(Ha, ha, cheap shot)
Then there's this:
Which instantly makes me think of this:
I've saved up nearly 3,000 Iraqi Points! That's almost enough for a free barrel of oil!
This is what immigration should look like. (Most) right-winger's aren't against immigration, contrary to how it may look; they're all for immigration, as long as it's legally done and the immigrants come planning to assimilate into American culture.
Go read the post; it's well worth your time.
The following passage starts on page 107; any spelling errors are my fault, I'm sure:
No one denies that there are passages in the Bible that contain problems of one kind or another. The inerrancy question does not involve interpretative problems or debates concerning the best text type. But problems of apparent discrepancies, conflicting numbers, differences in parallel accounts, or allegedly unscientific statements do concern the question of inerrancy.Errantists and inerrantists both have access to the same facts concerning each of these problems. Both have capable minds to use in interacting with those facts. Both can read the conclusions of others. But they do not come to these problems with the same basic outlook. The errantist's outlook includes not ony the possibility but the reality of errors in the Bible. Therefore, when he studies these problems one of his possible conclusions is that one or another of them is actually an error.
The inerrantist, on the other hand, has concluded that the Bible contains no errors. Therefore, he exercises no option to conclude that any of these same problems is an example of a genuine error in the Bible. His research may lead him to conclude that some problem is yet unexplainable. Nevertheless, he believes it is not an error and that either further research will demonstrate this, or he will understand the solution in heaven.
In short, Ryrie says he will continue to hold the position that the Bible is without error without regard to the evidence. I cannot begin to tell you how much this bothers me. Is it not written in one of our best-loved hymns, "The Bible stands every test we give it for its Author is divine"? If the Bible is true and inerrant, then it will stand up to our tests; if it is not, then it will not.
Perhaps anticipating my reaction, Ryrie attempts to explain himself with the following illustration:
If a happily married man comes home unexpectedly one day to find his wife waving good-bye to a handsome man about to get into a car, what will he think? If his confidence and trust in his wife is total and unwavering because of their years of satisfying experiences together, he will assume that she had a good reason for seeing that man. Though he may be curious, the husband will not doubt his wife's loyalty. Perhaps it will not be until later that he learns that the man he saw was delivering a special present his wife had ordered for him.But if his confidence in his relationship with his wife is even a bit shaky, his thoughts will wander him into all kinds of paths including unfaithfulness on her part. Because of his insecurity, his wife will forever be branded an adulteress in his eyes.
The analogy is clear, isn't it? If I come to the Bible with confidence that its words were breathed out from God and therefore without errors, and if that confidence is buttressed by years of proving the Bible totally reliable, then I won't be shaken by a problem, and I will certainly not conclude that it is in error. But if I think there can be errors in the Bible, however few or many, then I will likely conclude that some of those problems are examples of errors. An even if there is only one, I have an errant Bible.
The problem with the analogy is that, regardless of the mindset of the married man, there is the very real possibility that his wife did have an affair. The evidence of years of faithful marriage beforehand are not necessarily meaningful; she could have been having affairs without his knowledge. Carrying that over from the analogy, just because I'd never noticed an error in the Bible doesn't mean that it wasn't there all along, regardless of how many years I missed it.
Now, following the illustration, the man's first thoughts aren't likely to be that she'd had an affair, but he'd probably ask his wife who the other man in the car was. If she couldn't provide a satisfactory answer, a red flag might go up, and he'd investigate further, and he might come to the (possibly accurate) conclusion that his wife was cheating on him. Likewise, in approaching the Scripture, it's likely that any perceived errors are explainable in some way; if there isn't a good explanation readily at the mind, the student of the Word should dig deeper, ask teachers and pastors, and find one. If there is no explanation to be found, then it's possible that the Bible might just be in error.
But I most certainly will not ignore evidence that the Bible is untrue simply because my ideology says that the Bible must be true; it's the mental equivalent of plugging one's ears and shouting until the problem goes away. To borrow an another analogy, this one from essayist Bill Whittle (his emphasis):
We need a map. Several are for sale. How do we choose?Well, it seems like a good idea to choose the map that best conforms to the coastline we see unveiling before us. We choose the map that best fits the territory. We choose the map that best matches reality – the objective, external, indisputable reality of bays and promontories, capes and gulfs and rivers and shoals.
We can, indeed, lay out competing philosophies on the table, and see where each conforms to reality and where it does not. No maps are without distortions; none of these are likely to be, either. And one map may conform perfectly to the coastline in one area, and be dreadfully amiss in another. We can cut and paste them as we wish. This is too important for us to be arguing about who is right – all our energies must go to getting it right.
And before we start, we must agree to one thing, and one thing only: we will never be so full of arrogance and blinded by pride that we dare confront a place where the map does not match the coastline, and proclaim that the coastline must be wrong.
