Dallas Willard, Forcing Religion

Forcing religion on the young, even though it makes no sense to them is a major reason why they graduate from Church about the same time they graduate from high school and do not return for twenty years, if ever.

From Willard's discussion of Pearls Before Swine: when good things become deadly in The Divine Conspiracy. One example of where Willard takes quite a different view than most. Here he focuses not on the swine being the issue but the pearls. A pig can't eat pearls, what else would they do but attack one who feeds them pearls.

- Peace

Skywalker

Blogger and Comment Spam

From Keeping Comments Clean in the blogger help files.

Blogger has several built-in measures for dealing with comment spam and other associated dastardly behavior.
...
3. You can choose to receive notification by email when new comments have been posted on your blog. This way, you can monitor them for spam and delete them when necessary.
4. You can enable word verification for your comments. This will require an extra step in the commenting process, which will deter automated comment spamming systems.

They need to improve #3 by adding enough information so you can find the comment. The post title and perma link needs to be included in the email. I now I have two comment spams sitting in my archives, but no idea where. One of them came after enabling #4.

- Peace

Does Visual Studio Rot the Mind?

reminding on the Psychology and Aesthetics of Coding By Charles Petzold. As seen on /.

Been wondering the same thing about Eclipse. After using it for a couple of years now, I find wring code in plain old jEdit quite a jump. When I taught I used jEdit and PFE before that. Students raised on VB would complain and I'd point them to The dumbing-down of programming part one and two. Seven years later and I now use code completion cause it comes with eclipse and a bunch of good refactoring tools. Is it a step forward? I'm not always sure.

- Peace

Time Waster

Grid Game reminds me of the Game of Life. Best Score so far 1905.

Thanks Shane.

- Peace

home wifi working

Did this post on my ipaq.

-Peace
Dave

Update: so while the post came through I had to log onto blogger to publish it. I guess I need to find and up to date pocket pc blogger tool.

Dreamer

Normally I'd handicap a family sports movie at something like 80 to 1, but Dreamer paid off. It's a heart warming movie about a Father, Daughter and Grandfather following their dream of raising a champion race horse. Dreamer plays lightly on your heart strings drawing you into this family of horsemen. The group I saw it with cheered at the end.

My daughter was the cynic of the group, saying it was just like Seabiscuit (2003) . The last horse movie I saw was The Black Stallion (1979), so I can't say.

BTW we were given three free tickets to see the movie.

- Peace

Millrise Sunrise

Sarah took this while wating for the bus. I think it's breathtaking. Yes I'm a proud dad! She's set up her own flickr account.

- Peace

3300 km, best year ever!

I passed the 3300 km mark on the ride home last night. Making 2005 my best biking year ever in terms of distance. Last year I did just over 3200 and previous to that my best year was 2500 km in Edmonton in 96 or 97. Even if I don't get the last 200 kms for my goal of 3500 it's been a good year.

- Peace

Making sense of Genesis 1

Further support for this palace-temple conceptualisation is found in the final act of creation: the forming of humanity, male and female, in the image of Elohim. Long the subject of debate, the image of God language makes a great deal of sense within the palace-temple context. After all, what is the last thing placed inside the deity’s house, if not his image? So here in Genesis 1 on the last creative day, Yahweh fashions his own image and places it in his palace-temple.

...

This, it seems to me, is nothing other than the ancient version of the recently formulated Anthropic Principle, which in its various forms reflects the fact that the fundamental structures of this world, the observed values of its cosmological and physical quantities, appear to have been fine-tuned with human existence in view. To observers both then and now there are strong hints that this creation was designed for us. And Genesis 1’s answer, it seems to me, is not so much concerned with the "how" in the technical or mechanical sense as it is with the "who," namely, Yahweh.

A couple of quotes from Making sense of Genesis 1 by Rikk Watts. As seen on dead apostle.

