Ephesians 4:20-24
April 30, 2006
4:20 But you did not learn about Christ like this, 4:21 if indeed you heard about him and were taught in him just as the truth is in Jesus. 4:22 You were taught with reference to your former life to lay aside the old man who is being corrupted in accordance with deceitful desires, 4:23 and to be renewed in the spirit of your mind, 4:24 and to put on the new man who has been created in God’s image–in righteousness and holiness that comes from truth.
Talk about hard sayings! All I have to do is to lay aside my old self, change my thoughts and become someone I am not. There is simply no way that I can do that. Once that fact has sunk in, I find myself with only one course, to confess my weakness to Christ and depend upon him to do what I cannot. It seems that it takes a long time to fully realize a life hidden with Christ in God. -sdg-
Keeping the genie half in the bottle
April 29, 2006
China is having quite a time living in the world of cyber-talk, where almost anything goes. The big Internet companies seem to be making moral compromises to help the Party keep the genie half in the bottle. I strongly suspect that neither the Chinese communist party nor the Googles and Yahoos of the world have much control of the situation.
China and the internet | The party, the people and the power of cyber-talk | Economist.com
For foreign companies, the internet business in China is certainly a moral minefield. …For foreign companies, the internet business in China is certainly a moral minefield. But the internet should not be dismissed as merely an instrument of control for the Communist Party. In the past three years, China has seen far more extensive use of the internet and the rapid development of groups that share views online that are by no means always the same as the party’s. The numbers of internet-connected computers have more than doubled since the end of 2002, to 45.6m, and internet-users have risen by 75%, to 111m. China now has more internet-users than any country but America, and over half of them have broadband (up from 6.6% at the end of 2002). Users of instant computer-to-computer messaging systems have more than doubled, to 87m. Blogs—online personal diaries, scarcely heard of three years ago—now number more than 30m. And search engines receive over 360m requests a day.
These statistics are startling! Imagine China with more Internet users than the U.S. And 30 million blogs.
Dave, wondering if the Orlop has had any Chinese visitors.
Congress Gone Wild
April 29, 2006
More on April madness in congress from the online Wall Street Journal.
But forgive us for talking about actual substance. Like college kids on spring break, Congress is letting it all hang out in a political bender of a kind we haven’t seen in years. This is what happens when a President is at 36% job approval, and there is no Beltway chaperone. And to think there are still six long months until Election Day.
Dave, speechless.
Give More Money to Iran
April 29, 2006
Economist Arnold King has this to say about a Reuters story on the new Republican plan to soften the blow at the gas pump.
EconLog, Senate Republicans: Give More Money to Iran, Arnold Kling: Library of Economics and Liberty
So…for every gallon of gas we consume at the market-clearing price, we will pay less in taxes, leaving more to go into Iran’s pockets. And if that does not help our friends overseas enough, we’ll raise taxes on our own oil companies, so they won’t drill so much.
I wish we could suspend the Senate until September 30.
And so do I. The sight of politics overruling good sense is not a pretty one.
Dave, busy burning his Republican credentials.
Girly-men pastors
April 28, 2006
I’ll be quick to say up front that my present pastor is a refreshing exception to the rule, but if you are a man whose church experience is often frustrating, or if you are a woman wondering why it’s hard to get your man to church, read this good review of Why Men Hate Going to Church by David Murrow. And a tip o’ the tricorn to Michael Kruse for pointing me to it.
Biola > Spring 2006 : Biola Connections
Murrow quotes Nancy Pearcey (Total Truth), who writes about the prevailing Darwinian worldview that posits separation of religious belief from rationality.
Pearcey said industrialization forced men to seek work away from home, in factories and offices, which created a split between the public and private spheres of life. The public sphere became secularized through the new values of competition and self-interest, and the private sphere came to represent the old values of nurturing and religion, Pearcey said. Thus, religion came to be seen as for women and children and not as relevant to the “real” world of business, politics and academia, she said.
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Love Songs and Feminine Spirituality
An example of the feminization of the church is its music. Typical praise songs refer to Jesus as a Christian’s lover and praise his beauty and tenderness. Rarely do they praise his justice or strength, or refer to him as the head of an army leading his church into spiritual battle, like “Onward Christian Soldiers.”“The classic example is the worship pose of the eyes shut and the arms raised in this tender embrace, singing a song that says, ‘I’m desperate for you. You’re the air I breathe.’ Guys don’t talk to guys like that,” Erre said.
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Touchy-Feely Sermons
Another turn-off for men is touchy-feely sermons. Pearcey said the modern church stresses emotions and inner spiritual experiences while neglecting the intellectual side of the faith.
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Girly-Men Pastors
Touchy-feely sermons come from touchy-feely pastors. A feminized church tends to attract more “gentle, sensitive, nurturing” leadership,” according to Pearcey.
Murrow and Pearcey perhaps lay it on a little thick, but they make some compelling points. One reason that I have gravitated to the Reformed brand of Christianity is its attempt at balance between “heart knowledge” and “head knowledge,” as the current saying goes.
Dave, known to shed a tear, but don’t tell anyone.
Gasoline and Government
April 27, 2006
Whoever it was that said that we usually get the government we deserve is proved right by the panic in Washington over $3-plus pump prices.
