Category: Uncategorized

Derb on Sith:

OK, saw the darn thing — someone had to take the 9-yr-old. It is incredibly awful. Neither straightforward, honest black hats/white hats space opera, nor movified version of decent one-good-idea sci-fi short story a la “Alien.” Just a horrid mess of part-digested theme fragments from Julius Caesar to Dr Jekyll & Mr Hyde, kitted out with over-the-top FX, impossible to follow (Where are we now?), not an original thought in the whole thing, and pretentious as all get out. The 9-yr-old loved it. I really must pay more attention to his education.

I can’t see the point of light sabers. Wouldn’t a regular saber do just as well? If you have a light saber and I have my SIG 9mm, don’t I… have the edge on you, actually? (According to the movie: Yes, sometimes. Several Jedi knights got shot by guards wielding projectile-firing weapons. But then, other Jedi knights from an assault by hundreds of same. Huh? What happened to ray guns, anyway? And how come a transgalactic civilization hasn’t developed the epidural? Etc., etc., et bloody ectera.))

No one does sneering contempt better than the Brits. Even their expats are magnificent. That line about education nearly made me fall out of my chair laughing.

It was an ugly game, and one that Manchester United deserved to win. I don’t know what Arsene Wenger was thinking, going with a 4-5-1 approach with Bergkamp in front, but regardless, it didn’t work. Reyes was simply awful throughout the game, losing the ball badly every time he had it, and only a combination of uncharacteristically decent goaltending from Lehman and very good luck kept Rooney and Van Nistleroy from putting the ball in the back of the net.

United had chance after chance and just couldn’t finish. Ljungberg’s save – standing at the goal line and heading a Van Nistleroy header into the bar and out – was unbelievable, and if the goal had been six inches wider and one inch taller, Arsenal would have lost 3-0.

But they survived to take it to penalties and put the game away with four clinical finishes and one cheeky Ljungberg lob directly at the goalie, who basically cut his own throat by committing early to one side. It’s not how I would have liked to see them win, and I still think that taking off a player every five minutes would be preferable to penalties, but it’s nice to see the Gunners take home some silverware this season.

The FA Cup has lost a lot of its allure, as have most of the national cup competitions. If I were a UEFA official, I’d give first entry in the Champions League to the national league winner and second entry to the national cup winner. Putting that much TV money on the line would restore its prestige in an instant.

UPDATE: More good news. “We will be announcing today or tomorrow that Dennis Bergkamp will be signing a new one-year contract.” – Arsenal vice-chairman David Dein

Christians and Divorce
by Amigo’s Place

Divorce

God hates it (Mal. 2:16) and it’s a destructive institution, especially when children are involved. I have seen children really hurt by divorce; some even blame themselves for their parents’ actions. Despite the damage divorce causes, in some cases it must be even more destructive to remain married. So divorce is allowed as detailed Matthew 19:9, only in cases of unrepentant adultery* or abandonment. The innocent party in a divorce is free to remarry; the one that caused the divorce through their actions are not to remarry, that is considered adultery (Luke 16:18).

Is it an unpardonable sin?

What about Christians who by remarrying commit adultery? Adulterers aren’t supposed to make it to eternal life with God, as they are counted among the unrighteous (1 Corinthians 6:9-10 and Galatians. 5:19-21). Yet I don’t believe that adultery is an unpardonable sin. Since we are told to confess our sins to receive forgiveness (I John 1:9), the acts described in Corinthians and Galatians must refer to those who are unsaved and whose sins are not covered by the blood of Christ.

So if by remarrying in certain cases is adultery, yet it is not a continuing sin, even though the married state is? If it is continuing, the person committing it is dead in his sin and without hope. To escape unpardonable territory, God would have to see the adulterous remarriage as a single sin event and not a continuing one. Plus marriage is considered to be better than to burn with lust for the opposite sex. (I Corinthians 7:9).

So this sin is forgivable, though I doubt God will forget to woodshed you for your disobedience. None of the other sins mentioned in Corinthians is fixable while the state of that sin remains the same (marriage can fix the fornication, but that changes the relationship from unmarried to married). Idolaters, effeminate, abusers of themselves with mankind, thieves, covetous, drunkards, revilers, and extortioners are sinners that must turn away from their sin and turn to God.

Church discipline

What about church discipline and the Christian who divorces their spouse without just cause? Let’s say that a Christian husband divorces his wife, even after being counseled against that action. The church even follows the steps of discipline and boots the guy out from the congregation for the divorce (Matt 18:15-17 and I Corinthians 5: 1-8). The hope is that the man will repent from his sin and return to his wife.

