• Your life is temporary. The things of this life (the “life immediate”) are temporary
• The life you are looking forward to is eternal. So are the things of that life.
• Consequently the wise thing to do is to focus on the life to follow.
• The God who has made a way for you to enter into the life to follow has every desire that you succeed.
• When you think that he is disapproving of you because you are focusing on the life immediate, you are wrong.
• This is because you think that while you are focusing on the life immediate, God is as well. The reality is, God is always focused on your life as a whole: your immediate life and your future life, and how they relate to each other.
• This is the tip of the iceberg that is an uncomfortable reality: many of the things you belief about yourself are lies.
• You come to believe these lies through reinforcement by dwelling on them; lies like “I am not worthy.” “I am not redeemable.” “I have gone to far to come back again”
• The hard thing to remember is that these lies are not overcome and replaced by reminding yourself that they are, in fact, lies, but rather by focusing on the truth: “I am worthy.” “I have been redeemed because I was redeemable.” “I am never too far to go back, in fact I can go back now, this moment.”

Consider, meditate. Rinse, repeat.

Tom Gilson of Thinking Christian has posted a review of Michael Novak’s new book No One Sees God.

The book seems to be a call to both atheists and believers to put aside the polemics and try to find common ground; to remember that we are all human and all share the trait of not being able to “see God.” It would be nice if such collaboration was likely, however I forsee many falling back on the old question begging standpoint: “Why should I deign to comport with someone who is wrong?”

Hopefully that’s just the cynic in me.

First Things writer R.R. Reno has an excellent article on progressive politics, what it actually is, and how it is dangerous. He especially draws some excellent quotes from Edmund Burke’s writings regarding the French Revolution.

I liked what he had to say here very much:

“Nonetheless, conservatism and progressivism have fundamentally different tendencies as ruling principles. Conservatism wants to protect, nurture, and perfect aspects of the social norms we already have. Drawing its strength from what exists, it has room for dissent. Progressivism pours Agent Orange on the cultural landscape to make space for something new, something it imagines to be better. Seeking what is ideal, it often excludes dissent as a matter of moral principle.”

David Perdue’s Charles Dickens Page sets the stage in the following way:

Charles Dickens has probably had more influence on the way that we celebrate Christmas today than any single individual in human history except one. At the beginning of the Victorian period the celebration of Christmas was in decline. The medieval Christmas traditions, which combined the celebration of the birth of Christ with the ancient Roman festival of Saturnalia (a pagan celebration for the Roman god of agriculture), and the Germanic winter festival of Yule, had come under intense scrutiny by the Puritans under Oliver Cromwell. The Industrial Revolution, in full swing in Dickens’ time, allowed workers little time for the celebration of Christmas.

The romantic revival of Christmas traditions that occurred in Victorian times had other contributors: Prince Albert brought the German custom of decorating the Christmas tree to England, the singing of Christmas carols (which had all but disappeared at the turn of the century) began to thrive again, and the first Christmas card appeared in the 1840s. But it was the Christmas stories of Dickens, particularly his 1843 masterpiece A Christmas Carol, that rekindled the joy of Christmas in Britain and America. [em. mine]

If you have been alive in the United States or Britain for, let’s say, at least 12 years, then chances are you have been exposed to the classic short story A Christmas Carol, by Charles Dickens. The work continues to be an enduring classic; even after 160 years we see it revisited again and again through theatre, television, cinema, and other mediums.

But did you know that Dickens wrote other Christmas books after A Christmas Carol? Indeed, he wrote several. My suggestion for this Christmas season is to read A Christmas Carol if you haven’t already. The actual text is incredibly charming. If you are one of the lucky ones that has read it, then have a go at one of these (titles link to online texts):

• The Chimes (wiki): “Toby “Trotty” Veck, a poor working man, loses his faith in human nature and comes to believe that he and his fellow poor are naturally “vicious”. Then he is afforded a nightmare vision of his loved ones’ future after his death. The spirits or goblins in his local church bells show him how anyone, however good, may descend into degradation and ruin if sufficiently driven by circumstances. The chimes teach Trotty that nobody is born wicked, that crime and vice are man-made conditions, and that poor people have the same right to seek improvement and happiness as the rich.” [1]
• The Cricket on the Hearth (wiki): “The story centers on John and Dot Peerybingle whose marriage is threatened by a wide difference in their ages. When confronted with the possibility of Dot’s infidelity John consults the spirit of the Cricket on the Hearth whose chirping Dot has said brings luck. The cricket assures John that all will be well. In the end the misunderstanding is cleared up and the couple’s happiness is restored. The story also features the Scrooge-like conversion of hard-hearted toymaker Tackleton.” [2]
• The Battle of Life (wiki):

“The Battle of Life centers on a change of heart, but this time without the aid of supernatural beings. Doctor Jeddler’s daughters make sacrifices in love which convert their father’s cynical view of life.” [3]


• The Haunted Man (wiki): “Mr. Redlaw is a chemistry professor tormented by painful memories. He is visited on Christmas Eve by a phantom, a double of himself, who bestows the gift of forgetting these painful memories. The catch is that others who come into contact with the professor also lose remembrance of past hurts and sorrows.” [4]


1. “The Chimes.” Wikipedia. 8 Dec. 2008 <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/the_chimes>.
2. “Dickens Christmas Books.” David Perdue’s Charles Dickens Bage. 8 Dec. 2008 <http://charlesdickenspage.com/christmas_books.html>.
3. Ibid.
4. Ibid.

Mark Roberts has his Advent calendar going again. Following Advent is a great way to prepare yourself for the celebration of the Nativity of Jesus.

