Monthly Archives: January 2008

Florida

Another McCain victory, another droning McCain victory speech. He speaks in a robotic way that is guaranteed to bore. Apparently the GOP thinks he is ‘electable.’ Did that work for Bob Dole and John Kerry? He is going to get killed, and I mean killed, come November. “Independents” which probably means Republicans who think abortion is ok, come out and vote for Mac in the primaries, but in the general election they will vote for Obama or Hillary. Conservatives will be unmotivated for this kind of lefty, Rockefeller Republican, and we will get 4 to 8 years of Democrats running the show. Bush’s commitment to war at all costs has now twisted the GOP into a war party, and has hurt the cause of the unborn for another generation. Loving war seems to be the key factor in being the GOP nominee.

The McCain platform

I love it, I just heard Pat Buchanan on MSNBC distill McCain’s platform down to some easy to understand principles:

The jobs are going away;

The illegals are staying;

We’re going to start some more wars.

Who can’t support that?

Bush the Polytheist

“I pray to the same God as a Muslim prays” says President Bush (see this link).

Yeah, I guess so, except that the Muslim god is not a Trinity, does not have a Son, did not send that Son to become a man and die in the place of a fallen humanity, etc. Small details like that.

I would say that the President is bearing false witness against the Scriptural God and is also creating a god that does not actually exist, a polytheistic God that bears no resemblence to God the Father, Son and Holy Spirit.

Church Growth

Christianity did not grow because of miracle working in the marketplaces (although there may have been much of that going on), or because Constantine said it should, or even because the martyrs gave it such credibility. It grew because Christians constituted an intense community, able to generate the “invincible obstinacy” that so offended the younger Pliny but yielded immense religious rewards. And the primary means of its growth was through the united and motivated efforts of the growing numbers of Christian believers, who invited their friends, relatives, and neighbors to share the “good news.”

From Rodney Stark, The Rise of Christianity pp.196-215 (Princeton University Press, Princeton, NJ) 1996

Watching Jesus Camp

We watched Jesus Camp on YouTube (see the first section here). It is about as bad as you can expect. I don’t think it’s an unfair portrait at all. It depicts a particularly wacky and un-educated sector of the church, but one that you may have come in contact with or be a part of. Tongues-speaking, America-worshiping, Bush-idolaters who don’t seem to talk about love much, but sure do bang on about moral issues. Let me state just a few problems with these brothers and sisters off the top of my head:

1. The lady who runs the camp is a female pastor (Becky Fischer). Females aren’t supposed to be pastors according to the Bible and 6,000 years of church history (Old and New Covenants). I find it quite interesting that on this issue the far out righties of charismatic/pentecostal circles are every bit as liberal as Episcopalians and Methodists. Women’s ordination is just fine with the goofball American church.

2. America isn’t God’s chosen nation, the Church is. We have a city above, not made with hands, that is our home. You can work for implementing God’s law here on earth and that is great, but don’t confuse our 200 year old nation with the promised land. We have no more claim on God then Chad or Singapore.

3. George Bush is a shallow Christian who violated 1,700 years of Christian Just War theory and has used the Christian right as his useful idiots. This movie is proof positive of the idolatrous love of this man that the goofy church has felt for the past seven years. Hopefully we will look back later and say ‘what the heck were we thinking’ in idolizing this President.

4. Worship in most goofball USA churches is completely un-tethered from historic Christian norms. We have salesmen telling us that it’s “all about environments” and nonsense like that. Where are the sacraments? Where is reverence? All we get is kookiness that rightly makes unbelievers feel like they have entered the twilight zone when if they even watch it form afar. Would you go to church with ranting and raving young kids who are channeling their parents and shouting out in ‘tongues’ so-called? Well, maybe you would…I guess lots of people do.

It is embarrassing to be part of this, and since we are all one via baptism, we are all part of it. When will the goofiness that is American Church stop? I don’t expect it in my lifetime, but I do think that over time quality and truth will prevail against this insanity.

To see a good depiction of American Church, watch the embedded episode of King of the Hill here.

A Solution to FrameMaker 8 Crashes

As I have mentioned before, Adobe FrameMaker 8 was crashing just about every time I tried to save a file to PDF. It was an intermittent problem, and it was driving me beserk as I am doing all of my newer work using Frame and InDesign. But lo and behold a kind soul had provided me with relief. It turns out that most, if not all, of the problems are from the fntcache.dat file on the C drive. To fix this problem, do the following:

Open Notepad. Enter this text in Notepad:

del c:\windows\system32\fntcache.dat
shutdown -s

Save the file as a .bat file on your desktop. Mine is called “delfontcache.bat” When you run this .bat file, it deletes the fntcache and shuts your PC down. The result is that FrameMaker doesn’t crash any more. So before you shut down your PC (every time), run this .bat file to clear out the fntcache and shut down for you – problem solved.

Think with your body

James Jordan has repeatedly argued that one reason we are not to bow to images is that the human person is a deep construct – we have levels within us that we are not even aware of. We don’t know all the reasons why God says to do or not do something, but we can assume that it is important if he says it because he knows our make up far better then we do. Bowing to statues and pictures does something to us over time that we are not aware of. This news may uncover some of the reasons why it matter. It says in part:

The term most often used to describe this new model of mind is “embodied cognition,” and its champions believe it will open up entire new avenues for understanding – and enhancing – the abilities of the human mind. Some educators see in it a new paradigm for teaching children, one that privileges movement and simulation over reading, writing, and reciting. Specialists in rehabilitative medicine could potentially use the emerging findings to help patients recover lost skills after a stroke or other brain injury. The greatest impact, however, has been in the field of neuroscience itself, where embodied cognition threatens age-old distinctions – not only between brain and body, but between perceiving and thinking, thinking and acting, even between reason and instinct – on which the traditional idea of the mind has been built.

“It’s a revolutionary idea,” says Shaun Gallagher, the director of the cognitive science program at the University of Central Florida. “In the embodied view, if you’re going to explain cognition it’s not enough just to look inside the brain. In any particular instance, what’s going on inside the brain in large part may depend on what’s going on in the body as a whole, and how that body is situated in its environment.”

Or, as the motto of the University of Wisconsin’s Laboratory of Embodied Cognition puts it, “Ago ergo cogito”: “I act, therefore I think.”