Whole Reason

I have fin­ished import­ing over 2K posts from twoorthree.net, my pre­vi­ous site, shared with two other authors.

The changes to the blog are minor — the other authors will now be con­sid­ered guest authors, and this site will become my main ‘min­istry’ site.

Feel free to look around. More changes in my work log, including:

1. Re-loading, by hand, all of my images — typepad’s heinous export does not allow you to export the image names with the html. Ugh.
2. Set­ting up the podcast
3. Set­ting up the store!
4. Updat­ing my ‘About’ page
5. Adding plu­g­ins for Ama­zon, Scrip­ture links, and more.
6. Updat­ing all of my inter­nal links
7. Updat­ing the archive pages to show only Titles
8. Replac­ing the com­ment sys­tem with coCom­ment or IntenseDebate
9. Pars­ing out the Pol­i­tics cat­e­gory into smaller ones
10. Per­haps hav­ing a two-tier cat­e­gory structure
11. Updat­ing the RSS feed to use Feedburner
12. Get­ting some sleep

So, I’ve scoured the inter­net to find out how to use Google Voice with my Sprint account. You can use it for voice­mail with­out incur­ring any for­ward­ing charges, but I’m not sure if they will allow you any of the plans that would make it pos­si­ble for all of your calls via GV to be free, i.e. not count against your min­utes. I’ll updated when I find out more.

Last Update: 07/08/10

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I recently lis­tened to apol­o­gist Peter S. Williams (blog) deliver this talk at the 2010 Euro­pean Lead­er­ship Forum on the topic: Argu­ments for The­ism, and finally under­stood the Onto­log­i­cal Argu­ment for God’s existence.

How­ever, it brought up a ques­tion in my mind, which I sub­mit­ted to William Lane Craig’s web­site. I’ll post the answer if I get one, but here’s the question:

If the Onto­log­i­cal Argu­ment assumes that God is the max­i­mum qual­ity of attrib­utes of good­ness and greatness:

1. Which cat­e­gory does ‘being’ or ‘exis­tence’ fall into? Good­ness or greatness?
2. If that is an attribute of great­ness, could we not then use this argu­ment to argue for the exis­tence of a max­i­mally great and max­i­mally evil (instead of good) being, then con­clude that that being must also exist?

Com­ments?

Is Obama facil­i­tat­ing change or forc­ing it? Here’s today’s quote.

Neces­sity is the plea for every infringe­ment of human free­dom. It is the argu­ment of tyrants; it is the creed of slaves. ~ William Pitt

In our recent polit­i­cal his­tory, this might be applied to some of the actions of GW Bush, such as the war on Iraq, wire­tap­ping, sus­pend­ing habeas cor­pus for Gitmo detainees, etc.  

It could also be applied to the Obama Admin­is­tra­tion, in the way that they forced through their var­i­ous enor­mous spend­ing bills, as well as their upcom­ing “car­bon off­sets” (a.k.a as ‘cap and trade’) leg­is­la­tion.  Trust me, it will be urgent and necessary.  

As we have seen in the Obama admin­is­tra­tion, you don’t need time to read or openly debate leg­is­la­tion, you just need time to manip­u­late a major­ity vote.

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Here’s my first ser­mon as an ordained pas­tor, and here’s what was in it:

1. Get there
2. Quiet your soul
3. Pour out your soul
4. Read and wait for Illumination
5. Jour­nal
6. Express thanks

Lis­ten to Draw near to God

I was recently in a dis­cus­sion at the skep­tic site NW Ohio Skep­tics, and got into a dis­cus­sion about the dif­fer­ences between Evan­gel­i­cals and Fun­da­men­tal­ists, and one topic that came up is that of inerrancy.  While I think all Fun­da­men­tal­ists hold to a ple­nary inerrancy, I don’t think that that posi­tion is the only one among evangelicals.

First check out Daniel Wallace’s great essay My Take on Inerrancy.

Then, check out the dia­gram I made com­par­ing the dif­fer­ent types of Chris­tian­ity and their stands on dif­fer­ent doc­trines, includ­ing inerrancy — Neo-fundy Doc­trines?

Now, you are ready to read my expla­na­tion of how I view inerrancy, and how I think many Evan­gel­i­cals view it — but I bet there is a bit of diver­sity on this topic in Evangelicailsm.

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I’m sorry. It’s rather dif­fi­cult to be polite to some­one who makes a good, publicly-funded salary in order to spout this non­sense.

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Ok, since I really enjoyed the video below, I thought to read the short (16 page) Ari­zona immi­gra­tion bill (PDF) myself and see what all the hubub is about.  Even though I am polit­i­cally con­ser­v­a­tive, I do believe we need a com­pro­mise solu­tion that enforces our bor­ders and has com­pas­sion on peo­ple flee­ing the poverty and cor­rup­tion of Mex­ico (though the cur­rent admin­is­tra­tion is try­ing hard to shut down the drug cartels).

Sum­mary?  I think the law is a lit­tle too harsh, but only a lit­tle.  Even ‘worse,’ AZ Sen­a­tor Rus­sel Pierce argued on The O’Reilly Fac­tor last night (also below) that giv­ing cit­i­zen­ship to the chil­dren of ille­gals born in the US is NOT cov­ered by the Four­teenth Amend­ment, nor by court cases since.  His argu­ment is very inter­est­ing, and not out of the question.  

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Face­book giv­ing me the TURING test

I didn’t know he was lost. Seri­ously though, if they found him, I can tell you where.  Sup­pos­edly, his body is buried in the Mosque of the Prophet in Med­ina.  How­ever, the point is, he is dead, but Jesus rose from the dead. And may I add, Momo’s words bring death, but Jesus’ bring life.

Not sure that Jesus actu­ally rose from the dead?  You can always lis­ten to William Lane Craig or Lee Stroble defend that proposition.

As is often the case with con­tro­ver­sies sur­round­ing politi­cians, much of the rhetoric on Rep. Mark Souder’s affair with a staffer has been divided polit­i­cally. As I have stated on numer­ous occa­sions, hypocrisy makes it worse on these type of issues for con­ser­v­a­tive Repub­li­cans, espe­cially those who claim to be com­mit­ted Christians.

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