That said, and a good half an hour gone, I leave you for my studying. Be back later.
On Saturday, September 25th, the American Veterans Standing for God and Country will bring to Greenville the 5000-pound Ten Commandments monument which once stood in the Alabama courthouse where Roy Moore served as a State Supreme Court judge. It will be displayed in front of Rodeheaver Auditorium from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m.
The University family and the Greenville community are invited to view this historic monument. People may come for photo opportunities or to spend time in prayer for the nation at this critical moment in our history.
Have I mentioned Roy Moore before? (::checks::) Yep. I still believe Instapundit's right: "If judges don't obey court orders, who will?"
Naturally, of course, Drum and I disagree with how to deal with the situation. He suggests dividing the states up into congressional districts by straight geographical lines rather than by counties. I like several of his commenter's ideas. One of my favorites: let a computer randomly assign everybody in a state a "virtual district." So, in my state, I could be assigned any one of the eight districts; my dad and my mom might be assigned another district. So long as it's done on a completely random basis, it should make the districts each be representative samples of the state.
Other ideas: setting up a non-partisan committee for each state to determine the districts (to keep the politicans hands off) and/or adding more house representatives. The disadvantage to the computer solution above is that you lose whatever small measure of local voice in national politics you had. To quote a commenter:
No one person can accurately represent the local concerns of 600,000 people, and the constitution doesn't limit us to only 435 house members. In the words of another commenter:
If I did my arithmetic correctly, that would mean each representative would represent 27,000 people, which is a lot easier to do than representing 600,000. If the districts are divided up on a local basis and not a random basis, it would also make it easier to campaign. And, of course, since there's more competition between candidates, it's harder to gerrymander your way into getting more votes.
And, of course, with nearly 10,000 house politicans, the political process should slow way down, which can only be good for our wallets.
"Your fellow beings"... That's pretty strange wording. Why not "other people"? Perhaps the people giving the scholarship have been in contact with aliens?
I've been encountering a lot of strange wording lately. This probably has something to do with reading textbooks. I honestly cannot believe people talk like this. To any business person reading this: the word utilize: Stop saying it right now. The word "use" is just as good, means the same thing, and takes less time to say. Likewise, instead of the word "quality," use the word "good." Think of the time you'll save by eliminating unnecessary syllables from your speech! You'll enhance corporate productivity and increase your bottom line!
::hands go to mouth::
Oh no! I'm becoming one of them!
Jesse showing Dad a card trick
And now: Absolutely the coolest photo I've ever taken:
That's Jason unloading Jesse's newest Nerf gun at me. Twenty rounds per salvo. (We had to wait to buy this until after the assault weapons ban expired.) Where were these toys when I was a kid?
Anyways, good night, and may Jesse have at least ten times as many more happy years ahead.
Also:
But human urine has its limitations: It decays rapidly if not kept refrigerated and must be frozen when shipped. It can smell, and it foams. Donors must be screened carefully for drug use or disease. Also, different body chemistry guarantees that no two people's urine is exactly alike, an irritation for researchers who rely on consistency.
So, where do I sign up to sell that? Also: Do they really need to buy someone's urine? Why not just have the researchers drink more bottled water?
Last quote:
"We're finding lots of applications for it that we didn't know existed," he said.
Who knew?
I finally feel like I can catch my breath. Thank God for the weekend. (It was His idea, don't ya know?). A longish, rambling post about the start of my semester follows in the extended entry. If you don't care, proceed to my post below about media bias.
In retrospect, it may have been unwise to schedule most of my classes for Tuesdays and Thursdays; I'm in classes most of the day from 8 in the morning to 4:15 in the afternoon. Four hour-and-fifteen-minute sessions, plus chapel and lunch. The other days of the week are much easier by comparison, as I've only got two fifty-minute classes (plus chapel and lunch). But it doesn't help when you start off behind due to evening evangelistic services and society rush.
Society rush.... That was a lot of fun. For those of you non-BJU types, a word of explanation. Every student is required to join a society, which is kind of like a fraternity or a sorority, but without the drinking, the drugs, the frat house...... well, it's like a fraternity in that it uses Greek letters in the name. Except my society doesn't; it's called Bryan, after William Jennings Bryan. But it's been around for forever, and it was (although I did not know this when I joined) the society Dr. Bob III, our current University president, joined when he went through BJU, so the name isn't going to change any time soon.
Anyways, the society meets once a week, on Fridays, instead of chapel. There's a cheer, we recite our society verse, Col. 1:18 (because we can't have a BJU function without reciting something whether it's the creed at chapel, the Lord's Prayer at Artist Series, or a verse at society meetings. :-)), announcements, a short devotional message, and a game/skit of some kind. Societies also have one outing per year; one semester it's a "stag" outing, the other semester it's a dating outing. (This semester it's a stag outing, a rousing game of paintball. It's scheduled for next week, and was only announced today (or, more accurately, yesterday), the day after I could change my work schedule for next week. We'll see if I get to go.) It's really just a chance for a group of semi-likeminded guys to get to know one another. Oh, and the intra-mural sports teams are divided up by society.