Gas prices rise, and suddenly everyone in Washington becomes a raging anti-capitalist. (Washington D.C., that is — the other Washington already has more than its fair share.) Outrage over the audacity of oil companies daring to make money is something you expect to hear from a hippie at a Left-wing anti-everything rally, not the leadership of the greatest capitalist nation on Earth. The shock comes upon hearing the same rhetoric coming from both sides of the aisle.
I’ve said it before, and survived, so I’ll say it again. The only way to reduce our country’s energy dependence is to price it until it hurts and we are forced to change out habits. The hurt will be borne by those least able to suffer it, but blame the Government, not the oil companies.
Yet another example of unwarranted government interference is the forced reliance on ethanol. The energy bill Congress passed last year should have simply ordered the use of oxygenated blends, and allowed the market to figure out which worked best in different areas. Instead, the ethanol lobbyists did their job well. Politicians promoted and protected ethanol use, while refusing to protect manufacturers of rival additive MTBE from lawsuits. (Both are carcinogens, but it would cost more to clean MTBE from water supplies in event of a spill.) The coastal states were forced to switch to ethanol, which is expensive to make and hard to ship, and works well only in the Midwest, where supply lines are short. It turned out that domestic ethanol manufacturers couldn’t keep up with the demand, so we have to use imported ethanol — and imported ethanol carries a 54-cent tariff on every gallon.
One almost gets the idea that our politicos don’t really care about the economic impact of their largesse. Here in the middle of corn country, most people think that subsidizing ethenol production is a good thing, which means that most people aren’t thinking at all, just responding to sound bites on the evening news.
How did I get in this biting, cynical, mood?
Dave, retired, acknowledged greedy capitalist.
Reinventing Jesus
April 26, 2006
Go to this link for a review of Reinventing Jesus: What the Da Vinci Code and Other Novel Speculations Don’t Tell You by Komoszewski, Sawyer, and Wallace.
Kruse Kronicle: “Reinventing Jesus” Book Review
I have stayed pretty aloof from the recent spate of books that tell all about the “real” Jesus, like The Bible Code, The DaVinci Code, Misquoting Jesus, and The Gospel of Jesus, and I am not impressed by most of the efforts to debunk the debunkers that have been coming from orthodox Christian circles. In his review, Kruse says,
It is clear that an unprecedented number of people are asking who Jesus was and what do we really know about him. Where did scripture come from and how did it come to be in its present form? Is it reliable? What are Christians to make of all this?
Good question. Read the review to discover the six sensible conclusions of the authors.
Dave, about to add yet another book to his reading stack.
Vocabulation
April 25, 2006
The use or choice of words.
–William Craigie’s New English Dictionary, 1928
Jeffrey Kacirk’s Forgotten English Calendar offers this quote on language by Thomas Jefferson.
It is much to be wished that the publication of the county dialects of England should go on. It will restore to us our language in all shades of variation. It will incorporate into the present one all the riches of our ancient dialects; and what a store this will be may be seen by running the eye over the county glossaries and observing the words we have lost by abandonment and disuse, which in sound and sense are nothing inferior to nothing we have retained. When these local vocabularies are published and digested together into a single one, it is probable we shall not find a single word in Shakespeare which is not now in use in some counties in England.
What would TJ say about our present use of the language?
Dave, loving words, so he does.
The new media
April 24, 2006
The Economist has just published another of its in-depth surveys, this time about the change that is occurring in the media.
Among the audience | Economist.com
The next big thing in 1448 was a technology called “movable type”, invented for commercial use by Johannes Gutenberg, a goldsmith from Mainz (although the Chinese had thought of it first).
In 2001, five-and-a-half centuries after Mr Gutenberg’s first bible, “Movable Type” was invented again. Ben and Mena Trott, high-school sweethearts who became husband and wife, had been laid off during the dotcom bust and found themselves in San Francisco with ample spare time. Ms Trott started blogging—ie, posting to her online journal, Dollarshort—about “stupid little anecdotes from my childhood”.
And here we are, stupidly blogging away in the Orlop. If you are trying to make sense of what is going on with the media these days, I heartily recommend dipping into the linked article.
Dave, who wistfully hopes that his thoughts aren’t always stupid.
Ephesians 4:11-19
April 23, 2006
4:11 It was he who gave some as apostles, some as prophets, some as evangelists, and some to be pastors and teachers, 4:12 to equip the saints for the work of ministry, that is, to build up the body of Christ, 4:13 until we all attain to the unity of the faith and of the knowledge of the Son of God–a mature person, attaining to the measure of Christ’s full stature. 4:14 So we are no longer to be children, tossed back and forth by waves and carried about by every wind of teaching by the trickery of people who craftily carry out their deceitful schemes. 4:15 But practicing the truth in love, we will in all things grow up into Christ, who is the head. 4:16 From him the whole body grows, fitted and held together through every supporting ligament. As each one does its part, the body grows in love.
When a group of believers and seekers band together to worship God and grow as followers of Christ, they call themselves a church and turn to this passage of Paul’s for direction. There is little disagreement about the plain meaning of his words; no special discernment is required. It is an easily understood picture of people of different gifts joining together to help each other mature in their faith and to serve each other and the larger community. They seek blessings from God in order to be a blessing to others.
In the churches I have known, we are too often children, “carried about by every wind of teaching,” to the detriment of the goal Paul so plainly sets before us. But if I look a little closer, it usually isn’t hard to find the saints who are quietly doing the work of the church. Perhaps the glass is half full, not half empty. God will one day sort us all out. -sdg-