- Peace

Batman Begins

Kim and I caught Batman Begins at the cheap theaters on Saturday. Other than the sub par title this a movie true Batman fans [me] and Batman novices [Kim] could enjoy. Did a great job of tying together Bruce Wayne, the murder of his parents, who his parents where and the formation of Batman. Goes into why Batman is not vigilante and where his sense of justice comes from. It comes out on DVD this week, but I'd catch it on the big screen.

BTW you'll need to check what you know about microwaves and physics at the door.

- Peace

Elizabethtown

Saw this film with Kim and Sarah. With Orlando Bloom [Lord of the Rings] and Kirsten Dunst [Spiderman] how bad could it be? It's a movie that about how people sleep walk through their lives and how we need to wake up, but this movie never seems to wake up and sleep walks though everything.

There is some interesting imagery that's just wasted. There's a scene where a giant burning dove descends into the crowd and Kirsten Dunst character goes into stewardess mode and escorts people to safety. Thing is the dove means so much more, but here we have heroine escorting people back to their safe lives. The movie just doesn't gel.

The sound track was a brightspot to the movie and might be worth checking out on it's own. Pity U2's pride in the name of love didn't make the album.

BTW I given three free tickets to see Elizabethtown.

- Peace

Searching for the Joy - 27

1Ki 8:66 - "And on the eighth day he sent the people away, and, blessing the king, they went to their tents full of joy and glad in their hearts, because of all the good which the Lord had done to David his servant and to Israel his people."

God showed up.
The temple had just been completed and as the ark of the covenant was put in its place and just as the priests came out the house was filled with the glory of God. It was so intense that no one could go back in. The people were happy that God had blessed them in this way.

We pray for revival in our church quite a bit. It would be so cool if God chose to show up like that again. And yet this revival in Israel didn’t last. In only one generation they would split the kingdom and begin a downward spiral that would end with them back in slavery from where Moses led them. The real trick is to be faithful and full of joy when there is no evidence at all that He is there.

Goat Creek Ride

On Saturday Rawleigh and I rode the 43 km from the top of Goat Creek (up in the mountains, south of Canmore) to Banff and back to Canmore. It's one of my favorite rides. It's mostly down hill. We did it in about 2 hours 45 minutes of ridding, about 3:20 including stoping for pics. We left the Element at the bottom in Canmore. I've posted 76 pics.

- Peace

Happy Thanksgiving eh!

Before Jeremiah knew God, God knew Jeremiah; "Before I formed you in the womb I knew you." This turns everything we ever thought about God around. We think that God is an object about which we have questions. We are curious about God. We make inquiries about God. We read books about God. We make inquiries about God. We read books about God. We get into late night bull sessions about God. We drop into church from time to time to see what is going on with God. We indulge in an occasional sunset or symphony to cultivate a feeling of reverence for God.

But that is not the reality of our lives with God. Long before we ever got around to asking questions about God, God has been questioning us. Long before we got interested the subject of God, God subjected us to the most intensive and searching knowledge. Before it ever crossed our minds that God might be important, God singled us out as important. Before we were formed in the womb, God knew us. We are known before we know.

...

All wise reflection corroborates Scripture here. We enter a world we didn't create. We grow into a life already provided for us. We arrive in a complex of relationships with other wills and destinies that are already in full operation before we are introduced. If we are going to live appropriately, we must be aware that we are living in the middle of a story that was begun and will be concluded by another. And this other is God.

My Identity does not begin when I begin to understand myself. There is something previous to what I think about myself and it is what God thinks of me. That means that everything I think and feel is by nature a response and the one to whom I respond is God. I never speak the first word. I never make the first move.

Before we ate an amazing meal Thanksgiving meal prepared by my amazing wife, I read this section from Run With the Horses by Eugene H. Peterson. Thanksgiving is all about us responding to what we've been given and this section seemed like a good fit.

- Peace

Cornerstone Festival Web Site Announcement

Starting in mid-October CornerstoneFestival.com will become a much more exciting and interactive place to be. For starters, we'll begin hosting several discussion boards covering music, movies, and current events. And that's not all--you'll have a chance post to reviews and rate select albums, concerts, TV shows, books, and films each month. Please check back soon to sign up and get involved.

[link]

-Peace