Why Comment?

Welcome to my blog! My hope is that you will be encouraged to stop and think on the things of God. I hope that you also will bless others with your thoughts. Don’t be afraid that it might be “not profound” or anything, or that I will academically butcher your comment.

But do it unto the Lord.

— zoebios121

We often don’t think about why we discuss, comment, investigate, or “debate” about things. Aren’t those synonyms of the same thing anyway?

I would venture to say, “No.”

The Way Most Comment

More specifically, most people vest too much of their own self-worth upon their opinions when they comment or discuss. They come into something with a conclusion and set out to prove that they must be right. This takes them with the wrong perspective, so talking with those people comes down to a verbal fistfight and a lot of huffs and humphs when it is over. Someone’s going to be wrong, someone’s going to be right, and everyone’s going to be really uptight.

The Way it is Here

A now-forgotten method was pioneered by Socrates: two or more people come in with a general but clear set of ideas, and they examine it together. I blog with thoughts. You reply to my ideas or offer new ones or make me clarify. I respond in the most gracious, reasonable way possible, and we go on. That’s the way I do things. The purpose isn’t to “win”: the purpose is to edify (and be edified) and arrive at the truth.

Him we proclaim, warning everyone and teaching everyone with all wisdom, that we may present everyone mature in Christ. For this I toil, struggling with all his energy that he powerfully works within me.

— Colossians 1:28–29

So don’t be so thin-skinned: ideas are to be picked apart and examined; people should not be.

So go ahead: comment! Lue-Yee and I don’t bite. And if Epeuthutebetes does, then I’ll make him apologize. Humility is a good thing that we all need more of.

Under New Ownership

Why is it that people so often forget the “under new ownership” part of the gospel, that when we are saved we are not our own anymore because we have been bought at a price?

Nor is this new ownership a bad thing. We are not losing; we are not turning in our cards: we are redeemed into the life that God intended for us to live. This life is the most meaningful and fulfilling one we can live. In fact, it’s the only life lived that has any meaning at all.

Hitler, Abortions and Obama

Some perspective:

5.9 million Jews were killed over a period of conservatively 6 years in the Holocaust (Wikipedia: this comes out to a million Jews a year. But 1.2 million babies are aborted annually in the US alone.

Read: we kill more infants per year than Hitler killed Jews per year in the Holocaust. Puts things into perspective, doesn’t it?

We’ll probably go even higher as the Freedom of Choice Act opens up venues and methods of abortion that were previously considered too sick to do.

Note: this blog is NOT meant to be political in nature. But this issue is an important because it is a serious moral issue.

What We Should be Concerned About

Obama, with the Freedom of Choice Act that he has promised to push for, will overturn everything. This includes the (legal) definition of a human (you can see where the logic of this falls apart) as a fetus that has left the womb. With that Act passed, the doctors can still perform another attempt to take the infant’s life should the infant happen to make it out of a womb — which is euphemistically termed “a failed abortion.”  Attempted murder, maybe?

If all that a human was, was a mass of tissue that was ejected out of a womb and happened to get along on its own, then we are getting into some dangerous waters of our definition of “human.” That means we can make anything into a human. And nothing human. Suppose we could make a tumor live outside the body. Then it would be a “human.” That’s pretty messed up

To Address Some Common Objections

Disclaimer: This is not to say that there other things don’t need to be talked about. As Christians, we need to rethink the way we go about relationships, the way that we view sex, the way we view marriage: the way we view responsibility.

Also, don’t talk about the fringe cases as an argument for making abortion legal at the extent to which the law now allows it. Perhaps in the very strictest cases. But then we open the door to the definition of strict. And people have then the wrong attitude about the law. They see it as a kind of a bar to jump over. How little effort can I expend and still get by? Can I get it be convenient?

Finally, there’s also the idea that we don’t make laws for the exceptions: we just make exceptions in laws. We have forgotten this in a sensationalist, bleeding heart generation. Divorce started off for abusive couples; now we use it when our spouse stops being sexually exciting.

Aristotle once said, democracy dies when people realize that people can vote themselves benefits. We’re well on our way.

The Plague of our Age

I’m finding this to be true: that our most common mental malady is not anxiety anymore, it’s depression.

