99. This app, called simply “Westcott-Hort Greek New Testament” (don’t groan – see below), is based off that outdated but public domain edition, but is enhanced with morphological tagging, lexical data (from Strong’s, but please don’t hold that against it), and notes on significant variant readings from NA27 to mitigate deficiencies in the outdated Westcott-Hort text uncovered since 1881. The text of the AV is available by clicking on the verse numbers.
Use Barcode Scanner or click the image from your phone to download this app.
There are a couple interface issues, such as (currently) not giving the option to go to a particular verse; one must simply navigate to it from within its chapter. But hey, it beats paying more for other apps to give you access to the Greek NT, usually with fewer features than this app offers. If you’d like to try it out, remember that Android Market lets you refund your purchase within 24 hours with only the click of a button. Highly recommended.
Richard Fellows, author of the blog Paul and co-workers, just put up a fascinating challengeto the near unanimous understanding of the message of the Galatian “agitators”, also adding a twist on how to understand the dynamic between Paul and the “pillars” at the Jerusalem church.
The typical scholarly understanding of the background of Galatians is that the agitators genuinely represented a Jewish faction that still believed in retaining certain Jewish customs as we see in Acts 15. The message these agitators were spreading among the Galatians is usually conceptualized something like this:
“You should be circumcised because scripture and the Jerusalem church leaders require it. Why should you believe Paul when he tells you that you don’t have to be circumcised?”
In other words, they challenged Paul’s apostolic authority, subjugating it to that of the Jerusalem leadership. Richard Fellows, however, thinks that their message was somewhat different:
Related posts:- An (ancient) introduction to “faith in Christ” vs. “Christ’s faith” Originally inspired by this recent post by Doug Chaplin, I exhumed a paper I wrote in third year Greek while an undergrad (I estimate this to be c. 2000-2001). As...
Ok, this is the beginning of a series I’ve been meaning to start up for quite some time.
My mission: I’m going to post a lyric that attempts to make theological/philosophical observations I find interesting. I may or may not choose to highlight my own specific thoughts on the subject (but you’ll probably be able to get some idea from looking at the post tags).
Your mission: Tell us what you think of the message of the lyric. For instance, tell what you think the lyricist(s) observations were, what you think of those observations, or how well they performed lyrical artistry in this song. Don’t concentrate so much on why you do or don’t like the artist/musical genre, etc.
Electric Train
written by Larry Tagg, recorded by Bourgeois Tagg on Bourgeois Tagg
The Intelligent Design documentary Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed was never released in the theaters in the UK, so now in the wake of the DVD’s release there this month, the UK radio show Unbelievable has recently partnered with someone named Mark Haville to host the first screening of the movie to a UK audience. In anticipation of this event, Unbelievable has done a couple of shows related to the topic.
This last weekend’s show was an interesting knock-down-drag-out between Meyers and atheist Peter Atkins of chemistry textbook fame. I thought I’d direct my readers to it, if for no other reason than to enjoy the fireworks that result. I thought the discussion of Meyers’s trademark information theory arguments for ID almost went somewhere really helpful, but since Meyers has the tendency to filibuster and Atkins has a short fuse, and because both have no qualms about talking over one another, the topic ended up stillborn. In any event, it is evident that they are in effect speaking two entirely different languages.
Related posts:- No arguments from ignorance allowed R.C. Sproul recently had a discussion with Ben Stein, host of a documentary called “Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed”. This documentary takes a look at the way some colleges appear to...
- My crackpot detector’s about to explode .!. Three unmistakeable signs of someone no one has any business taking even half-seriously: 1) They imply or state outright that the beginning of the universe, the earth, or...
- Enemies united against an imaginary foe I’ve been quite vocal on this blog in pointing out my disagreements with the Christian critics of science (ID advocates and other creationists). Unfortunately, these special creationists have had quite...
First of all, I have decided to try to use this blog as something other than a distraction from my doctoral work. Specifically, I’m going to try to figure out ways of including aspects of my research for my dissertation here (but not so much that I get ripped off, of course). For those who don’t know, I am ABD in a PhD program in historical linguistics at the University of Georgia. My dissertation involves translations of the Gospels into a few languages for whom those translations are among the earliest attestations. It’s more interested in linguistic aspects of those translation languages than the Gospels qua biblical literature, but my interaction with them is bound to bleed over, at least in my understanding and familiarity with them. So we’ll see how that goes.
