Very funny satire over at Kamp Krusty about people getting offended by the word "Christmas"...

Happy Wednesday!

No, wait. Check that. You likely know that “Wednesday” really means “Woden’s Day” -- a nod to the Teutonic god.

I, for one, do not worship Woden. I'm not wont to worship Woden, and, well, wouldn't worship Woden. Perhaps you pursue a personal relationship with Woden. But maybe not. So forgive my insensitivity.

Granted, in this culture, the fourth day of the week is, most obviously, “Wednesday” – why, it’s as obvious as, say, December 25th is Christmas – but we shouldn’t simply say things like that out loud because “it’s been that way” for centuries.

It’s time to recognize, and celebrate, our differences. Joining the celebration of religious expression is easy: Simply be offended by everyone else’s religious expression. Celebrate good times, come on.

I love it! Read the rest here.

Happy Thor's Day!

touché

touché
Originally uploaded by davidgoering

When we were at my parents' place, Joshua loved to "take pictures" with this little toy camera that was lying around.

A subtle reminder that he's a 21st century kid is that after taking each picture, he'd pretend to look at the non-existent digital display on the back of the camera, pressing non-existent buttons. I sure never did THAT when I was a kid taking pictures with a pretend camera.

It has been a long time since I have laughed this hard.

The 9 Most Badass Bible Verses

Rather than write a series of books or give a bunch of boring speeches, Elijah invited 450 Baal prophets to a contest, where both sides would set up an animal sacrifice. Whichever God could rain down fire on its sacrifice would be the one everybody worshiped.

It's brilliant in its simplicity, and we're surprised religious debates were ever carried out any other way after that. You can raise all the intellectual challenges you want about faith and the origins of the universe, but at the end of the day, you have to worship the god who can set you on fire. It's common sense.

We like to think Elijah stood in front of the howling column of heavenly fire, straightened his robes, turned to the crowd and said, "Thus, my opponent's argument falls." Then, he finished the debate in the way that all debates should be finished: by having the losers slaughtered.

Please note that the article does have some bad language and also there are some sexual jokes about passages like Ezekiel 23:20.

Family Pic 11/07

Family Pic 11/07
Originally uploaded by epaga

Quite a clever idea here. Since I don't have sound at work, I hope the dialog is as funny as the video looks. :)

Just for fun before I go to bed, here's one of my all-time favorite XKCD comics:

Very funny song by Biff. You know, the "Hello, anybody home, McFly?" guy.



Found on the hilarious "Letters from Kamp Krusty" blog.

"Come To Me"

Wow, box.net is nice - now that I can host files and then automatically link to them here, I thought I'd upload a really simple recording of a song I wrote a few years ago called "Come To Me". When I say simple, I mean it: It's just me on the guitar, also, the sound quality isn't the greatest. Here you go...

01 Come To Me.mp3

Test upload

This is a test to see if I can host files and then link to them automatically with BOX.net.

Firefox_wallpaper.png

Along those same lines, saw this quote in my Quotes of the Day feed:

Democracy is the recurrent suspicion that more than half of the people are right more than half the time.
- E.B. White

Another funny yet thought-provoking question by Scott "Dilbert" Adams on his blog:

Here’s a question for all philosotainers. Are we better off if Pakistan is ruled by a relatively rational and reasonable dictator pretending to be an elected president, who is an enemy of Islamic fundamentalists, as is now the case with President Musharraf, or by a real democracy that could end up run by Islamic extremists with an arsenal of nuclear weapons?

Now, I know very, very little about the actual situation in Pakistan...what I find so challenging about this thought is more the general idea that maybe, just maybe, Western democracy is NOT the solution for the world's problems (as Bush clearly thinks and has said before in multiple speeches). Because what happens when the people of a sovereign nation come together, and freely vote together...for an Islamic extremist government which supports terrorists?

Just was listening to last.fm (Stephi wanted the R&B channel) and the song "Nobody" was playing by somebody called Shawn Desman. The chorus is

I don't wanna hold nobody if I can't be holdin' you
I don't wanna kiss nobody if I can't be kissin' you

Good ol' double negative. I had to laugh imagining him singing the logical equivalent "I wanna kiss somebody if I can't be kissin' you."

Well, this video sure is a little...unsettling. Skip to 0:40 for the quick summary of what it's talking about if you don't feel like watching the whole thing. That's what I did. ;-)

It makes me wonder how things are in Germany...?

This made me laugh:

Phyllis Diller - "I want my children to have all the things I couldn't afford. Then I want to move in with them."

This is probably the most fascinating psycho-analysis optical illusion I've ever seen. Which direction is the dancer turning in? Clockwise or counter-clockwise?

Stephi and I both saw opposite directions, and it took me about 5-10 minutes of concentrating to be able to see the other direction at all. It's amazing how hard it is to imagine that other people really honestly are seeing the exact opposite of what you're seeing, just depending on which side of their brain dominates. Totally freaky.

So which direction do you see? (found via Moby's blog - yes, that Moby)

Awesome idea. Found on Noel's site.

glumbert - Mirror Mirror On the Wall

"The Onion" (satire newspaper) headline of the month:

Bisexual's Parents Half Understand

The parents of recently admitted bisexual Jeremy Lambert said they completely half-understand their 19-year-old son's lifestyle choice and are 50 percent behind him no matter what happens, sources reported Monday.

One of the most jaw-droppingly amazing YouTube videos I have ever seen:



This guy MASTERED that wall. Insane? Yes. Completely foolish? Yes. But all the same, he MASTERED that wall. The intensity and passion this guy had for what he did just blows me away and is so challenging in light of 1 Corinthians 9:25.

Unsurprisingly (and sadly), the guy that did this climb, Dan Osman, died a few years later during a stunt he was doing called "controlled free-falling" when his rope broke.

I found this video on the Joe's Goals blog.

This is my kind of humor. Found on the really funny Letters From Kamp Krusty blog:

Dear Church Solution Magazine,

I do not think you should have a "sexpo."

I saw your website, for your upcoming event: www.churchsolutionsexpo.com. I feel that a sexpo, even in the interest of helping pastors expand what you call the "houses of worship market", is inappropriate, not right, and just generally wrong.

While the Bible is largely silent about sexpos, that does not, in my opinion, make your sexpo acceptable. You say, for example, your sexpo "will have a unique appeal for exhibitors".

