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Showing posts from September, 2008

There is none righteous...

... no, not one! (Romans 3:10) Is Paul's teaching of human depravity too pessimistic? What about that nice guy down the street who always supports community causes, or that kind co-worker who has more integrity than many professing Christians we've met? Robert Mounce gives one possible explanation... "Paul's portrayal of the unrighteous person may seem overly pessimistic to many contemporaries. After all, do we not all know certain individuals who live rather exemplary lives apart from Christ? Certainly they do not fit the description just laid out. Although it may be true that many of our acquaintances are not as outwardly wicked as the litany would suggest, we must remember that they are also benefactors of a civilization deeply influenced by a pervasive Judeo-Christian ethic. Take away the beneficent influence of Christian social ethics and their social behavior would be considerably different." (Romans, Broadman & Holman, 1995, p. 110)

National Punctuation Day, Sept 24

“My attitude toward punctuation is that it ought to be as conventional as possible. The game of golf would lose a good deal if croquet mallets and billiard cues were allowed on the putting green. You ought to be able to show that you can do it a good deal better than anyone else with the regular tools before you have a license to bring in your own improvements.” — Ernest Hemingway, letter, May 15, 1925 — The official website . It's about time. (Not, its about time.)

The sower

I've always drawn encouragement from van Gogh's "Sower", who depicts a man working late into the evening sowing the good seed. I discovered a similar one he painted, entitled "The Sower in the Evening".

Flew: Dawkins "a secularist bigot"

Antony Flew has a scathing review of Richard Dawkins' The God Delusion : The God Delusion by the atheist writer Richard Dawkins, is remarkable in the first place for having achieved some sort of record by selling over a million copies. But what is much more remarkable than that economic achievement is that the contents – or rather lack of contents – of this book show Dawkins himself to have become what he and his fellow secularists typically believe to be an impossibility: namely, a secularist bigot... This whole business makes all too clear that Dawkins is not interested in the truth as such but is primarily concerned to discredit an ideological opponent by any available means... On Dawkins' treatment of Einstein, Flew says, The fault of Dawkins as an academic ... was his scandalous and apparently deliberate refusal to present the doctrine which he appears to think he has refuted in its strongest form. Thus we find in his index five references to Einstein. They are to the mas

Quotes from Sunday's sermon

"I don’t know about you, but I have a romantic attachment to railroad travel; I am a sucker for railways. It probably dates back to my childhood, when travel by railroad in England meant you were going on holiday. And so the image of the law as a railroad track makes a lot of sense to me. A railroad engine is designed to travel on a railroad track. When it is on the track it does just fine, and it can enjoy life as its designer intended it to. But suppose a railroad engine says to itself 'these tracks are so confining; the scenery is so much better away from the track. I am going to jump off the tracks and enjoy my life as I want to.' What happens? Disaster! "And the Ten Commandments are like the railroad tracks for us. God designed us so that we would be most fulfilled and most at peace with ourselves and our neighbors when we stay on the tracks by living according to the ten commandments. If we say to ourselves, as so many people do 'but they are so confinin

The world is run by information

"The world isn’t run by weapons anymore, or energy, or money. It’s run by little ones and zeros, little bits of data. It’s all just electrons.... There’s a war out there... and it’s not about who’s got the most bullets. It’s about who controls the information. What we see and hear, how we work, what we think, it’s all about information.... The world is run by information." Margaret Manning, RZIM Today's Slice 9/9/08 “If you abide in my word, then you are truly disciples of mine; and you shall know the truth and the truth shall make you free .” (John 8:31-32)

Mandy

Mandy, a faithful companion to my mother for many years, died this week. What's been going through my head is that poem... All things bright and beautiful, All creatures great and small, All things wise and wonderful: The Lord God made them all. All the horses and dogs and farm creatures that my mom loved... they came as as gift from the Lord. It's going to be real hard for her now, since this may be her last dog. (Maybe.) Aging is a humbling process as we give up one by one all those things we enjoyed most in life. For her it was first the horses and riding, and now possibly the ability to care for a dog.