Southern History, American Freedom, Christian Liberty
I’m always bugging my wife to buy us a toaster. I saw this today on engadget and I think I’m in love:
You just slide the toast in on one side and it slides you some toast out on the other side. Nice. Very nice.
While doing some online shopping over the weekend, my wife and I came across these little plush dolls on amazon.com called Holy Folks and are made by a company called TadPals. They are cuddly plush versions of figures from biblical history. They have Noah, Moses, Mary and Jesus. Now I would probably pick up Moses, Mary or Noah for one of my kids in a heartbeat. The dolls are really cute, but I’m not to crazy about the Jesus one. I just don’t know that it’s appropriate to make Jesus into a doll. I mean doesn’t that put Him on the same level as Barney in a childs mind? Here is the picture and writeup on the Jesus version:
“The Holy Folks Jesus doll comes complete with a shepard’s Staff. His magnetic hands can firmly hold onto the magnetic staff, and also come together in prayer position. Play & Pray with your new best friend! Jesus with his enduring smile will delight children of all ages.”
“Holy Folks – Play & Pray Pals. Say hello to the Holy Folks, the high quality, lovable plush characters inspired by your favorite stories and scriptures. These huggable and familiar friends are the perfect examples of faith, patience, courage and love for children of all ages. Each 16″ plush doll comes individually packaged with Play & Pray magnetic hands and accessories. Give your children and loved ones the gift of Holy Folks – they’re always faithful, always smiling!”
–TadPals LLC, Holy Folks
My aversion to it has nothing to do with making idols or anything like that. It has more to do with the effect it has on the mind of children. What makes “Jesus, with His enduring smile” any different from Barney with his enduring smile? As Christians we believe that Jesus was more than just a historical figure. We believe he was God come in the flesh. And there’s just something unnerving about turning God into a doll or an action figure. I think He can do without kung-fu grip.
Here are some other neat but at the same time questionable items:
I sure hope all the reports were wrong about you coming to the SEC to have a better chance at a national title. Because your about to be the next victim of the ESPN/ABC asset protection squad. Members include Chris Fowler, Kirk Herbstreit, Lee Corso, Mark May, Rece Davis, Lou Holtz and Brent Musberger. These folks have made sure that just like 2004, you will in no way be playing for a national championship this year. Even if you destroy Arkansas in the SEC championship game, you will be going no higher than the Sugar Bowl. The problem isn’t your team. The problem is that your conference has a television contract with the wrong network. Until the SEC renegotiates its contract over to ABC, you can forget an SEC team in the NC. Michigan didn’t even win their own conference. USC lost to an unranked team. Florida’s only loss was on the road at top-10 Auburn. You tell me who deserves to go. And don’t give me this tripe about USC having a tougher schedule. Florida had one of the hardest schedules in the country.
The audacity of Brent Musberger to campaign on national television for Notre Dame to go to the Rose Bowl against Michigan is almost too much. Michigan already beat them within an inch of their life earlier in the season. If the Rose Bowl chooses Notre Dame over LSU, it will be clear that the SEC should just pull out of the BCS altogether. What use is it being a member of an orginazation that is so influenced by one or two of it’s members that it leaves the rest out in the cold? If it comes down to Ohio State vs. USC in the NC game, and Michigan vs. Notre Dame in the Rose Bowl, the SEC ought to pull out the Monday after selection Sunday. That means that once again the SEC gets nothing more than it’s mandatory conference tie-in to the Sugar Bowl and the Pac-10, Big-10 and Notre Dame get all the rest of the BCS money. When is the SEC going to wake up and learn that they are leaving money on the table every year in this stupid system. We got a little more respect when Roy Kramer was still in charge because he invented the BCS but now that he is gone, the SEC has been kicked to the curb.
And just to finish up with a little SEC love. Georgia beat the ACC divisional champ Georgia Tech over the weekend, and South Carolina beat ranked Clemson, and Florida beat Florida State. The SEC has cleaned up against good non-conference competition this year but we are getting no credit for it because of the Arkansas blowout by USC. Thanks a lot Arkansas. If you could have just put in your freaky magic-trick offense from the get go, maybe we wouldn’t have to endure yet another USC team in the NC game.
If you are really itching to burn $12, do yourself a favor and just strike a match and get it over with in the back yard. Just don’t make the mistake of burning it on seeing the movie The Fountain. We went Christmas shopping today and decided to see a movie while we were out. We couldn’t decide between Deja Vu and The Fountain. We saw the trailer for The Fountain on the History Channel the other night and it looked like an interesting story about the search for the fountain of youth. Here is part of a review of it from IMDB:
“I recently saw this film at the Toronto International Film Festival.I was eagerly anticipating it’s release, being a big fan of Pi and Requiem for a Dream. That being said, this is a hard film to watch. It has beautiful cinematography, an amazing score, and very impressive acting, however, I feel that the advertising on the film has been misleading. This is not a love story, nor is it a science fiction film (although it has elements of both).The true core of the film is a man dealing with the idea of mortality.”