I'm sure that's true.

Read the rest here.

This post just made me laugh embarrassingly loud at work:

In the news, O.J. Simpson is in jail for trying to reclaim some items in Las Vegas that an alleged thief stole from him. If O.J. is found guilty of asking a thief to return his belongings, he could go to jail for 30 years.

I assume O.J. is kicking himself for not killing everyone in the room, covering himself in their DNA, and going golfing. You have to stick with what works. What the Hell was he thinking?

From Freshly Squeezed O.J. on the Dilbert Blog.

Quote of the day:

Being a fool for Christ is one thing. Being a fool for no good reason is another.
- Ariel Vanderhorst(in the comments)

Quick quote from Carl Sagan (of all people!):

"In order to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first create the universe."

Found this test linked on Noel Heikkinen's site. Very interesting. Especially since I've never read any Barth, but about 90% of what I read about him on his Wikipedia article really resonates with me. Note that similar to Noel (and also Brett, where Noel found the test) it's a close call between Luther (unsurprisingly), Barth, and Anselm (Anselm? Who is Anselm?)...gee, I need to read more books. :)



You scored as Karl Barth, The daddy of 20th Century theology. You perceive liberal theology to be a disaster and so you insist that the revelation of Christ, not human experience, should be the starting point for all theology.


Which theologian are you?
created with QuizFarm.com

Karl Barth		73%
Anselm		67%
Martin Luther		60%
Charles Finney		60%
John Calvin		53%
Friedrich Schleiermacher		47%
Jonathan Edwards		47%
Jürgen Moltmann		33%
Augustine		27%
Paul Tillich		7%

I like this billboard. A lot. Found on SpellingMistakesCostLives.com.

Now, for my 300th post on this blog - a quote:

"Never be afraid to laugh at yourself, after all, you could be missing out on the joke of the century."
- Dame Edna Everage

One of the most fascinating sites I've encountered in a very long time: Worldmapper. They currently have 366 maps of the world, where the countries are sized according to a certain factor. For example, here's the map with each country sized by their Infant Mortality Rate:


Here's a map sized by Military Spending:


Man, got to tear myself away from this site so I don't spend the entire afternoon there. Incredible stuff.

For some reason, this video really tickles my funny bone.

I'm sure most of you have seen the Mentos & Diet Coke videos by now. If not, you should. But did you ever wonder what would happen when you mix Mentos and.... beer?

A lot of what I post on here is pretty much just things I read on my different RSS feeds. I've decided to start using Google Reader's sharing feature. So I now have a mini-blog which can be found here. All it is is basically a filtered list of links and articles that I think are cool.

So if we have similar tastes, you may want to subscribe to the feed there to get a John-filtered list of links I read and think are funny / cool / thought-provoking / weird.

Iraq won the Asian Cup against Saudi Arabia - and right away, people took to the streets to celebrate....by shooting their guns into the air. That's awesome, I wish more of that would have happened in Germany during the World Cup. :)

Another excellent example of the many little and ...uh... not-so-little differences between cultures.

Also, it's amazing to see (once again) the incredibly uniting power soccer can have.

OK, this is awesome: Chore Wars. It's basically a fantasy role playing game web site with experience points and gold and armor and leveling up, etc. But the hilariously cool part is that you earn your experience points by doing real-world chores at home. So the idea is - your household or office signs up together, and the more chores someone does, the higher he or she levels up.

Man I wish this would have existed when I was a kid and we had chore lists and stuff. This would have made things a bit more fun. :)

Found via WebWare.

Wow, quite a weird but cool "inverted world map", where the oceans are land masses and vice versa. Stare at it long enough, it plays tricks with your mind. The big (better) version is here.

Here's my favorite scene in the trailer for the new Simpsons movie.

From The Corner (via Noel Heikinnen), a graph displaying "belief in God" in percentage. Note this is not about belief in Jesus, Christianity, or even if God is personal.

Just added this great daily comic to my feed reader: http://xkcd.com.

Why? Well, believe it or not, this comic is 11:0 for me - I've seen 11 of them, and have actually laughed at every single one.

That's quite a contrast for example to the Berlin U-Bahn Willmor comic which seriously is at 0 to about 40. They're just. not. funny.

Edit: Actually, to be honest, now the comic is at about 25:1. It's spooky how similar my humor seems to be to that guy's humor. And I REALLY need to get back to work.

I continue to be amazed at my brother David's photography skills. He's currently on a trip throughout Europe after graduating from high school, and he's already taken some amazing pics and posted them on his blog. Check it out, as well as his photos on his Flickr page!

In Nigeria, the average price of machetes dropped by 50% (from $6 to $3) after elections were held (and politicians stopped employing thugs for their campaigns).

Whoever came up with the idea to do a survey on machete prices has got to have one dark sense of humor.

After a bunch of studies, a psychologist at the University of Portsmouth has discovered that babies actually start "lying" and deceiving their parents from around when they're 6 months old. Until now, mainstream psychology has said kids aren't capable of willfully deceiving till age 4. Of course, as almost any parent will tell you, that is complete nonsense.

This new study definitely confirms a suspicion I've had for quite a while: Little kids and babies are WAY smarter (and way less innocent) than we give them credit for.

One example that happened all the time with my son Joshua was that he knew he wasn't supposed to touch something and so he would look a different direction and then move his arm as if to grab for something else nearby, thereby "accidentally" brushing against precisely the object he wasn't supposed to touch. He'd then pull a mock "shocked" face, as if to say "oops, I didn't mean to do that". And he was maybe 10 or 11 months when he started doing this.

Psalm 51:5, baby. Psalm 51:5.

All together

All together
Originally uploaded by Aslans child

Here's the latest picture of the whole gang plus spouses, just without grandkids. :)

This made me laugh.

Here's a really funny paragraph by Scott Adams, the Dilbert creator, from an article on his blog. It's funny...because it's SO TRUE and SO politically incorrect.

Consider religion. I’ve made this point many times, but it is necessary context for this discussion. At most, only one religion can be “right” because religions are mutually exclusive. It can’t be true that a Christian goes to heaven while at the same time he burns in Hell (according to Muslims). It can’t be true that we only have this life, as Jews believe, if it’s true that people reincarnate. There can’t be new prophets such as Joseph Smith if Mohammed was, as Muslims believe, the last prophet. So no matter who is right about the “big picture,” if indeed anyone is right, we can all agree that at least 75% of the world would serve their souls just as well as in their current schemes if they started praying to Sponge Bob Square Pants.