A short period of time later the fellow shows up with a new wife (the real reason he left his first wife) and now says he’s sorry and wants to rejoin the fellowship. Does the church accept him back? He went against the church’s counsel and divorced his wife to enter into an adulterous relationship with another woman.

If repentance means to turn away from the sin, what has the man turned from? By admitting his action as wrong and that now he’s sorry?

He says he’s remorseful, and if he were to leave the present wife, that would destroy the new marriage. Plus, it’s also adultery if you remarry a spouse you divorced who then married someone else (and is now somehow available to marry again). I know we are to forgive, but somehow to take him back appears to me as condoning his behavior.

Yet I know that whatever sins I confess today, unless I die right afterwards, I will likely again confess some of these same sins later in my life. And God promises to forgive my sins if I confess them. So as an act of forgiveness, we are to accept the fellow and his new wife back into the congregation. I guess we leave the woodshedding of the fellow and his new wife up to God, as He will discipline His own.

* Where an adulterous spouse sees no wrong in their actions and will not stop committing adulterous acts. If your spouse commits adultery and asks for forgiveness, as Christians we are told to forgive. Doesn’t seem fair, but God promises to forgive our sins if we confess them. Plus, Jesus was punished for our sin, the ultimate in unfairness.

You are not required to divorce, it is an option. You also have the option to be patient and forgiving. Hosea put up with Gomer; God didn’t tell Hosea to put her away.

From WND:

“We take the side of science in spite of the patent absurdity of some of its constructs, in spite of its failure to fulfill many of its extravagant promises of health and life, in spite of the tolerance of the scientific community for unsubstantiated just-so-stories, because we have a prior commitment, a commitment to materialism. It is not that the methods and institutions of science somehow compel us to accept a material explanation of the phenomenal world, but, on the contrary, that we are forced by our a priori adherence to material causes to create an apparatus of investigation and a set of concepts that produce material explanations, no matter how counterintuitive, no matter how mystifying to the uninitiated. Moreover, that materialism is an absolute, for we cannot allow a Divine Foot in the door.”
– Richard C. Lewontin, Alexander Agassiz Research Professor at Harvard University

I’ll be interested to know how the Panda’s Thumb apologists attempt to explain that one away, given that it cuts the legs out from under their insistence on the impartiality of science and supports every doubt that evolutionary skeptics have had about evolutionary apologists for decades.

We’re informed the fair sex is also responsible for killing the joke:

Around the same time, said John Morreall, a religion professor and humor scholar at the College of William and Mary, the roles of men and women began to change, which had implications for the joke.

Telling old-style jokes, he said, was a masculine pursuit because it allowed men to communicate with one another without actually revealing anything about themselves. Historically women’s humor was based on personal experience, and conveyed a sense of the teller’s likes and dislikes, foibles and capacity for self-deprecation.

The golden age of joke telling corresponded with a time when men were especially loathe to reveal anything about their inner lives, Mr. Morreall said. But over time men let down their guard, and comics like Lenny Bruce, George Carlin and later Jerry Seinfeld, embraced the personal, observational style.

“A very common quip was, ‘Women can’t tell jokes,’ ” Mr. Morreall said. “I found that women can’t remember jokes. That’s because they don’t give a damn. Their humor is observational humor about the people around that they care about. Women virtually never do that old-style stuff. Women’s-style humor was ahead of the curve,” he said. “In the last 30 years all humor has caught up with women’s humor.”

The mingling of the sexes in the workplace and in social situations wasn’t particularly good for the joke either, as jokes that played well in the locker room didn’t translate to the conference room or the co-ed dinner party. And in any event, scholars say, in a social situation wit plays better than old-style joke telling. Witty remarks push the conversation along and enliven it, encouraging others to contribute.

Not being a professional student of humor, I have no idea whether that’s so or not – although this is quoted from the New York Times, so obviously they wouldn’t print it if it wasn’t true – but I have noticed that all of the good oral storytellers I know are men, which is somewhat surprising since women tend to be more skilled verbally.

I do find the notion that women “don’t give a damn” about joketelling to be interesting, however. How many times have you been at a party while a man is telling a story about something vaguely amusing that happened to him and his wife keeps interjecting minor editorial corrections about how it wasn’t actually one person that no one at the party knows, but another person of whom no one has ever heard who was the guilty party, or the other car being red, not blue. It’s as if they’re completely unconscious of the very high probability that nobody cares about the accuracy of the historical account, the audience is just listening for amusement.

It’s just incredibly irritating, for the listener as well as the teller. Sometimes, I feel like asking the storyteller if he’ll just hold on a moment while I explain to the amateur revisionist historian that as far as I am is concerned, it matters not one iota if the events being described are 100 percent true or not, and that if she would kindly shut up and let the man tell his doggone story already, I’d very much appreciate it.