*Emphasis added by me
I would agree with that reviewer totally. The acting, score and cinematography were excellent. The story however was worse than bad. It was so “out there” that anyone who is currently not tripping on acid is going to be totally lost within 15 minutes. Even if you take the confusing parts as metaphor, you still can’t make the metaphors mesh. I haven’t been so confused by a movie since 12 Monkeys. I also agree with the reviewer that the advertising was very misleading. It was billed as a sci-fi/fantasy lovestory about a quest for the fountain of youth. Yes, it had some space, swordfighting and kissing. But if it’s a sci-fi/fantasy lovestory, so is Santa Clause 2.
Teleology is the philosophy of design or purpose in the natural world. It’s a belief that the natural order, and the individual organisms within it are designed for a certain purpose or use. Theists and atheists alike live according to an underlying assumption of teleology whether they acknowledge it or not. I talk a lot about the validity of intuitional truth on this blog, and teleology would generally fall into that category. To get a better understanding of what it’s all about, take this quote from The Pilgrim’s Regress:
Every day a jailor brought the prisoners their food, and as he laid down the dishes he would say a word to them. If their meal was flesh he would remind them that they were eating corpses, or give them some account of the slaughtering: or, if it was the inwards of some beast, he would read them a lecture in anatomy and show the likeness of the mess to the same parts in themselves -which was the more easily done because the giant’s eyes were always staring into the dungeon at dinner time. Or if the meal were eggs he would recall to them that they were eating the menstruum of a verminous fowl, and crack a few jokes with the female prisoner. So he went on day by day. Then I dreamed that one day there was nothing but milk for them, and the jailor said as he put down the pipkin:
’Our relations with the cow are not delicate -as you can easily see if you imagine eating any of her other secretions.’
Now John had been in the pit a shorter time than any of the others and at these words something seemed to snap in his head and he gave a great sigh and suddenly spoke out in a loud, clear voice:
’Thank heaven! Now at last I know that you are talking nonsense.’
’What do you mean?’ said the jailor, wheeling round upon him.
’You are trying to pretend that unlike things are like. You are trying to make us think that milk is the same sort of thing as sweat or dung.’
’And pray, what difference is there except by custom?’
’Are you a liar or only a fool, that you see no difference between that which Nature casts out as refuse and that which she stores up as food?’
’So Nature is a person, then, with purposes and consciousness,’ said the jailor with a sneer, ’In fact, a Landlady. No doubt it comforts you to imagine you can believe that sort of thing:’ and he turned to leave the prison with his nose in the air.
’I know nothing about that,’ shouted John after him. ’I am talking of what happens. Milk does feed calves and dung does not.’
–CS Lewis, The Pilgrim’s Regress
It’s readily obvious when we look at the natural world that it’s particulars are meant for certain applications or activities. Like the character John says, “Milk does feed calves and dung does not.” Now this concept is an important one that regresses to greater ideas like intelligent design. It’s also a crucial point of connecting the material world with religious ideas. Indeed, this might be the crux of where the physical meets the metaphysical in human understanding.
Take homosexuality for example. The reason for rejecting it amongst religious and non-religious alike is a belief that it is “against nature” in some way. That phrase is tossed out a lot, and it simply means that engaging in homosexual acts is an abuse of the way the body was designed to work. Sex is a proper use of the body as it’s designed, but homosexuality is a use of the body in a way that violates it’s obvious design. It’s akin to feeding your calves dung instead of milk. You can claim all day long that they are both just secretions of a cow, but in a few days you’ll have a dead calf on your hands.
In short, the anthropological application of teleology brings an undertone of morality with it. It’s inescapable. Any time you bring oughtness into the philosophical mix, it’s going to require a judgement of the violation of what ought to be. That’s why I said earlier that teleology is the crux where physics and metaphysics meet. It also marks a turning point in this series of posts where I am taking simply theistic arguments to something more concrete about who that theistic personality may be.
Thanksgiving is probably my favorite holiday. I like it because it’s not overly commercialized and the whole concept of giving thanks for the good things in our life is such a pure concept. It crosses all kinds of lines. It’s really hard for liberals to find anything to gripe about when it comes to Thanksgiving. It doesn’t have anything to do with Jesus so that makes them happy I guess. Anyway, have a happy Thanksgiving. Use it to rest up for the crazy Christmas season.