From his post "How Rational Are Terrorists"

Velvet Elvis - Part Three

So it's definitely time to pick this back up and get to it. Things have been really crazy because of our church's move.

Anyhow, Mike blogged about the intro here. Good stuff. I especially liked this quote:

The question of "What if I'm wrong" hangs out there like a god-awful pink flamingo on a California lawn. Careful not to throw the baby out with the bathwater, but in this generation of emergent faith, it's hard to say what the baby actually is.

That's a great description, and I'll simply take that analogy way too far by saying that often, emergent faith seems prone to me to simply say "there is no baby to lose, we are the baby" and thereby react like babies. See, I told you I'd take the analogy too far. ;-)

Anyhow, here again a stream of consciousness on Chapter 2 - "Yoke"

• I found myself enjoying and resonating with this chapter far more than with Chapter 1. The reason is that I think he's hitting at the heart of what has bothered me as well for quite a while: The (modern) thought that somehow, the Bible can be understood without any interpretation being necessary. Here's a quote from the chapter on this:
  
  

  Somebody recently told me, "As long as you teach the Bible, I have no problem with you." Think about that for a moment. What that person was really saying is, "As long as you teach my version of the Bible, I'll have no problem with you." And the more people insist that they are just taking the Bible for what it says, the more skeptical I get.
  

  -page 44

  
  That's so true! Everything and anything in the Bible needs to be interpreted in some fashion.
  • "Love your neighbour" - what's love? "Love is patient, love is kind" - what does it mean to be patient? Do I have to let people walk all over me?
  
  
  • "Women should cover their heads while praying" - does this mean all women or only the women of Corinth, or only the women of that culture where not wearing a head covering was immodest?
  
  
  • "All have sinned and fall short of the glory of God." - What is sin? "Sin is lawlessness" - Which laws does that include, and do they include the law I need to cleanse myself if I even brush against a woman who is having her period?
• I also like his point that Jesus brought a new "yoke" which means "way of interpretation" - among many other things(!), Jesus brought with him a new way of living, a new way of viewing Scripture and living it out.
  
  
• And so here's the big point for me: We interpret the Bible in community. God made the Bible so we were to interpret it together. I love Bell's point to an extent:
  

  For most of church history, people heard the Bible read aloud in a room full of people. You heard it, discussed it, studied it, argued about it, and made decisions about it as a group, a community. [...] So if one person went off the deep end with an interpretation or opinion, the others were right there to keep that person in check.
  

  -page 52



• Unfortunately, there are a couple of things I think he's overlooking or at least doesn't ever mention.
  • "The community" is more than just your little group. We need to realize that the community we interpret the Bible with needs to include people like Paul, Augustine, Martin Luther, and all the rest of our Christian heritage and church history over the past almost 2000 years. In other words, "repainting" and "reinterpreting" things in a way that goes against the mainstream interpretations can be a dangerous, dangerous thing to do because you're basically breaking with the historical Christian community simply because your little 10-person house church happens to interpret the Bible in such a way that sleeping with your girlfriend is fine. Well, how convenient.
  
  
  • There is such a thing as spiritual authority. In the above quote, he's acting like the synagogues were a little pluralist democracy where people voted on what was right. That's not the way things worked. People were rabbis for a reason. And someone becoming a rabbi needed the approval of two other rabbis. Bell acts like everybody is a rabbi, which explains why there are so many freakin' "Emergent" blogs where everybody acts like they're some kind of authority even though all they did was sign up for a Wordpress account and start writing cynical criticisms of things they didn't like about their church. People like to feel like they're "rabbis". Well, we're NOT. And we should listen to and respect those who are.
    

There ya go, I'd better get back to work. Please post away.

Wow. This is kind of old news (like, 3 days or so), but Google now has a so-called "Street View" on their maps for five cities in the U.S.

Well, I finally gave it a run. And it's totally jaw-droppingly amazing. You basically get panorama photos of any point on ALL streets in the downtown areas of New York, Miami, Denver, Las Vegas, and San Francisco.

Check it out for yourself here.

Great quote:

I have heard self-righteous Christians proclaim, “Alcohol has never touched my lips” when it is also obvious that a treadmill has never touched their legs.

- Perry Noble

This rocks, a web site all about sticking the weirdest things in a blender and seeing what happens. Check out the iPod one.

Here are a few of my thoughts on predestination and free will. Beware: This is pretty theoretical, intense stuff and could easily bore you. I just wanted to jot these thoughts down and see if anyone is interested in talking this through, since I'm boring my wife to tears about this by now... ;-)

Naturally, this is all assuming God exists and the Bible is God's revealed truth, etc. etc.

• Our choices are determined or caused by
• Our "being", i.e. who we are
• Our circumstances
• In other words, if someone took a time machine and without influencing anything, watched me make a decision over and over again, it seems logical that I would always make the same decision. Why? Because I would always be the same person, and the circumstances would always be the same.
  
• Put differently: Everything but God has a cause, and this includes any decisions I make with my will - my decisions are caused by who I am, and by the circumstances I am in - both of which themselves have causes.
• If I follow the chain of cause and effect back, it all ends up with God the Creator. God is the one and only Uncaused Cause.
  
• So by creating with omniscience, that is, by creating while knowing the outcome, God thereby predestined.
• Put differently: Omniscience + Omnipotence = Predestination
  
• So what happens with free will? I'd say it depends on your definition of "free"...
• Our will is free from coercion or determination by God: God does not control us or our will like you might control a robot. When I make a decision, it is MY decision alone. I can choose what I want and I alone will be held responsible for my choices. God can and will not be held responsible for the choices I make.
• Our will is not free or independent of our being, of who we are. In other words, I (by definition!) can and will not make choices that are somehow detached from who I am.
• So how can God hold us responsible if He created us? Well, though it's a tough passage, check out Romans 9 with an open mind. I'd summarize Paul's thoughts there by saying that the act of creation itself is never a negative thing - simply because God chooses to create someone though He knows full well how that person will decide does not make it God's responsibility when His creation turns against him.
• God could have "picked and chosen" who He created so that only those people were created who would accept Him. Why didn't He? Good question, I don't know, but I like Piper's take on it which is basically that certain facets of God's character, e.g. His mercy, His wrath, the unconditionality of His love, would never have been able to have been displayed if He had never created "objects of wrath" like it says in Romans 9.
• So all in all: It's really a tough issue, but I think it's funny how I can tend to shy away from the topic mainly because I just don't like the implications, but not because I don't think that thinking about the topic wouldn't reveal more of who God is to me.

