The Desert of the Real

Aboslutely, unbelievably, disgusting. There are no works strong enough to communicate my revulsion over this. Yet we still have people declaiming the depravity of man. You know, for a bit I was thinking “Yet, in China, it’s mandatory, and God hasn’t destroyed them, so we obviously have a ways to go in fulfilling our iniquity.” However, sitting here, I think I was wrong. In this, we have surpassed china in our vileness. They at least don’t parade it. The people subject to it, don’t celebrate it, they endure it. It’s the evil of a few perpetrated on the masses. Here we have people who not only celebrate it, but would proudly advertise on their t-shirt the murder of their unborn, defenseless child.

I want to vomit.

Yesterday I submitted a request to our Managed service provider to change a couple of our firewall rules. It’s a fairly common scenario that I asked for. I got back an apology, but they couldn’t do it, the software didn’t support it.

So once again I had to write to them and teach them how to use the firewall they’re supposed to be managing for us. Am I the only one that finds that just a little disconcerting?

Update: Oh yeah. I love this. I gave specific instructions as to rule placement in the change request. So where do they put the rule which handles the majority (80%) of the traffic on our network? Did they put it at the top of the rulebase, where I asked them to? Of course not! Surely it made more sense to put it at the bottom of the rulebase, where the packets have to traverse all the rules in the firewall before they can be accepted right!?

If you haven’t heard of
Peer FS you should check them out. They’ve got some pretty cool replication technology. It’s an actual filesystem that sits at the kernel level and replicates objects. So it avoids the expensive calls to actually open and read files.

I haven’t used it yet, but I’m hoping it might be able to provide some greater stability in our web environment than our current solution for keeping the servers in sync.

Seems I can never remember this. So maybe posting it here will help me, and who knows, someone else might get helped too.

Compaq servers that have the smartarray 5i in them show up in /dev/cciss when you load the cciss driver.

Unfortunately, not everything recognizes this, expecting instead to see them in /dev/sda or /dev/hda. In particular, if you’re running Gentoo linux, you’ll probably have to bind mount your /dev directory over your new install before running grub, like so:

mount -o bind /dev /mnt/gentoo/dev

If you don’t do this, it’ll either not be able to see your disks at all, or it’ll see them, and even embed stage 1, but it’ll fail to install stage2 with a no such partition error.

Note that EVMS2 has a similar issue. If you want to use EVMS2 you have to make sure you edit /etc/evms.conf. In there look under legacy_devices and add ‘cciss’ to the ‘directories’ variable so it looks something like this:

directories = [ ide scsi dasd cciss ]

Then scroll down to the include variable, and add ‘c0d?’ to it so it looks like so:

include = [ hd? sd? dasd? disc c0d? ]

Now run evms_activate again and it should find your disks just fine.

I ran across this in my reading tonight:

It isn’t about clever apologetics or careful exegetical and expository
preaching or great worship bands. It is about believers in Jesus
falling to their knees in worship, truly taking their faith seriously,
and even repenting publicly in prayer. ... This is what people in this
emerging culture are drawn to.

His point in this section is not that we should abandon the things he lists, but rather suggests that it is these things which will have the profoundest effect upon the unbeliever who is present. I don’t disagree that it’s not about great worship bands. I also don’t disagree that those things he advocates are important, or that God can use them to good effect in the life of those around us who see what we do. Indeed, he will use it. Either to save them, or to condemn them.

However, what I have been sensing in this book, and particularly in this passage, is a leaning towards the importance of experience over everything else. He stresses that it is the experience that postmoderns are looking for. Hence we have all these manipulatives. Art, sand, prayer labyrinths, candlelit prayer stations, etc. All to enhance their experience. Here, he says this at the expense of sound biblical teaching. I’m sure it comes as no surprise to anyone who would actually read my tripe that I have a huge problem with this.

Scripture specifically tells us that faith comes by hearing, not by painting. Last time it was seeker sensitive…we were supposed to pull all of our religious symbols, and any deeper truth from our services, lest we offend those seeking God. Now we’re supposed to bring all those symbols back, but we’re not supposed to emphasize what they mean? At least not over and above the experience.