Still, I’m not much of a joke guy myself, so I can’t say that I see the death of the joke as being any great loss.

From The Nation:

Clinton’s evolving approach–call it Brand Hillary–is sincerely rooted in her not-easily-categorized worldview, but it’s also a calculated response to today’s political realities. In effect, she’s taking her husband’s small-issue centrism–its trademark combination of big but often hollow gestures toward the center, pragmatic economic populism and incremental liberal policy gains–and remaking it in her own image, updating it for post-9/11 America with an intense interest in military issues.

At the same time, she’s also experimenting with an increasingly national message about smart government and GOP extremism and testing new, unthreatening ways of revisiting her most politically disastrous issue: healthcare. In one setting after another, she offered the same impromptu-seeming refrain: “You may remember that when my husband was President, I tried to do something about healthcare. Well, I still have the scars to show for it. But I haven’t given up.” That’s a line worthy of the man Hillary married–you can picture Bill sitting at the kitchen table in Chappaqua, repeating the line and chuckling, “That’s good. That’s really good.”

“I haven’t given up.” In other words, no matter what you hear about Hilary Clinton moving to the center, she’s still going to Cubanize the American health care system, because what is wrong with it should be obvious to everyone: insufficient socialism.

I won’t be at all surprised if she’s the next President. Chelsea’s not ready and after two terms of a Bush, it’s clearly a Clinton’s term.

Isn’t that how it works?

Ancelotti knows all about penalty competitions, having watched his team outshoot Juventus in the 2003 final. Liverpool manager Rafa Benitez maintains his players won’t practise spot-kicks ahead of the game, subscribing to the belief that nothing can prepare a player for such a pressure-packed moment.

This is like a basketball coach telling his players not to practice their free throws. It’s astounding how international soccer is decades behind US sports in some ways, from training and fitness technology to basic statistical analysis.

The team that practices its penalties usually wins. Just ask the English or the Dutch. I had the weakest shot on by far on my Italian team a few years ago, but I always won our penalty shot contests. The more you have it down to a routine, the easier it is, especially in pressure situations.

Anyhow, if it comes down to penalties, Milan will win it. It is, however, a dumb way to end a tie. My suggestion is to pull one player from each team after 90 minutes, then pull an additional player every five minutes. You’ll get a winner before it gets down to five-on-five.

New MoveOn.org Ad Shows Republican Majority Leader Frist Trying To Blow Up Capitol…

Oh, you mean that’s not his actual platform? Never mind.

Thomas Friedman writes in the NYT:

I don’t understand a concept of the sacred that says a book is more sacred than a human life. A holy book, whether the Bible or the Koran, is only holy to the extent that it shapes human life and behavior.

“Look, Newsweek may have violated journalistic rules, but what jihadist terrorists are doing in Iraq and Afghanistan – blowing up innocent Muslims struggling to build an alternative society to dictatorship – surely destroys the Koran. They are the real enemies of Islam because they are depriving Muslims of a better future. From what I know of Islam, it teaches that you show reverence to God by showing reverence for his creations, not just his words. Why don’t your spiritual leaders say that? I am asking, because I want to know.”

Santo cielo! I know that I’ve stated many times that journalists are astoundingly ignorant, but Thomas Friedman is someone whose book, FROM BEIRUT TO JERUSALEM, I read in high school as a uniquely well-informed description of the Middle East. A book is holy to the extent that it accurately reflects the Word of God, not how it shapes human life and behavior. By Friedman’s bizarre definition, Star Wars is holy because it gets people to line up in front of empty theatres for weeks in advance, to say nothing of its effect on the language.

Second, the reason that Muslim spiritual leaders are not saying that Muslims should show reverence to God by showing reverence to His creation is because this statement has nothing to do with Islam. The fact that Thomas Friedman has made a religion of his humanism does not mean that humanism is an inherent part of any historical religion.

I find it very telling that after decades of repeatedly excusing “the rage of the Arab street”, the legacy media has finally deigned to notice the hair-trigger, nonsensical nature of Muslim violence now that the alternative would be placing the blame for the riots on Newsweek.

This still amuses and annoys me. An old Amazon review:

“Although the events in The War in Heaven are fictional, the invisible world of spirits in describes is not.” This sentence, from the author’s note at the end of this novel, illuminates the difference between [X] and other writers of fantasy. Mainstream fantasy authors like George R. R. Martin, Terry Goodkind, Robert Jordan, Piers Anthony and the like all understand that the mythical concepts they create for their novels are just that, mythical. [X] does not. If religion constitutes the ultimate confusion of fantasy and reality, then that confusion sees its purest expression in religious entertainment.