I'd LOVE dialog on this topic, please post comments or write me emails on this.

Resources:
Wikipedia article on Free Will
Free Will and Responsibility
Are There Two Wills in God? (John Piper)
Newcomb's Paradox

WWII as a Real-Time Strategy Game, found in the comments on Slashdot Games:

Germany: We will pwn j00
France: ZOMG ZERG *France has disconnected from server*
UK: You too can experience your finest hour with all herbal enlargement pills
Germany: UK is just an F'ing spambot, we'll invade Russia

.
Russia: No fair Germany, we had a deal!
Germany: WTF Russia is turtling!!!
Japan: All ur base in Asia r belong to us
USA: OMG Japan is so f***ing ninja! I was AFK
Russia: This sucks, I have a spambot and AFKer on my team
US: Don't worry I was macro building up my production while AFK
UK: Sorry about that spam, I was letting my little bro play
Russia: Bout F***ing time you showed up
Germany: Italy, are you going to do anything productive?!
Italy:*Italy has disconnected from the server* *Italy has joined the game* *Italy has joined the Allies*
Germany: We're screwed *Germany has disconnected from the server*
US: "If the radiance of a thousand suns were to burst at once into the sky, that would be like the splendor of the Mighty One... I am become Death, the Shatterer of Worlds."
Japan: ZOMG we gotz nuked *Japan has disconnected from the server*

The last few weeks I've dived into the whole predestination/free will/sovereignty/theodicy question, partly because of thoughts I had while preparing a teaching on Ephesians 1:1-14, but also after realizing how strongly Driscoll and Piper, whom I both respect highly, are 5-point Calvinists.

I'm planning on writing up a longer post on this, just wanted to point anyone who's interested to a great article which for me finally gave a feeling of "now I get it!" on the whole topic by first of all defining "free will" in the terms of the question "Would the exact same person in the exact same situation have been able to decide differently than they did?". Either way you answer that question, you can run into logical problems. I really like the slant the writer of the article takes.

Anyways, check it out here and tell me what you think.

Our church is currently in the process of moving out of our old building in Immanuelkirchstr. to a new place one block away.

The new place is less than half the price of what we're paying for the old place, has a more "open" feeling to it, is on the ground floor rather than the attic (which means it's more accessible and cooler in hot summers), and is on two floors which is nice for storage space, etc. So I am really going through mixed emotions this week. One emotion is definitely excitement about the new place.

Another emotion is a tangible sadness. There are so many moving memories I have with this old place. Here are just a few (in no particular order)...

• Jamming "Invitacion" with Zakcq, Carlos, Anna, and Claudia
• Strings breaking
  
• Seeing Suzanne van Dyck worship with all her heart
• Mike dancing in the back during worship
• John van Dyck sharing on D-Day
• Mike's "memorial rocks"
  
• Our Easter service with the cross
• Saying goodbye to Zakcq and Jessica
• Saying goodbye to the Mansfields
• Saying goodbye to the Johnsons
• Saying goodbye...
• Saying goodbye again...
  
• Our crisis weekend with Joe Dunn and others, deciding what to do without a pastor in town.
• Mark Darling kicking my butt into gear
  
• Mark Bowen touching my heart
• Greg Van Nada's listening eyes
  
• Mike's goodbye party
• World Cup fever - Zidane losing it
  
• Dave Mansfield doing sound
• Reese, Gabe, Ariana, Lucas
• Major cleaning with Flo
• The team signature wall
• Dave Lennander crying during his first visit
• Joshua being dedicated
• Sarah being dedicated
• Uwe & Jenny's wedding
  
• Jenny's testimony
• Ronja's testimony
• Jamming "All Bow Down" with Daniel, John Hudson, Ronja, and Johannes
• Last weekend's final service at the old place, with story after story of people sharing how God has changed their lives using Rock Berlin...looking forward to what God will continue to do!
  

(inspired by Todd's goodbye list for their old place - his is much more poetic ;-)

Is Christianity Good for the World?

Just wanted to point you all to a wonderfully pointed debate between two very intelligent people on the above question, one of them debating from a Christian perspective (Douglas Wilson), the other from an atheist perspective (Christopher Hitchens).

Some really great stuff in there. Props to Hitchens for allowing the debate to be hosted on Christianity Today of all places. :-)

From Hitchens:

If hymns and psalms were sung to sanctify slavery—just to take a recent example—and then sung by abolitionists, then surely the non-fanatical explanation is that morality requires no supernatural sanction? Every Christian church has had to make some apology for its role in the Crusades, slavery, anti-Semitism, and much else. I do not think that such humility discredits faith as such, because I tend to think that faith is a problem to begin with, but I do think that humility will lead to the necessary conclusion that religion is man-made.

From Wilson:

Now allow me the privilege of pointing out the structure of your argument here. If a professor takes credit for the student who mastered the material, aced his finals, and went on to a career that was a benefit to himself and the university he graduated from, the professor must (fairness dictates) be upbraided for the dope-smoking slacker that he kicked out of class in the second week. They were both formally enrolled, is that not correct? They were both students, were they not?

Find the debate here.

I watched this at work so I didn't have any sound - but this might actually be funnier without sound. Unbelievable that this actually seems to be real.

Google's Spellchecker is a sexist pig

When you search for "She invented", it says "Did you mean he invented?"

Human beings are inherently...?

This is definitely the scariest true story I have heard in a very, very long time.

Girls 'felt right' killing friend

The two 17-year-olds, who cannot be named, stuffed a chemical-soaked cloth into the mouth of Eliza Jane Davis, 15, and throttled her with wire after waking up on a sleepover and deciding neither would feel bad about killing someone. [...] The two teenagers, then aged 16, stayed in one room and decided to kill Davis the next day during a morning chat. The girl who carried out the strangling told police she watched calmly as the emotions on her friend's face shifted from anger to terror as she realized they intended to kill her.