Related posts:- Dialectology and the Gospels Since starting my research of the Gospels for my dissertation, I have repeatedly wondered (as I idly mused earlier) if there have been any attempts to identify where the Gospels...
- Meandering through the Synoptics Ok, I promised to write stuff I find interesting as I go through my diss research, so here’s a couple thoughts I had tonight as I was researching. These will...
Today I put in a bid to join the newly revived Biblioblogs rankings list. Listed blogs that are related to biblical studies of one sort or another are ranked based upon their traffic as recorded by Alexa. Since this list is in new hands, it’s currently pending a revision of the standards determining what is and what isn’t a “Biblioblog”.
In the meantime, a blogger who happens to regularly top the list in rankings simultaneously savagely misrepresented me and fair-mindedly (or schizophrenically) recommended that my blog get ranked, despite his penchant for trying to get people thrown off this list. With friends like that…well, I’ll take any friends I can get.
For the record – as if my readers didn’t know any of this - I am not a creationist, an inerrantist, a Calvinist of any stripe, nor someone who holds any water for the Manhattan Declaration (I haven’t so much as mentioned it on this blog). I can’t afford to allow these below-the-belt charges to color anyone’s perception of me while I’m trying to get recognized as an honest-to-gosh “Biblioblogger”.
I was honored to receive an award from James McGrath at Exploring Our Matrix, who was himself a deserving recipient. The idea is to honor five to seven blogs whose content is considered particularly inspiring. What a hard award for me to give, as I typically don’t frequent blogs I don’t find, in some sense, inspiring! Not only that, but I don’t have a huge repertoire of blogs, so, as you’ll see, I’ve actually tagged two or three of them before. But to give proper honor to the award that has honored me, I must pass it on. So here are the five that came to my head when I was looking for five places to hang the plaque engraved “Inspiring”:
In case you were wondering why this site was down all day on Tuesday (grrrrr), my .htaccess file keeps crippling the site with a 500 internal server error. This time I didn’t guess that it was my .htaccess again, and it took me all day to have a chance to diagnose and correct it. Won’t take me that long next time. I can only guess that it’s one of my plugins causing the problem, but it’s too intermittent a problem to find the culprit by process of elimination. I tried changing the permissions on the file, so we’ll see how that works. If you’ve got any better suggestions, please deliver — I’m a total noob with this stuff.
The most annoying thing was that I had just published a new post (in case you missed it, check it out) that probably hit everyone’s RSS reader, and so they came to check it out and KERSPLAT. I apologize. And welcome back!
Wow! Heather at Heather’s Hodgepodge has bestowed upon me an award that I accept gratefully. This is an honor coming from Heather, who definitely deserved the award herself.
As with all awards, there are some rules and they are as follows:
* Each Superior Scribbler must in turn pass the award on to 5 most-deserving Bloggy Friends.
* Each Superior Scribbler must link to the author and the name of the blog from whom he/she has received the Award.
* Each Superior Scribbler must display the award on his/her blog, and link to this post, which explains the award.
* Each Blogger who wins the Superior Scribbler Award must visit this post and add his/her name to the Mr. Linky List (scroll down). That way, we’ll be able to keep up-to-date on everyone who receives this prestigious honor!
What an…honor(?) to be tagged with the Honest Scrap Meme by one Joshua Cecil Horne at the Smoak House.
Honest Scrap Award
I’ll let Josh tell you about it:
When accepting this auspicious award, you must write a post bragging about it (hence my over-the-top cocky title for this post), including the name of the misguided soul who thinks you deserve such acclaim, and link back to said person so everyone knows he or she is real. Choose a minimum of 7 blogs that you find brilliant in content or design. Or improvise by including bloggers who have no idea who you are because you don’t have 7 friends. Show the 7 random victims’ names and links and leave a harassing comment informing them that they were prized with “Honest Weblog.” Well, there’s no prize, but they can keep the nifty icon. List at least ten honest things about yourself. Then, pass it on!