Now, "Rush" is the term for the evenings of the first couple of days of classes, where the societies try to recruit the new freshman into their ranks. (This conveniently prevents a lot of anti-freshman bias that I'm told is common on other campuses.) Like a lot of other societies, we tried to bribe freshman into our tent with food.
That's how you cook shish-kabobs. You douse them with lighter fluid over an open fire. Yum. We were told that we had the best food of the night. The next night we ordered something like 20 pizzas from Little Caesars. These were consumed in about 15 minutes. The freshman had gotten the hang of this.
Anyways, that long digression all to say, I was unable to complete much homework those two evenings. Then Saturday was induction, which is when we find out which freshman joined us. I would have (actually good) photos of this event, but there was goodly amount of water involved, and I like to keep my camera working.
We're not supposed to engage in any hazing of the freshman; in other words, we have to be willing to go through whatever we put them through. So, we were all pre-soaked before the freshman came out to join us. Our "Spirit Leader," Brent, had them all get on their knees and recite the Bryan Pledge, which I didn't remember reciting as a Freshman. (oops.) After that little formality was taken care of, the freshman joined the upperclassmen in achieving outer wetness, thanks to a collection of buckets hidden behind us. We then joined a variation on capture the flag, the variation being that we were each equipped with a number of "flour-bombs," a handful of flour encased in toilet paper. I'm sure you see where this is going.
Having made a mess of ourselves and several cars in a nearby parking lot (by accident, of course!), we had a snack/meal (pizza and tea lemonade). Then, of course, we had a short devotional message (naturally, BJU = religious institution after all) and sign ups for our soccer team. A fun time was had by all.
So, little homework was done on Saturday. And Sunday I had church stuff. And on it goes.
As far as actual classes go: I think I'm going to like them. None of them look like they're going to be too boring yet. Two of them scare me, because they both involve an end-of-the-year presentation. One of them is my salesmanship class, the other a global culture class called "Practices and Protocols of International Business." The sales class involves several videotaping sessions too. (eek!) But I'll get over it. My "Production and Operations Management" class looks like it will be lots of fun, even though (or because) it's at 8 in the morning, based entirely on the group of people I'm sitting near. My Graphic Communications class (which I'm taking for my minor, Public Relations Journalism) looks like it will be fun, if time-consuming. (I get to play on a Macintosh! It does this really cool thing when you minimize a window.) I'm also taking Elementary Statistics this year with Dr. Guthrie, who is my all-time favorite teacher at BJU. He is absolutely hilarious, and he knowledgeable, so the class is both entertaining and informative, not a combination you get too often.
Lastly, I'm taking Bible Doctrines, which I think is going to be a very helpful class. The premise is that the class will go systematically over the primary tenets of Christianity (as taught by BJU), explaining where they come from in the Bible. Of course, since this is college, we have to use big words to describe everything, preferably with Greek word origins. So, this semester, we'll be going over Bibliology (the doctrine of Scripture), Theology (doctrine of God), Christology (doctrine of Christ), Pneumatology (doctrine of the Holy Spirit), and Angelology (just guess). Next year we learn Anthropology (the doctrine of man), Hamartiology (the doctrine of sin), Soteriology (the doctrine of salvation), Ecclesiology (the doctrine of the church), and Eschatology (the doctrine of "last things.")
Anyways, Bible Doctrines should be useful for helping me figure out exactly what I believe (religiously speaking). Whether or not those beliefs line up with the position of BJU, I will have a chance to hear their arguments and decide if they make sense.
Enough rambling for one night... Hopefully I'll be posting a bit more often now that I'm catching up with my homework. See you later!
The thing that interests me is that this story doesn't interest me. Maybe I've just become jaded and cynical to the media and to political dirty tricks, but this just seems like more of the same, except that this time a felony may have been committed instead of just spin. What does interest me is that CBS's (or, more accurately, television news media's) reputation is bad enough that a good number of people believed the documents were a forgeries as soon as the possibility was brought up. The mainstream media is so poorly thought of that it's achieved a status of total distrust (at least for a lot of conservatives/libertarians).
How did the media achieve this status? Probably by claiming they were totally unbiased. It's just like trying to be a referee at a little league game: Neither side is going to believe you are impartial, whether you genuinely are or not. Both the liberals and the conservatives accuse the media of being biased against them, and they can't both be correct.