Holy. Crap.

I thought this was funny, this was overheard in a store somewhere. Yeah, my humor is not exactly the "normal" type. But that's why you think I'm so funny, right? ... Right?

Children Are Malicious Little Tape Recorders

Little boy after a loud crash: You broke it! I'm very upset with you -- very upset! Mommy broke the lamp! She's a bad girl!

via Overheard in the Office, May 8, 2007

Velvet Elvis - Part Two

I now have finished chapter one of Velvet Elvis and there's so much I could write. I simply don't have the time to do a big polished post, so I'll just kind of give a stream of thoughts and see if anything snags attention and maybe a dialogue. Please freely post comments!

• In my opinion, the "postmodern", "emergent"...thing...can often be mainly understood solely as a reaction against modernism. Hence the word "postmodern" - if there wasn't modernism, post-modernism could not exist!
  
  
  
  
• Now, that's not a bad thing in and of itself - I'd agree that "modern" Christianity has a bunch of weaknesses which often result from one-sided, reductionist thinking. The problem is that post-modernity then can quickly react to those weaknesses by a counter-weakness, taking the opposite of the weakness to an extreme, thereby creating a new problem! Here are a couple of examples which I find in chapter one:
  
  
  
  
• Modernity tends to value answers more than questions: I remember hearing about one pastor who swore to himself he'd never be stumped by the same question twice. What that implies is that questions exist solely to be answered, and if you don't have an answer to a question, that somehow is a negative thing which needs to be remedied.
  
  However, questions are NOT a negative thing! See for example the fact that some of Jesus' last words were "WHY have you forsaken me?" Jesus himself is asking a question without receiving an answer. I think Velvet Elvis brings this fact out wonderfully in chapter 1.
  
  But the problem I see in the postmodern, emergent reaction to that weakness is the tendency to do precisely the opposite: Suddenly, questions are valued above answers, and having doubts becomes something positive. Some of the remarks in Velvet Elvis go in this direction. "What if tomorrow someone dug up definitive proof that Jesus had a real, earthly, biological father named Larry - would your faith fall apart?" Planting doubts is NOT my definition of asking healthy and honest questions.
  
  What I wish is that moderns would learn from post-moderns, and vice versa, and we'd hold questions and answers in tension. That we'd keep the line drawn between questions (good) and doubts (bad) - very often, Jesus says "Do not doubt". James says we "must not doubt". BUT Jude 22 says "Be merciful to those who doubt." Can't we take all those facts and hold them in a healthy paradoxical tension?
  
  
  
  
• Modernity tends to value doctrines above actual living: I remember a "Fact, Faith, Feeling" train - doctrinal fact needs to lead the way, our faith needs to be connected to that fact, and our feelings, a little red caboose, will follow...sometimes. ;) Now I agree with that image, but I think it's easy to then go and define faith as simply "believing" said doctrine. But that's not enough. True faith means living out the doctrine. So often faith was seen in "modern" Christianity as an all-in-your-head deal of "Yeah, I choose to believe in my head that God loves the world.", but never living it out practically, which is what "true" faith is.
  
  However, again, I see the postmodern reaction to this weakness is to do the opposite. Suddenly, doctrines of truth are no longer the foundation of our faith, but rather it's all about whether or not we "live in the way of Jesus", which is how Bell defines what Christianity is about. After planting some pretty intense seeds of doubt about the virgin birth, he asks that "if" the virgin birth was drawn into question, "Could a person still love God? Could you still be a Christian? Is the way of Jesus still the best possible way to live?" In other words - as long as you live in the way of Jesus, you're OK - "the doctrines are simply the springs" that help you jump higher on your "trampoline", as he puts it. And he ends with the pointed question "If the whole faith fails apart when we reexamine it and rethink one spring, then it wasn’t that strong in the first place, was it?"
  
  Again, I wish for a healthy tension of these two thoughts, not taking it to the extreme either way - I feel Bell is definitely taking it to the extreme by drawing the virgin birth into question. And it's not a healthy "Did the virgin birth happen?", it's a dangerous planting of doubts by asking "What IF the virgin birth DIDN'T happen?"
  
  Sorry, but certain doctrines are FAR more than a single spring in my trampoline. They're the frame, the ground on which my trampoline stands, the legs of my trampoline.
  
  Those certain doctrines include the virgin birth, the Trinity (both of which are drawn into question by Bell, though he finds the easy way out by saying "...but I'm not saying it's not true!"), the resurrection, the substitutionary death of Christ.
  
  
  
  I think Paul answered the question of "Could you still be a Christian if the doctrine of the resurrection needed to be 'rethought'?" quite nicely in 1 Corinthians 15. And I'll close with that, 'cause this is getting long:
  
  

  "And if Christ has not been raised, your faith is useless."
  
  - 1 Corinthians 15:17
  
  

Happy Birthday, Joshua!

Joshua turns 2 today. We're looking forward to a cool party tonight with all his friends and babysitters coming over. :)

Have I said that being a Dad just frickin' rocks? No? Well, it does!

For a random "wow" moment, click here.

Oh boy. There's currently a court case to give "person" status to...a monkey, so it can receive personal donations.

"If we can get Hiasl declared a person, he would have the right to own property. Then, if people wanted to donate something to him, he'd have the right to receive it," said Theuer, who has vowed if necessary to take the case to the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg, France.

Emphasis mine. Yeah. My thought exactly.

Velvet Elvis - Part One

Hi all, after reading Mike's first thoughts on Velvet Elvis, I finally got around to ordering it and now I've started reading it. Mike asked if I'd be interested in doing a "blog dialogue" on it, and I think that'd be fun. This whole thing is going to be geared toward us processing our thoughts on the book together. But hey, who knows, add my 3 readers to his 7, and we could be in double digit readership, bay-bee! ;-)



Here are my initial thoughts after reading the cover back and the introduction chapter. And because people like lists (what, you don't?), I'm doing it in list form.

• I really appreciate his note on the back of the cover: "Don't swallow [this book] uncritically. Think about it. Wrestle with it." I think that line's exactly what should have been on the back of "New Kind of Christian", if you ask me. And this is exactly why Mike and I are starting this dialogue.
  