It’s hopelessness, helplessness and complete burnout. It’s cynicsm.

We are like Dirt

When we are dry, we suck up water. But dry us out to a point, then we start rejecting the very thing we need to become wet again.

Interesting.

Should we say “Good Luck?”

It’s cliche, it’s everywhere. But should we as Christians do it? Luck, if it even exists, plays a negliable role when put next to God. Shouldn’t we say something like “Godspeed” (what I do), or at least a neutral but more precise “I wish you well.”

Actaully, Godspeed was used to wish someone a safe and sucessful journey. It’s also where the word “goodbye” came from.

So the next time your ignorant, fight-picking Atheist friend calls you out on “godspeed” because it has the word “god” in it, you can tell them they’ve been saying it all their lives with the word “goodbye”

I’ve never added a poll before and so I will now. I am a bit excited to see how this turns out.

On a different note, I wish everyone Godspeed on their exams (pun intended).

Do your best and leave God the rest.

Quiz: Theological Standing

I must say, I’m a bit surprised to be in complete agreement with John Calvin. Lue-Yee assures me that Calvin himself was not a 5 point Calvinist.

You Scored as Karl Barth The daddy of 20th Century theology. You perceive liberal theology to be a disaster and so you insist that the revelation of Christ, not human experience, should be the starting point for all theology. John Calvin 100% Karl Barth 100% Anselm 100% Martin Luther 80% Jürgen Moltmann 73% Friedrich Schleiermacher 60% Augustine 53% Jonathan Edwards 40% Paul Tillich 27% Charles Finney 27%

What is Love? Ask God

What is love? Ask God: He has already answered. Many times.

He is willing to give wisdom to those who ask: are we willing to listen?

Black as Sin: Hating our Sin

When Christ bore our sin, He didn’t just go straight to Hell. We often think that He did. Why? Because we treat sin as being bad only for the consequence that we were cast out of paradise.

But that is not the case. Before Jesus descended to Hell, He was beaten, mocked and spit on; He then died a slow, painful death. Notice: this was all on earth.

Our sins, therefore, have a terrible price to to be paid on earth as well: another reason to hate the sin that we have. Hate it as God hates it.

Ephesians on the Reason for Working

For a while now, I’ve been thinking about living on $30k a year (excluding tithing or saving) by living wisely in order to leave the rest of my salary for more worthy pursuits: supporting the church (especially missionaries), artists and writers, et al. It would reduce my love for things of this world and keep me from getting distracted from things of eternal importance; I think it would also be an example to others to do the same and be raised in godliness.

Doing all the smart things to the life I live is a smart one, not a short-changed one. To come up with even more ways to live more efficiently – and hopefully more effectively – I’ve been reading excellent sites like getrichslowly.org or thesmartdollar.com.

What I didn’t know before was that the motivation for this had biblical precedent as well. In Bible study Mike pointed out a verse:

Let the thief no longer steal, but rather let him labor, doing honest work with his own hands, so that he may have something to share with anyone in need. (Eph. 4:28)

Note here that the point of the former thief working isn’t that it makes him self-sufficient but that it enables him to give back to the body of believers. This flies completely in the face of all conventional wisdom, but it supports my recent conviction of using my money in a way that I can store my treasures in heaven where they will truly matter.

The Real Reason I Hate Macs

If you know me, you know I do. They’re a lesser computer that facilitates a layer of lies to the customer about how a computer really works; they also encourage no thinking. But that’s not the point. While talking to Sam Lee, I think I finally realized why, beyond being an inferior computer, it elicits so much anger in me:

Irrational consumerism. People buy what they don’t need, at prices that they should know they don’t need to pay, for a product that doesn’t really actually perform with hardware that’s up to date.

I mean, look at the first-gen iPhone (there are plenty of examples, but this is an easy one). 3G had been around since 2001 and was becoming less of a novelty in 2005, and they weren’t able to put it in the iPhone. But because of his holiness Steve Jobs, people bought them anyway. Then, when the second-gen iPhone came out and had something that should have been in the first, people upgraded the Mac way: throw away a product that costs too much and does too little to buy, at full price, an almost identical inferior one. Yay for frivolous gimmicky features.

Oh, and I seem to dislike people with a messiah complex as well.