So without any further ado, here I go…
I am aware that a few of my theological positions are considered by many of my evangelical readers to be "liberal" (e.g. my beliefs on origins and biblical inerrancy). But this post will (unfortunately and unintentionally) be likely to cause controversy due to its blatant conservatism. More conservative, it turns out, than most modern evangelicals. Anyone know right offhand the first directive God is recorded to have issued mankind? Hint: it’s not about which tree to eat from. This one reveals one of God’s chief purposes for the race He created as the crowning constituent of His world: “Have lots of babies. Raise them to take their place in the administration of My Kingdom.” This is obviously my own colloquialization of Genesis 1.28, but I’m sure you have guessed the wording of the original command: “Be fruitful and increase in number; fill the earth and subdue it. Rule over the fish of the sea and the birds of the air and over every living creature that moves on the ground.” It has been said that this was “a blessing, not a command,” and indeed, the words quoted above were introduced as a blessing: “Then God blessed them and said…” Now I want you to try to imagine how being blessed is not also an act of commission: how like God would it be to make provision for something He doesn’t care one way or another about? I can’t think of anything in Scripture that sounds anything remotely like, “You know, you may never wish to take advantage of this blessing, but I just want you to know that if you ever want to [blank], I’ve got you covered.” God’s blessings express His heart; far from offering an option subject to be disregarded at our whim, His blessings communicate His plan and His commitment to seeing that plan through to fulfillment. Even in recent times, right up until and even after industrialization, the pattern God ordained was still maintained on a broad scale. Parents wanted to have children to help out in or around the home or contribute income from other employment as soon as they came of age; children were expected to help provide for their parents and siblings as time progressed. Family was a primary focus of everyone’s life; those for whom this was not the case were looked on as flighty, uncommitted, and frivolous. But things changed: it was as though humanity decided that its commission to subdue the earth was complete, and so reproduction was optional at best and too downright inconvenient at worst. Too often these days in which self-centeredness is the rule, Americans who start having children early (and by early I mean before their late twenties) are assumed to be either 1) clumsy in their birth control efforts or 2) quaint and old-fashioned. Usually in that order.* Actually, that first assumption is somewhat justifiable: since the advent of birth control, people have been able to enjoy sex with abandon simply for mutual or self-gratification. Christians with this mindset thank God for the gift of birth control. Birth control may in fact be a gift of God, but one arguably more beneficial to the Kingdom when unbelievers avail themselves of it. Consider the following points. Related posts:
- Homeschooling and agendas There is no bigger proponent of home education than yours truly. I myself was homeschooled from the fifth grade through graduation. Although a somewhat shy, awkward kid, I somehow turned...
I thought it might be a good idea to follow up on the poll I set up for “Why are so many Christian scientists evolutionists?”. Obviously, no poll on such a matter could be even close to definitive, or even representative of my readership. But I thought, given the high traffic the post preceding it gathered, I thought it might show some interesting results. I have to date received 30 votes. Let me break them down a little.
26 voters said that believing scientists accept evolutionary theory simply because that’s what they feel the empirical data shows. This is my position, and the position of the others who linked to my site that brought all the traffic, so this shouldn’t be too surprising.
Related posts:- Why Christian scientists are evolutionists, revisited When I posted the poll, “Why do Christian scientists often profess belief in human evolution?”, originally under this post and since then in my sidebar, I resolved that I would...
- Why are so many Christian scientists evolutionists? As a followup on my reason number two from Why the debate over creationism matters, wherein I state a couple sources underlying this question, I’d like to get my readers’...
- How big a deal is this evolution thing, anyway? I get the impression from some I know that I spend too much time worrying about the creation/evolution controversy. So in case you didn’t notice, I posted a new poll in...
Following the lead among my local blogger friends Saige, Heather, and Josh, all of whose blogs have around 200 posts, I decided to reckon my own post count.
Now, mind, I started blogging on a blog called Don’t Dream It’s Over in March 2006. Note for anyone clicking on those links: it’s a part of the blog system for a site called Planet Preterist, where my user name has always been “Ransom” (I am still proud of the blog’s tagline: “Where Ransom goes to rant some”). Also, a visitor to that site and this one would notice some quite similar blog posts, due in part to the fact that I imported a number of DDIO posts to Undeception (originally hosted at wordpress.com) when I started the latter, and in part to the fact that since starting Undeception I have cross-posted a couple newer posts for the attention of those at Planet Preterist.