  
• One of his main points to start the book off is
  
  

  I embrace the need to keep [...] reforming. By this I do not mean cosmetic, superficial changes like better lights and music, sharper graphics, and new methods with easy-to-follow steps. I mean theology: the beliefs about God, Jesus, the Bible, salvation, the future. We must keep reforming the way the Christian faith is defined, lived, and explained.
  
  

  - page 12

  OK, this is both a dangerous point and yet a good point at the same time, depending on how you understand his words. And this ambiguity is precisely what I am hoping will not happen all too often in this book. This statement is ambiguous enough to be understood to mean "I embrace the need to reform my beliefs of whether the Bible is God's word, whether Jesus was bodily resurrected, etc., etc." Sorry, but that is a dangerous direction to head in. And to be honest, I don't think that's what he means.
  
  But, if you understand the sentence to mean "I embrace the need to take fresh looks at ancient truths, and to be willing to change how I live out my faith if I recognize that a part of my 'faith' is actually only my culture.", then it's great and I fully agree.
• Something practical I've recognized over the past few years is how I've changed in my missiology because of precisely this healthy side of "reforming". Being as much as possible a part of the culture around me, not forming a competing culture. Allowing unbelievers to be a part of our church as much as possible, to feel accepted and loved, and not that we set up a bunch of hoops for them to jump through so that they can be a part. I realized I had kind of had that mentality. That's not because I was somehow taught something wrong before or anything (this is definitely not at all a dissing of my "home church" where I started from!), rather it's because I had allowed my Christianity to actually become my culture, which, to put it bluntly, isn't Biblical. BTW, one book that really put into words what I mean is Radical Reformission by Mark Driscoll.
• Now, note the final words of the introductory chapter:
  
  

  If it is true, then it isn't new.
  
  I am learning that what seems brand new is often the discovery of something that's been there all along - it just got lost somewhere and it needs to be picked up, dusted off, and reclaimed.
  
  

  - page 14

  
  
  
  That's precisely the way that ambiguous statement from above should be understood. I really agree with this, this really resonates with me. It isn't truth that somehow is changing or isn't absolute, it's our view as Christians of those truths that over and over again throughout history has to be recalibrated.
  
  

I really should be working, just wanted to shoot this out to y'all: The web version of the Wii's Mii Editor. For all of you who don't have a Wii (yet...), this shows you what fun you're missing out on. Oh and here's my pitiful try at a storm trooper. And here's...mii.

Scott Adams, the Dilbert author, has a quite readable blog with some pretty off-the-wall humor. Today, his idea is to outsource the U.S. government to India. Fun stuff.

I know you have many questions about this excellent idea. Allow me to anticipate them and answer them.

Q. What the hell do Indians know about America?

A. More than you. The Indians who graduated from the Indian
Institute of Technology are among the smartest people on the planet.
And whatever they don’t already know, they can learn while you’re
watching American Idol. Yeah, it hurts. But it’s true.

Just wanted to say I'm glad the Supreme Court decided you don't have a constitutional right to do the following to a five month old fetus/baby/infant:

Once the cervix is sufficiently dilated, the doctor uses an ultrasound and forceps to grasp the fetus' leg. The fetus is turned to a breech position, if necessary, and the doctor pulls one or both legs out of the birth canal, causing what is referred to by some people as the 'partial birth' of the fetus. The doctor subsequently extracts the rest of the fetus, usually without the aid of forceps, leaving only the head still inside the birth canal. An incision is made at the base of the skull and a suction catheter is inserted into the cut. The brain tissue is removed, which causes the skull to collapse and allows the fetus to pass more easily through the birth canal. The placenta is removed and the uterine wall is vacuum aspirated using a suction curette.



(Quoted from the Wikipedia article on Intact dilation and extraction (aka Partial Birth), emphasis mine)

Quote of the Day

Moses Hadas

from Quotes of the Day

"This book fills a much-needed gap."

I'm currently preparing the message for this weekend on Ephesians 3:1-13, and for the first time I can remember, I struck upon an individual word in the German translation which just rocks and is way better than the English word. It's in verse 8. In English it says

To me – less than the least of all the saints – this grace was given, to proclaim to the Gentiles the unfathomable riches of Christ

What I love about the German translation of this verse is the word for "unfathomable". It's "unausforschlich". "Forschen" is to discover or study. Because of the "aus" prefix, the word means "impossible to discover completely", but it has the clear connotation that it IS possible to keep discovering: Otherwise it would be "unforschbar". This fits quite well to the actual Greek word "anexichniastos": Now I ain't no expert, but it seems to me "an" fits the prefix "un", "ex" fits the prefix "aus".

"Unfathomable", though of course coming close, just doesn't have this beautiful connotation for me of beckoning me to search deeper because there will always be more to discover.

Happy Easter!


A friend of mine just sent this to me, and I cracked up. It's apparently from reverendfun.com, so make sure to go visit that site and buy stuff in order to relieve my conscience of this blatant copyright infringement. ;-)

Stephi and I watched "Children of Men" last night, and I'm still mulling over it and thinking it through, which almost always is the deciding factor of whether or not I like a movie or not, actually: If a movie makes me think, regardless of what its message is, I like it.

Children of Men made me think, but it also drew me into its world and stole my breath, especially with its three LONG action shots which are each single takes. It's hard to describe what it feels like to watch a single car chase scene where the camera not once cuts to a different perspective, but the whole scene is a 4 minute long, fluid, intense piece. But the shot that was most incredible was the 9 minute long - yes, 9 minute long - take of Clive Owen making his way through a war zone, into a building where bombs and shells are exploding everywhere, up some stairs with refugees everywhere, then back out through the war zone and into a building. The whole thing is intense and you just don't get a second's rest, because the camera never gives you that rest: It's a single continuous shot. At first I thought this had to be multiple shots and they simply used CGI to stitch them together, but then I read this article. They actually prepared and practiced the choreography and explosions for that 10 minute scene for 12 of their 14 allotted shooting days at that spot, then would try to shoot the whole thing in one take - any time anything went wrong, they had to reset everything and it took 5 hours, and then they'd try again. And they actually made it on their last try! Just amazing stuff...now I'm just really disappointed and confused at why in the world Pan's Labyrinth (an excellent movie itself BTW) got the cinematography Oscar over Children of Men. What in the world? Children of Men is in a league of its own when it comes to cinematography, it should have been a no-brainer.

I found that war zone scene on YouTube by the way...