There is an article out today talking about Steven Spielberg’s comments during the Emmy’s board meeting. He mentions something that has been a constant annoyance of mine. It’s the showing of greusome or explicit commercials for television shows during normal TV hours and programs. I don’t want my kids seeing a trailer for CSI where some child get’s kidnapped and murdered right in the middle of a Monday Night football commercial break. It’s too hard to police things like that. By the time you have crossed the room to cover your child’s eyes the commercial is nearly over and they have seen some corpse laying on the ground all flayed open. It’s terrible. To me, it’s every bit as bad as seeing Janet Jackson exposing herself during a halftime show. You tune in for one thing and you get something else. It’s a bait and switch.
And before you liberal whiney-babies start e-mailing me with the typical “just change the channel if you don’t like it” garbage, it’s impossible to realize, react, put down the dishes, dry off your hands, cross the room, grab the remote and change the channel in time to keep them from seeing it. And don’t tell me “it’s your responsibility to police your kid’s TV watching” either. We DO police our children’s television time. More than most I assure you. But I shouldn’t have to velcro a remote control to my arm just in case CBS decides to show some nasty show’s trailer during the 2:30 college football game broadcast. To me that is just irresponsible programming, and it’s tiresome. I shouldn’t have to be concerned that my kid will get nightmares from me watching a football game.
I’m a big time TV nut. I love a good TV series as much or more than a good movie, and I love watching football just as much. But there is no V-chip for commercials. At least movie previews get ratings. Why not television previews. Sometimes I just turn the TV off altogether because it gets to be too much of a hassle to police it during shows and times where no policing should be necessary. And I’m sure that’s not what networks want to happen.
A close friend gave me this book for Christmas last year and I have to say that I highly recommend it. It’s a survey of literature throughout church history that are either purely Christian or have in some way or another had a direct influence on the church. It’s edited by Alister McGrath, who is Professor of Historical Theology at Oxford University.
His method is to introduce each literary work with a brief background about it’s author. You can tell pretty quickly that his understanding of church history is very robust and he comes at it from a highly orthodox view. This lends him a theological credibility that assures me that he is letting the author be who he was, rather than trying to “interperet” them into a modern form as is so often the case these days.
The book is divided into five epochs as follows:
This is one of those rare gems that should be in every Christian’s library. Most of us can’t afford to have a book for each one of these works in our library and even if we did we probably wouldn’t have time to read them. Yet we should all have a decent grasp of the major Christian writers in church history. This book is the answer to that dillema. Here is the link to it on Amazon. It makes a great Christmas gift.
I smoked some of this last night and thought I would give a review. Blackjack is a ready-rubbed Virginia blend tobacco produced by Fribourg & Treyer. It smells very sweet when you first crack open the can. It’s not the same kind of sugary sweet you smell with bulk aromatic blends. Instead it almost had a citrus smell to it. I’m still not sure if I like the smell or not. As far as handling goes, it was easy to pack because it’s already been rubbed out. It seemed to light up well, though I had a hard time keeping it lit toward the bottom. It was a little wet, but not nearly as wet as an aromatic mix. I might try letting it dry for an hour or so next time before I light it up.
The flavor was nice but very mild. It was hard to pick out any individual flavors as standouts. The smoke was not real heavy either. Skip Elliot over at The Briary said that it was a good tobacco for someone just making a foray into non-aromatic blends. I’m assuming the mildness(almost to the point of being bland) is the reason for that. It was definitely better than Presbyterian Mix, which was the first tinned tobacco I ever tried. I think I am going to like it but at this point I don’t see it becoming a favorite just because of the mildness. I’ll post an update later when I have a chance to smoke some more of it. I’m dedicating a pipe to it so my opinion might change as the pipe gets seasoned with it.
It’s rivalry week in college football. While the rest of the country(and ESPN) is enraptured with Ohio State vs. Michigan, in Alabama one rivalry is king. Alabama vs. Auburn. The Iron Bowl. And in honor of Iron Bowl week, I humbly present to you the Iron Bowl Scorinator. It’s a program I wrote a couple of years ago that you can use to torment your friends with. Just put this executable on their computer and put a shortcut to it in their startup menu with the appropriate switches in place. They will be presented with the score of the game and your team’s logo and fight song blaring through their speakers.
Here is what it looks like in action:
I would be happy with that score.
So if you’re an Auburn fan and they win 44-7 just run it like this:
> c:ironbowl.exe /w-au /s-44-7 /f
Or an Alabama fan would do this:
> c:ironbowl.exe /w-ua /s-44-7 /f
You can hit escape to close it. The /f switch makes it where it will go through at least one iteration of the fight song before allowing them to escape. Whatever you attach to the /s- switch will be displayed on the screen, so you could put anything you like as long as it’s not too long. Use the /? switch to get a list of options and usage info. As always, it’s written in assembly so it’s sure to crash your computer faster than any other language. 