This is the book I’m reading now. I borrowed it from a friend of mine. It’s pretty light reading, but there’s some good information in it. I think he does a good job of keeping it from getting overly deep into issues like postmodernism. I think he’s right about the general approach of those influenced by the teachings of postmodernism, and I have no doubt that his suggestions will bring people into the church. But so will free ice cream.

What I find really interesting is that he stresses the importance of not seeing this as a change in product being sold. He rightly sees the issues of the consumerism mentality in many churches today. He warns against using his examples of a new postmodern (or post-christian) approach as some new edge to get people to come in. However, isn’t that all it is? When churches change their format, start using candles, paint during worship, whatever, are they not really just adjusting their marketing?

I’m not against change, as long as the change doesn’t involve abandoning scriptural principles. What bothers me is this perception that we need to create these great marketing schemes to convince people to come in to the church. Underscoring that is the assumption that the unbelievers seek God on their own and thus will come to us. I see no scriptural support for that whatsoever. The gatherings of the early church were never about bringing in the unbelievers so that the pastor could convince them to convert. Not that unbelievers didn’t see. I do not suggest that God never uses the church or its gatherings to reach people. However, that is not the purpose laid out for us in the biblical model.

Went to see it last weekend. I had heard it was good, yet I still kept my expectations down. I really didn’t want to be disappointed. I wasn’t. It was a great flick and I enjoyed it immensely. I can understand why some people thought it was a bit mopey with regards to Peter Parker. It was a little thick in places, but I felt like it had a purpose and they tied it together pretty well.

I’d definately recommend it. Now I just have to scrounge up some money to see Arthur and Bourne Supremecy. Incidentally, if you haven’t heard, if you buy the new extended Bourne Identity DVD you get a free ticket to the new one.

The other night a discussion on the upcoming election popped up in channel. It isn’t the first time, and it probably won’t be the last. The question varies, but they all share a common root. Who will be the next president? Who are you voting for? We have to keep this guy or that guy out.

For the first, I know who the next president will be…
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I have now finished Desiring God. This was a tough read. I read many of the passages several times. There is so much there that resonates with my soul.

Paul has always been my favorite new testament writer. His style, his passion, his zeal, his argumentation, I love all of it. I hvae always looked at his life as something to be emulated. Yes, Christ is always our ultimate model, yet I think Paul demonstrated powerfully how one goes about that. I have always been drawn to his verses on suffering, but knew I was missing something.

This chapter on Christian suffering pulled back the curtain on that. It was a debilitating blow to be sure. The indictment on western christianity is staggering. “If only for this life we have hope in Christ, we are to be pitied more than all men.” Doesn’t really describe western Christianity as I know it. Dr Piper goes further, in suggesting we actively pursue the suffering this statement reflects. Wow. The prospect of the joy and deeper rooting of my life in Christ is thrilling. I’ve had the fortune of being through some really trying times already in my life. Nothing even in the same zipcode as Paul’s, but yet even these produced a reliance on His grace. These times produced a level of faith I simply could not have gained otherwise.
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I’ve had a couple of interesting URLs pointed out to me in the last day or so. The first would be humorous if it wasn’t so scary. Interestingly, in one forum it was posted in most people initially thought the sign on the left was the graffiti, and didn’t even notice the sign on the right.

Yet another sobering link, is the one to this story on the recent actions of Rep Bill Thomas of California. As mentioned in the story, he has essentially killed a bill which would remove the legal language threatening preachers who speak on political issues.

I definately think it is wrong for our government to be in the position of silencing speech in this way. Especially since nobody bats an eye when Al Gore comes to speak in TD Jakes’ church, but let a pastor speak out about abortion and we have to file a complaint with the IRS. Yet, it is my personal opinion that our churches should have simply cut the string as soon as they tried to tie it on. Give up your NFP status and pay taxes, don’t compromise your principles. It is ridiculous for the church to cower over something so silly.

Let the government do what it wants. The church has endured far worse than the threat of taxation. Instead, let us count it as joy when we are persecuted for the cause of Christ. Let us rejoice when they take away our NFP status, and when they do whatever they can to silence us. Just don’t let them silence us. Let the world see that suffering of any kind, even to our pocketbooks, is not sufficient to silence the truth! This is what wakes people from their slumber! Everyone has pet peeves, everyone has their preferences, but what wakes people up is seeing someone caring enough about something to be willing to suffer for it!