NOTE #1: PLEASE don't watch this if you haven't seen the movie and think you may yet. The whole movie is set up in a way that it builds up to this incredible 10-minute climax. To watch this scene by itself pretty much ruins the effect. I link this only for those who've already seen the movie or think they won't anyways.

NOTE #2: This scene is quite intense and violent (like the rest of the movie), so don't watch this if you're not comfortable with intense scenes.

OK, here it is.

The symbolism behind Children of Men is also very interesting, here's an excerpt from the excellent Wikipedia article on the movie:

According to Cuarón, the title of P.D. James' book (The Children of Men) is a Catholic allegory derived from a passage of scripture in the Bible.[33] (Psalm 90(89):3 of the KJV: "Thou turnest man to destruction; and sayest, Return, ye children of men."[34]) James refers to her story as a "Christian fable"[20] while Cuarón describes it as "almost like a look at Christianity": "I didn't want to shy away from the spiritual archetypes," Cuarón told Filmmaker Magazine. "But I wasn't interested in dealing with Dogma."[6] The audience swims through an ocean of Christian symbolism, where British terrorists named "Fishes" protect the rights of fugees.[35] Opening on Christmas Day in the United States, critics compared the characters of Theo and Kee with Joseph and Mary, calling the film a "modern-day [36]Nativity story".[37] To highlight these spiritual themes, Cuarón commissioned a 15-minute piece by British composer John Tavener, an Orthodox Christian whose work resonates with the themes of "motherhood, birth, rebirth, and redemption in the eyes of God." Calling his score a "musical and spiritual reaction to Alfonso's film", snippets of Tavener's "Fragments of a Prayer" contain lyrics in Latin, German and Sanskrit sung by a mezzo-soprano. Words like "mata" (mother), "pahi mam" (protect me), "avatara" (saviour), and "alleluia" appear throughout the film.

Now, on the one hand, the movie is incredibly depressing and dark - the world basically has no future whatsoever since everyone is infertile. But this is not a "Sin City" where hope is not to be found anywhere whatsoever, rather the movie centers on the hope of humanity in the miraculously pregnant girl Kee who is protected by the main character Theo (whose name means God). And to be honest, this resonates with me a lot.

So, all in all, I give this movie a 14. For those who don't know my rating system (it's been quite a while since I've rated a movie), that means I think it's worth 14 Euros to see this movie.

You can safely assume that you've created God in your own image when it turns out that God hates all the same people you do. - Anne Lamott

Found this on Ariel's blog.

Geek Glory

Woohoo! I just got some geek glory by being mentioned on the Lifehacker blog! I helped fix 2 little bugs in a script they had, so they updated the script and...get this...mentioned my alias!



Bring on the geek glory, baby. Although it's nothing in comparison to Mike's gushing being quoted on the Scrybe main page (look for mrcaron). Because of this, he's unfortunately way much cooler than me, in a geek sense of course. But hey, being mentioned on Lifehacker is a definite step toward catching up with him.



BTW, more on Scrybe coming soon in a separate post...

Just wanted to share this Greasemonkey script I found for all you Google addicts out there: Here is a great Greasemonkey script which (collapsably) embeds Google Reader into your GMail. Totally awesome. All you need is Firefox, Greasemonkey installed, then you install the script, and you're done.

Powered by ScribeFire.

Some of you may already know this game: Line Rider. If not, check it out, although I must warn you of extreme addiction potential.

Then, take a look at this and mourn the days and weeks somebody must have spent doing this:

Translation the easy way

Nice.

clipped from www.overheardintheoffice.com 9AM The Global War on Terror Hits Another Snag Tech #1: There. Translations are done. All nine languages. Tech #2: That was fast. I didn't even know you spoke Arabic much less any of the others. Tech #1: It's easy -- just highlight the text and change the font. Tech #2: What?! Tech #1: Yeah. We should hear back from the Army in a day or so. I went ahead and sent the new files off. Tech #2: [Huge sigh.]

Discovered this yesterday (even though it's been around for quite some time) and think it's pretty cool: Twitter is basically a mini-blog you set up where your posts can't be longer than 140 letters and are supposed to be answering the question "What are you doing?"



You then hook up with friends and can see what they're doing pretty much in real-time, depending on what you want (too many friends and it might be information overload - you can just scale back then). For example, I learned today that Mikey is trying to learn Spanish on his way to work. Nice.



The idea is simple enough that I could easily see it becoming the Next Big Thing™.



Anyhow, sign up and then add me as your friend so we can keep each other updated on what's going on. :)



See the "badge" at the top of my sidebar to see what I've been doing all day, for example.

For a couple weeks now I've been using Lifehacker's Trusted Trio method to keep my GMail inbox clear, and it's worked great - one more reason why Lifehacker has become one of my favorite blogs to date! The idea is quite simple:



For every single email you get, you as soon as possible get out of your inbox and place it into one of three "bins" (which can be folders in Outhouse Outlook, or, even better, labels in GMail): Action (stuff I need to read and/or reply to!), Hold (stuff I need to be able to keep on the back burner and keep an eye on, like emails I'm waiting on a reply for), or Archive (pretty much everything else that isn't spam or "funny" jokes forwarded by co-workers, you can just delete those). Since placing an email into one of those three options doesn't take a lot of time at all (meaning you usually don't have to even read the whole email to be able to categorize it) - poof! Your inbox is cleared very quickly, also you have a nice handy email "to do list" lying in your Action bin for you to "get done".



Check it out, this is what an empty inbox looks like - beautiful, isn't it?

Some smart guy somewhere figured out Google can sometimes have a higher resolution of satellite images than what you can access on the Google Maps tool. If you manipulate the URL a little, sometimes you can zoom even further in.

For example, get ready for your jaw to drop. Hwhoah.

Now just think what the military can see if they want, I bet they could count my nostril hairs if I looked up like the guy near that well. Of course, I do have a pretty big nose.

NETBible

I just discovered the "NET Bible", a Bible translation specifically developed in order to be a freely quotable, online or downloadable Bible.

I just read their Daily Reading today, which was Judges 1-4, and was pretty impressed by the translation. It seems to have been designed to be first precise, then readable, but with great commentaries any time any translation is disputed in any way.

They have tons of other cool stuff, like really awesome word studies, also you can download the whole thing for free.