In fact, it's debatable whether or not a truly unbiased news source can exist. The journalist faces the dilemma of what to put into a two-minute story or a quarter-page article. There's only so much data he can fit into that space, so he's forced to pick and choose which quotes to use, which camera angle to take, etc. These decisions will inevitably be influenced by his political bias and what's most important to him, so to say that his story will be unbiased is inaccurate.
That's why I'd like to see newspapers, TV news stations, etc. admit whichever bias they have. I'd like Fox News to quit saying it's "Fair and Balanced" and call itself conservative, and I want CNN to admit to a liberal bias. The system works well enough for the blogosphere, after all.
But since that's not likely to happen any time soon, perhaps someone with the time, interest, and resources could set up a website detailing the biases held by each of the major news outlets, along with evidence for that claim. The blogosphere does have some features focused on certain issues--Instapundit routinely links to a weekly roundup of anti-gun bias in the media--but there's nothing like that sorted by news outlet instead of by issue.
Unless there is, and I'm not aware of it. If that's the case, please leave a comment. I'd love to see it.
But now, I'm kind of glad he didn't win. Not only has he shown himself to be a hypocrite, but now he's saying dumb things like Jesus wouldn't vote for his rival in the Illinois senate race.
::sigh::
Relgion and politics don't mix well. For any future political leaders who might be reading: Please don't quote the Bible in making political arguments. Remember that we do have a diverse religious culture, full of Christians, yes, but also of athiests, agnostics, Muslims, Hindus, etc., etc.. Quoting the Bible is just as ridiculous to them as quoting the Koran would be to Christians.
And don't put words in Christ's mouth or assume that he'd endorse you. To the athiest/agnostic/et al., saying "Christ wouldn't vote for my opponent" is just as silly as saying "Santa Claus would vote for me, because I'm nice and my opponent is naughty!" or "The coal in my opponent's stocking could power New York City for a year!"
Even worse, to the Christian, Keyes' statement is borderline blasphemy. How dare he say "Vote for me! Jesus would!"? With that one statement Keyes has probably alienated just about everyone.
::shakes head:: Next!
There are 2 reasons I didn't write about the conventions. First: I have nothing to contribute. Everything l could say has been said, and better, by other bloggers, some of which are actually there. Second: I couldn't care less about the conventions. This is the first time I've been more than dimly aware of them, and I don't think I missed much.
I think the problem is mainly that I don't care about partisanship. I don't care what tribe you're in so much as what you stand for. If a Democrat called for (and supported, as shown by his record) lower taxes, reduced discretionary spending, and more liberty of all kinds (ideally starting with a repeal of McCain-Feingold), then I'd vote for him. And since both the Democrats and the Republicans hold to essentially the same beliefs on most of the issues I care about (both of them standing on the wrong side all too often), then I'm not terribly enthusiastic about watching the two candidates/parties bash each other. "He lied about being in Vietnam!"/"He lied about the War on Terrorism!"; "He wasn't in Cambodia when he said he was!"/"He didn't show up for his National Guard Service!"; "He's a flip-flopper!" (as if this is, by necessity a bad thing--if you'r'e wrong, change your mind rather than hanging onto wrong opinions!) /"No, he is!" And on, and on, and on it goes. Goodness, I hate elections.
Look, the only issue that matters to this election is national security. On that issue, Kerry falls short, based on his record, not on personal attacks about where he was or wasn't in 'Nam or on his personal courage or lack thereof during his four months on the swift boats. On the other hand, Bush has supported our military as he's called them into battle, and the military knows it and is grateful. He's conducted the War on Terrorism pretty well, although there'll always be room for improvement. Bush has proven that can handle the War on Terror.
That's why I plan to vote for Bush. However, it's about the only reason. He and I disagree on most domestic issues. (McCain-Feingold Monstrosity again, spending, even gay marriage.) Frankly, if 9/11 hadn't happened, I'd vote for the Constitution Party candidate or something. But like I said, national security is the only thing that matters this election.
I don't care about the parties slinging mud at each other or cheerleading for themselves. I'd much prefer a rational discussion of individual issues to a frenzied crowd of true believers for either side. Hopefully thoughtful debate will come back after the election.
Now I have sylabii (sylabus-es)for all my classes. This semester is going to kill me. More details later. Sleep now.
Government is evil. It’s a necessary evil, but it’s still evil. Its job is to be big and powerful and push people around. It’s sorry thing we need it, but, hey, them’s the breaks. So, the idea is to be as careful as possible when applying it. You should be as hesitant to use the government to achieve something as you would be burning down an orphanage to achieve something. But people don’t get it, always whining to government to fix every problem instead of getting off their own duffs even though government can often make things worse. Look at this way, the government is like Godzilla: it’s most adept as smashing and breaking things, but if it tries to help an individual person, it’s more likely to crush him accidentally than anything else. So that’s why I’m ‘gainst big government.