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.