Check it out:

NETBible

Well, wonderful - using the Clipmarks apparently got me marked as a spam blog which means I can't post posts until Almighty Google Man checks to make sure I'm not a spam blog. I think the reason is that their wonderful and good-looking AI (you listening, AI?) detected that the clip was copy-pasted automatically from a different page.

Anyhow, what I was GOING to post was a link to this pretty cool physics flash game where you keep removing sticks from a tower built of sticks. The tower responds in real-time. Anyways, check it out (whenever this post gets posted):

Stick Remover

*sigh*

Gotta love it when you're at the receiving end of a false-positive anything.

This is just a test of the Clipmarks plugin (http://www.clipmarks.com), let's see how this works. ;)

The idea of the plugin is pretty dang cool, this lets me clip and paste from within Firefox directly to the blog and also my own clippings page.

clipped from www.quotationspage.com

I don't want any yes-men around me. I want everybody to tell me the truth even if it costs them their jobs.

Samuel Goldwyn
US (Polish-born) movie producer (1882 - 1974)

Family Picture 2/2007

Family Picture 2/2007
Originally uploaded by epaga.

This is our latest family picture. Enjoy.

This is just too cool - a group at the University of Washington made a tool which can create 3D-views of things, say the Notre Dame, by automatically extracting 3D details from pictures. You can then view the object from any perspective and the tool interpolates between the pictures.

Frikkin' awesome. Check out the movies especially. Photo Tourism

"After twelve years of therapy my psychiatrist said something that brought tears to my eyes. He said, 'No hablo ingles.'" - Ronnie Shakes

I had a good laugh at this, especially thinking how Mario'd pronounce "Wiiiid, dooood."

The Mystery of Consciousness -- Friday, Jan. 19, 2007 -- Page 1 -- TIME

This is quite an intense article on a materialistic, supposedly scientific look at consciousness: The Mystery of Consciousness -- Friday, Jan. 19, 2007

What made this article thought-provoking for me was the question: What if scientists end up understanding how consciousness works and can explain (and manipulate!) it entirely by measuring (and simulating) brain waves and movements? If it could be shown that the feeling that "I exist and can choose" is something physical, something I can turn on and off as I please - would that challenge the Biblical belief that such a thing as the "soul" exists?

In the article the author seems to equate "soul" and "consciousness" a lot, in the end stating that if (and in his view, when) scientists achieve the goal of explaining consciousness, it's basically a death blow to any reasonable faith in an after-life.

Sorry, I don't really follow that logic - for me the soul is more than just consciousness. What I do find intriguing is one of the most interesting justifications I've heard yet for atheistic morality. I'm not saying I agree with the author, but at least he's trying to make sense. :) I'd love to hear any thoughts both of you regular readers of mine have about this article, if any.

Princess Sarah

Princess Sarah
Originally uploaded by epaga.

Hi everyone!
Sarah Lena Goering was born today at 3:14 p.m. Her name means "princess of light".
The birth went incredibly smooth - her first contractions started around 8:30 in the morning, slowly got stronger as the day went by, the really painful ones were right at the end, the last half hour or so. Sarah weighs in at 6 pounds 3 oz and is 19 inches tall. Oh, and she has really long feet. :) Attached to this are a few pictures - her dad thinks she's one of the very few newborns that actually look cute. ;) Both Mom and daughter are feeling great, Stephi said she's feeling better than yesterday, since she was feeling pretty tired yesterday.
Have a great week!!!

For a few more pictures, see our Flickr page! http://www.flickr.com/photos/johnstephi

Hallo zusammen!
Heute ist Sarah Lena Goering um 15:14 geboren worden! Ihr Name bedeutet "Prinzessin des Lichts".
Die Geburt verlief super glatt - die ersten Wehen begannen so um 8:30 morgens, und wurden langsam aber sich immer stärker, die richtig schmerzhaften Wehen kamen aber erst ganz zum Schluss, so die letzte halbe Stunde. Sie wiegt 2800g, ist 49cm groß, und hat richtig große Füße. :) Angehängt ein paar Bilder - ihr Papa findet, sie ist eine der gaanz wenigen Neugeborenen, die tatsächlich süß aussehen. ;) Sowohl der Mutter als auch der Tochter geht's blendend. Stephi sagte, ihr geht's zur Zeit besser als gestern um diese Zeit, wo sie sich ziemlich kaputt fühlte.

Euch allen eine schöne Woche!!!

Für weitere Fotos einfach auf die Flickr Seite schauen! http://www.flickr.com/photos/johnstephi

So silly. And yet - so amazing. This guy's been practicing this for 37 years. I'd say he has it down.

Just found an awesome site. But first, let me explain. No, that would take too long. Let me sum up (100 points for anyone who got that movie reference).

A lot of you know I try to use the geeky GTD system for stayinggetting organized - if you, like me, happen to have a problem with being organized, check out "Getting Things Done" by David Allen, it's a lifesaver for me. The main points that help me the most are:

Have a trusted "in box" where you simply dump anything and everything you think needs an action from you at any point in time. This makes sure I never forget a great idea I have - yes, it does happen about once a year.

Divide your to-do list not into days when you want to do them but into contexts, in other words, have an "Email" to do list, a "Talk to Stephi about this" to do list, etc. etc. That way, whenever you're in that context, you can check the things you need to be doing in that context and not worry about the other contexts.

Have your to do list only consist of actual "Next Actions", not big plans, so that you know exactly the next physical thing you need to do, so don't have "Fix car" as your todo, rather "Call car repair place - (232) 424-1555".

Anyways, the main reason for my blog post is that I found a great online way to do this system. It's a web service called TiddlySpot which hosts your own personal Wiki for free. I'm using a Wiki called d3 which is basically a GTD version of TiddlyWiki, which is a free and simple personal wiki. Phew. Wild and wooly Web 2.0, I'll tell ya.

So anyways, it rocks, and it's free, and it's online and it keeps me organized. If I remember to use it. :)

From The Onion 3 years ago:

Bush on North Korea: 'We Must Invade Iraq'

WASHINGTON, DC—With concern over North Korea's nuclear capabilities growing, President Bush reassured the American people Monday that "extreme force" will be used to remove Saddam Hussein from power if the Iraqi president fails to give up suspected weapons of mass destruction.

Check out the article for more satire goodness. :)