I’ll admit right off the bat I’m an atheist. So why, you may ask, am I reviewing this book at all? I was sent free promotional copies of The War in Heaven and its sequel The World in Shadow by publisher Pocket Books so that I might review them for a different website I write for. After determining that site wouldn’t be the appropriate venue for reviews of these books, I couldn’t help wanting to post SOME kind of commentary after reading things in The War in Heaven that profoundly offended both my sensibilities and intellect.

The War in Heaven, for the most part, reads like a poor episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer written by a Christian fundamentalist. Sure, there are some entertaining passages, but it is sheer folly to claim, as one other reader did in his review, that the book isn’t preachy. The book preaches throughout its length. Characters pray everywhere. Now it’s not as though that sort of thing would be unexpected in a Christian novel; [X] is dutifully giving his audience what they want. But unlike mainstream fiction, Christian fiction is of course MEANT to evangelize. Otherwise, what’s the point? You might as well write a secular novel.

But what really irked me were passages in the aforementioned “author’s note” that I found so wrong-headed that they deserved comment. They indicate the difference in perspective between rationalists and the religious with crystal clarity.

[X] writes that “a rational, post-Enlightenment world has a difficult time admitting evil’s reality.” On the contrary, rationalists simply reject the notion that evil has a supernatural source. To claim that someone who does bad things does so out of demonic influence is not merely irrational but irresponsible. People who do bad things should be held accountable for their actions. “The devil made them do it” unjustly absolves those people of being held accountable and clouds the real reasons behind why someone might do a bad thing. Blaming imaginary beings for real problems solves nothing.

[X] then gives us a brief bit of autobiography where he describes his pre-Christian life as, apparently, a hotbed of “sin” and debauchery. “I could feel my mind slipping away with the shards of my morality,” [X] writes of himself, “as I became less and less interested in anything but sin.” Well, how nice for him, but I can say that as an atheist, my own life looks nothing like this, nor am I headed “straight for self-destruction.” Nor does [X]’s past reflect the lives of any of my other atheist friends either, all of whom are hard-working, upstanding, family-oriented people. If [X]’s past really was as irrational and self-absorbed as he claims it was, it’s no surprise religion was able to hook him when he was at his most vulnerable.

[X] also makes an attempt to defend the Christian doctrine of Hell by claiming that “in my experience, it is not God who sends us [to Hell].” I don’t know if, by referring to his “experience,” [X] is implying he has personally checked out Hell, but I can say that the scriptures do indeed make it clear that it is God’s wrath that determines who suffers eternal torment. Every Christian loves John 3:16, but try reading John 3:18 or 3:36 sometime. A God who says, in effect, “I love you, but if you don’t love me back, you’ll be tortured for eternity!” cannot by any stretch of the imagination be called good or loving. To do so strips the very word “love” of any meaning it could possibly have. As long as Christianity holds to the doctrine of eternal punishment for simply not being Christian, it will never be able to lay any legitimate claim to being a moral belief system. If you want a good example of evil, I say “belief in Hell.”

Finally, I was disgusted by [X]’s remark that “Hell is our natural destination. Each of us is drowning in a sea of self-destruction.” Such a profoundly misanthropic statement reveals that, at its core, Christianity has a deep loathing of humanity and life itself. It is diametrically opposed to the positive, humanistic outlook most atheists subscribe to. I ask you, honestly, which is the heathier, happier outlook? You know, there just might be something to a rational, post-Enlightenment worldview after all!

I suppose it’s a small step forward to base your book review on the afterword instead of the cover. While there’s absolutely nothing wrong with disliking a book or slamming it based on your opinion that it is boring or poorly written, the characters are cardboard cutouts or the plot makes no sense, this is not so much a review of a novel as an assault on a rival worldview.

And as such, it is also more than a little nonsensical; since when do Christians absolve people of responsibility for giving into temptation? I was always under the impression that “the wages of sin are death” was a fundamentally Christian teaching. For a religion with a deep loathing of humanity and life, it’s interesting to note that Christians are the one’s holding up the birthrate in the West, it’s post-Christian Europe and the atheist-leaning Blue states that can’t be bothered to procreate and raise children.

In any event, it’s hard to get too worked up over the opinion of someone who gave a Peter Gabriel CD five stars. The horra, the horra! Anyhow, if you happen to have read WAR or WORLD, I’d encourage you to review it on Amazon. People do read those things, including publishers, and they do make a difference.

I also vehemently disagree with the reviewer’s statement that all Christian fiction must evangelize, although many in the CBA would probably take no exception to it. What is the point otherwise? As Umberto Eco, among many, many others, have demonstrated, the Christian worldview is a rich and deep treasure trove of metaphor, symbolism and even plot devices. Regardless of whether one believes it or not, it can make for an excellent foundation around which to tell a story.