The Desert of the Real

An atheist professor was teaching a college class and he told the class that he was going to prove that there is no God. He said, “God, if you are real, then I want you to knock me off this platform. I’ll give you 15 minutes!”

Ten minutes went by. He kept taunting God, saying, “Here I am, God. I’m still waiting.” He got down to the last couple of minutes and a Marine just released from active duty and newly registered in the class walked up to the professor, hit him full force in the face, and sent him flying from the platform.

The professor struggled up, obviously shaken and yelled, “What’s the matter with you? Why did you do that?”

The Marine replied, “God was busy. So He sent me.”

Ugh. Tech support is always the worst. To date, I was fairly sure that AOL’s was the absolute worst. And I don’t mean the customer TS, I mean the supposedly technical people in their postmaster group. They’re some real winners let me tell you.

Now, when I used to have AT&T, I had fairly decent Tech support for my broadband connection. If I called in and told them hey, my lights are dead on the modem and I tried rebooting it to no avail, they’d say ok, check and if there was no outage currently reported they’d report one.

Then comcast bought them. With comcast, they laid down fiber to my house. That’s what I connect over. Then they offered phone services over it too. Despising SBC as I do, I switched. Now when my cable goes out, so does my phone. So I call. “Hey, my cable is out, lights are dead, rebooting doesn’t help. My phone is also dead.” And the response? “Ok, can you reboot your computer?” roll Yeah, that’s going to help.
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Here we go again. This is unbelievable. A few salient points from the article that should jump out at you.

Sixty people crowded last week into a small room at the Bayonne police firing range to witness smart gun technology. Donald H. Sebastian, senior vice president of research and development at New Jersey Institute of Technology (NJIT), stood near an oversized screen displaying a real-time video of an NJIT policeman shooting an experimental handgun in an adjacent indoor range. Although there was no applause as shots rang out, the action demonstrated that smart gun knew friend from foe.

Wait…an NJIT “police” officer? In otherwords, campus security guard? Puffing them up a bit there aren’t we? I dunno, I’ve never been on their campus, but in my experience campus security is hardly worthy of being called police officers.
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Yes, I am aware of what transpired yesterday in the hearings, as well as (thanks to MarkE) the comments Rush made in regard to it on his show.

A full response is coming later, but again, just because some lame guys who are generically against torture can’t come up with a response doesn’t mean their isn’t one. More than that, I should say I am not surprised that a man like Arlen Specter or even Rush would come out in support of such a policy. Why do I say this? I say it because I do not expect these men to have a biblical worldview which they apply their politics. They are practical, applying the concept of greatest good without regard to any higher law which may be at play here.

God willing, at some point in the near future I hope to respond at greater length to the comments and arguments presented in this link by these two men, as time permits.

Anyone seen this? I actually saw it in the pentacostal evangel issue I discussed in the last post, however, I didn’t want it to get lost in there for people who couldn’t care less. ;-) In Arkansas, Louisiana and Arizona you can now choose “covenant marriage”, either to enter into, or apparently, to convert your current marriage to. (This is what Ark Gov. Mike Huckabee and his wife will be doing on Valentines Day). What is it? Well, it’s something I like….and don’t like.
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While at church this morning, as is my custom, I picked up a copy of the Evangel. I was quite pleasantly surprised by a plethrora of insightful statements within its pages. Excepting the letters section, which contained a typical example of a reader who completely missed the point in an article on the agenda of gay activists and their efforts at our public schools. (He felt that the evangel was apprently not showing enough love because of their efforts to warn parents about the things their kids are being indoctrinated with.)

Anyway, as this sort of thing does not happen often, I feel compelled to share these things.
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Unbelievable. There is a clinic in Dallas: Aaron WHC, which will be the first abortion clinic in the state to provide late term abortions to Texas. (At least since we passed a law limiting the procedure to ambulatory surgical centers). They have laid plans to remodel their clinic to be exactly that. So people will be coming form all over Texas, I’m sure to utilize this despicable monument to the depravity of man. It’ll be open within a month, closely followed by two others: one in Austin, and one in Houston.

Yet it gets worse. The general contractor handling the remodeling is a (self-proclaimed) christian, and a former pastor. He attends a large Fort Worth church, and is building churches int he Dallas area as he remodels the clinic. His spiritual leaders, and the pastors of the churches he is building have apparently been made aware of this situation and none of them have taken any visible action.
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Paul Owen writes:

I for one, want to apologize to my Roman Catholic brothers and sisters on behalf of the Reformed community for being particularly prone to such straw-man tactics, and for constantly engaging in such shallow misrepresentations.

Can I just say that I’m really getting tired of this? Where in the world do people (not just you Dr Owen, he just happens to be the perpetrator in this specific instance) get the audacity to apologize for people they do not represent?

More than that, to apologize for a large group of people generalizing about what they have or have not done, when they only know a handful (proportionatately) of the group. I do not deny that protestants, even in the reformed tradition, have misrepresented other traditions. Yet I do deny that this is something which has been done one-sided, or in such a broad scale as to warrant such an apology. And if one were to be given on our behalf, it certainly would not be given by those who most often seem so willing to offer one.

Thanks Dr Owen, and the rest of you, but I think I’ll offer my own apologies, if and when the need for them becomes apparent. Until such time, I suggest you stick to representing only those who have asked such of you. You’re certainly welcome to the opinion that you think we need to apologize (however much I may disagree with you on that point) but I would respectfully ask that you all refrain from offering what is not in your power to give.

I love books. I love science fiction, fantasy, classical literature, poetry, shakespeare, non-fiction, technical, you name it I love reading. Well, for Christmas, one of the books I got (which I finished, as with the others, within a day or so of receiving it) was Jasper Fforde’s Well of Lost Plots. The third in the series which began with ‘lost in a good book’. The humor is somewhat complex, and often depends on the reader being fairly widely read. There are plenty of puns, and the whole thing is a meta-narrative on the production of books from a fantastical perspective. The stories are filled with loved (and hated) characters from various books, giving you a unique and odd perspective on them that is addictive.

Basically, if you, like me, are a lover of good literature, or even think you might be, I can’t recommend these books enough. If you are not widely read already, these books will encourage you to change that. ;-) And if you are, or are to a degree as I am, it will encourage you to read them all over again.