Related posts:- Major revision to an earlier post A correction from a commenter shows that I was wrong in attributing the following quote to Eusebius, the Early Christian Father (ECF), in my post entitled: “Is full preterism a...
I’m embroiled once again in a major challenge in my personal life that, aside from some interesting interaction in the comments, has kept me from posting here over the last couple weeks (it’s the same issue that occasioned my “Radio Silence” post). I am confident I will have all this behind me in just a couple weeks’ time.
Just thought I’d let you know…
Steve
P.S. Once again I solicit your prayers for my satisfactory performance.
My MacBook laptop’s hard drive crashed last week and I’ve been waiting to get it repaired; apparently you aren’t supposed to move them when they’re storing data to the hard drive…and I didn’t know it…*ahem*
Anyway, I lost lots of precious data (including all the family videos recorded this year!!!), but if I can forget that, I think it’ll be all right. Oh, and because I have AppleCare (an extended warranty), they replaced the hard drive for free and paid for shipping both ways. That would have been good enough, but additionally they replaced the whole keyboard/trackpad part of the computer, which had undergone some unfortunate wear and tear, free of charge. I sent it in Tuesday and it was delivered back in good-as-new condition on Thursday before noon. That’s customer service.
Anyone who’s tried to use this site more than a few times over the last year has noticed significant down-times, lags, and/or empty page pulls. I’ve put up with it because the host I’ve been using, 110mb is a free host, which means it doesn’t cost to run my website off of their servers.
Well, I’m trying a cheap (pay) host now, and as some of you may have noticed, it deleted the earlier version of this post. I’ll have to figure out what’s going on…
EDIT:
Ok, I think I know what happened. This morning, I unwittingly posted the original version of this post on the old web host because the domain undeception.com was temporarily – as a glitch – pointing to the old host. At some point after posting the original, my new host took back the domain. The glitch was likely due to my not removing undeception.com from the old host’s records, which I have now done. The RSS feed seems to be lagging behind and reading from the old host, 110mb, so people are seeing errors messages until I can resolve that.
Following Mike Beidler’s lead, I’m notifying my readers that I’ve just added this blog to the Blog Networks app on Facebook. How’s about adding mine to your list and notifying me if I haven’t added yours to mine yet?
Looks like the Chinese have been found out – but they’ll probably never admit it.
It seems one impossibly young-looking female gymnast from China’s team was described in a state-run news report last year as being only 13 years old, which would make her ineligible for the Olympics this year and her contributions illegitimate.
Okay, so the Chinese government’s crooked. No surprise. But the reason I’m posting this is that quotes like the following in the AP article I read had me scratching my head as I skimmed through it:
Chinese authorities insist that all three are old enough to compete. He herself told reporters after Wednesday’s final that “my real age is 16. I don’t pay any attention to what everyone says.”
My long-time friend Heather has tagged me with a meme listing my five favorite things (in no particular order). So here we go!
1) Receiving and spreading knowledge. I am an education nut (read: “nerd”); I love to receive it, and welcome opportunities to share it.
2) Discussing important topics. I want real back-and-forth dialogue on things that I’m interested in. I’m not much of a small talk guy. I like big talk: theology, politics, pressing interpersonal problems, anything that matters or strikes my fancy as unique. Discussion of sports does not qualify.
3) Studying origins. I’m not primarily talking about the evolution/creation controversy here: I like to know about the beginning of almost anything. This has led to almost choosing ancient history as my postgraduate field, and it did lead to my choice of Indo-European/Germanic linguistics, which seeks to uncover the details of the origin of each language family. I like visiting historical sites so that I can experience, as much as possible, times and circumstances anterior to my own – and the earlier, the better.
I’ve been thinking about switching themes for months now, but this weekend I’ve been toying with the one you see here. I can already see some things that I’m going to want to tweak, but if you have any suggestions as well, let me know. Also notice that I am trying out a “wall” widget à la Facebook on the rightmost sidebar right beneath the “Recent comments” widget; if you wouldn’t mind, leave any comments you have on the theme there so I can see how it works.
Edit: I removed the wall widget. One, I can’t see people using it, and two, I didn’t like the comments showing up in my “Recent Comments” widget.