He also has some advent resources, including an introduction to Advent.

Go here for his Advent calendar blog entry for today, December 8th, 2008.

[Ed: This is an old post that never made it through the whole publishing process because, well, life got in the way and so did my server's ability to boot without going into kernel panic. I'm going to continue on with reviewing The God Delusion because I promised someone I would.]

Alright. This is the first real entry on my iterative analysis of Richard Dawkins’ new book The God Delusion (go here for the first). It’s going to be short, though, because the first chapter really doesn’t say much all that necessary of further dissection. The chapter divides into two sections, Deserved Respect and Undeserved Respect. The first is a clarification between two kinds of religion: “supernatural religion” and “Einsteinian religion”. Einsteinian religion, as Dawkins calls it, is that “quasi-mystical response to nature [that] is common among scientists and rationalists.” ^[1] This type of religion is in juxtaposition to the supernatural religion of “religious people”, and it is the gods of supernatural religion that Dawkins is calling delusional. I’m not sure why he called this section Deserved Respect. Possibly he meant it as a contrast to what gets Undeserved Respect.

What is it that gets this undeserved respect? Why religion, of course. Dawkins provides of litany of areas where religion is provided with unthinking respect that it should not have. Or, rather, it is provided with respect merely because it is religion, and not because of any trait that would make the respect deservéd. That’s actually fine with me. I don’t think we should give respect unthinkingly. Religious ideas should be able to be freely questioned just like any other, and both suppoorters and detractors should have a voice.

Notice, however, that there is a difference between questioning religious ideas and haranguing religious people with sophmoric polemics and pejoratives. The two should not be equated. Also note that a failure to understand why there is generally respect for religion does not mean that, ergo, you should disrespect religion and religious people. It might be the case that people do not merely respect religion ipso facto, but for other reasons as well.

One final note: in this chapter, Dawkins makes the following quote: “Some men think that because they have achieved a high degree of learning in one field, they are qualified to express opinions in all.” ^[2] I’m going to step out on a limb and make a prediction here: By the end of this book we are going to see Dawkins eat those words. I know Richard is a very, very intelligent person; much moreso than I, and I know that his interests probably scale numerous disciplines. But I also know that his professional fields are zoology and biology. From what I’ve seen in other reviews (and this is borne out in the table of contents), he makes philosophical and moral objections to God’s existence. That would be fine, of course, if he were properly a philosopher. In fact, I think it would be fine if were a sailor, or a barista. What’s not fine is making such a complaint and then commiting the very same thing yourself. My bet is that Dawkins’ philosophical objections are going to be the same old rehashed arguments that have been dealt with time and again. Why would he do this? Because those areas of scholarship are not his field.

I don’t mean to say that I’m going to set Dawkins straight every place he’s wrong, but I do hope to provide rebuttals to some of his arguments. I am in no way a professional in the area of philosophy, but it’s where my passion lies. In contrast I don’t have much practical knowledge in the area of evolution and intelligent design, which Dawkins spends several sections on. That’s a topic of study that really doesn’t bear much interest for me, at least not enough to wade through the morass of contending books and papers. I feel if I were to respond in an authoritative way I would most assuredly be coming from a standpoint lacking a solid base of knowledge. So if my critique of the “scientific” sections of his book is sub-par, I apologize in advance. I’m sure there are reviews out there that do his arguments much more justice.

1. Dawkins, Richard. The God Delusion. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2006. 11.
2. Ibid. 16.

After a little over a year of being offline I finally bit the bullet and got my FreeBSD box back up and running. It’s still in the living room but at least it will boot without throwing a hissy fit.

Also, God bless fsck.

Sometimes I think we should worry less about whether or not God is real and worry about how much more real he might be than us. There’s a frightening aspect to a reality where you are vapor and mist next to a being whose solidity outstrips the very earth you stand on.

I happened across this article on salon.com that takes Oprah’s latest psecudo-spiritual schlock to task. It appears that she’s jumped on the bandwagon of people following a book called The Secret that’s cribbed from the Word of Faith movement people but put a secular slant on it.

Now I’ve never been a fan of Oprah, and this is one of the reasons why. For a person who has the power to deeply impact such a large audience, she displays an incredible lack of intellectual responsibility. It seems like time and time again these ridiculous fads crop up on her show or on her book list. It’s almost as if she’s the gatekeeper for what her watchers will accept but doesn’t actually do any rigorous gate-keeping. In fact, it appears that she’s set herself up on top of the “pyramid scheme” this time, as it were. I suggest you read the article first for more information, then come back here.

There was one quote from the book that caught my attention, and I’d like to go over it in depth in this post, if you’ll allow me. Here it is:

“Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Joseph, Moses, and Jesus were not only prosperity teachers, but also millionaires themselves, with more affluent lifestyles than many present-day millionaires could conceive of.”

This line of thinking seems like something that has no doubt come out of the Health-and-Wealth-gospel circles, but with it from such a fresh source I can’t help but respond. Let’s consider each of these in turn.

Read more »

More insights from The Everlasting Man:

“In Christendom hope has never been absent; rather it has been errant, extravagant, excessively fixed upon fugitive chances. Its perpetual revolution and reconstruction has at least been an evidence of people being in better spirits. Europe did very truly renew its youth like the eagles; just as the eagles of Rome rose again over the legions of Napoleon ^[1], or we have seen soaring but yesterday the silver eagle of Poland ^[2]. But in the Polish case ever revolution always went with religion. Napoleon himself sought a reconciliation with religion. Religion could never be finally separated even from the most hostile of the hopes; simply because it was the very source of the hopefulness. And the cause of this is to be found simply in the religion itself.”