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Irish Death

I just found a new favorite beer: Quilter's Irish Death. So good!

Posted at disnetdev - QOTD #3

http://disnetdev.com/blog/2008/09/08/qotd-3-universe-wilson/

Allah Is A Demon

Or so says pastor Driscol. For the longest time I was convinced that he had ceased his controversial ways, contenting himself to the occasional pot shot at Brian McLaren.

But no. Apparently he will not be tamed.

View it for yourself here

*sigh* But it gets even better. I did a quick google blog search to see if anyone else was talking about it (doing a regular web search for “allah is a demon” is an exercise in pain I shall leave to the reader). Apparently the blogsphere has recently gone crazy over remarks made by McCain supporter Pastor Rod Parsley. The gist of which is that he believes allah is a demon spirit and that “America was founded, in part, with the intention of seeing this false religion [Islam] destroyed”.

While I’m sure Driscol won’t go so far as to say America is destined to destroy Islam (I hope), we are still left with his statement. If only it were a bad case of religious Tourettes and it could all be chalked up to crazy old Driscol doing his controversial thing. But no. He actually means it and gives a couple of verses to support him.

I case you couldn’t tell by now, dear reader, I Don’t Agree with Driscol. Regardless of your views on demons/spirituality, to assert with 100% certainty that the entire religion of Islam is nothing more than demon worship is incredibly arrogant. Not to mention offensive.

And it doesn’t seem very biblical to me. Though Driscol used a few verses in an attempt to anchor his belief in scripture, the appropriateness of the verses are tenuous at best. For some contrast look at the story in Acts 17:22-23 (from which Mars Hill derives its name by the way). Does Paul tell the Athenians “You all are worshiping demons! Turn or burn!”?

I really wish Driscol wasn’t turning into this generation’s Jerry Falwell/Pat Robinson.

Wow!

Amazing video of the World Wide Telescope:

Heresy! And other fun notions...

My pastor had a fairly interesting sermon this Sunday on the emergent church. And since labeling is a self-evident good he broke it down into three "good" forms: reformed (which he identifies with), evangelical, and home churches. Liberal emergers (emergents? emergen-testants?) provide the much needed foil to deride.

He gives us two binary choices (a binary binary choice!) to help us understand the emergent movement. We have emergent vs. traditional buildings and emergent vs. traditional theology. Here is a friendly table with appropriate values judgments (as filled in by my pastor).

	Old Buildings	New Buildings
Old Theology	Boring!	Sweet!
New Theology	Boring Heretic!	Heretic!

Churches can be emergent (trendy, culturally hip, relevant you might even say) with services, worship, community and so on. Churches like this will have loud music, dark sanctuaries meeting places, prayer circles and other such nonsense. Traditional churches are of course less interesting (I'm sure you are familiar with their ilk).

Any form of a new emergent theology is of course heresy and needs no further discussion.

In the process of dismissing emergent theology, my pastor mentioned Brian McLaren and his book A New Kind of Christian. To which my friend sitting next to me piped in: "Its heresy on a stick!".

Because of such high praise from my friend and since my pastor recommended we never read the book, I had it downloaded to my Kindle before he had moved on to his next point. So much for respecting authority ;)

I'm not entirely sure what I think of McLaren (haven't finished his book yet). Suffice it to say that what I have read is fascinating and refreshing (does that make me a heretic too?). I will leave you with a quote from A New Kind of Christian that sums up a lot of what has been banging around in my head for a while.

And I guess my Protestant friends would be livid right about now, saying things like "We're not modern--we're biblical! We believe in 'sola Scriptura'! We follow the New testament!" But couldn't they agree that the way they read the Bible, the way they feel the need to put a sola in from of Scriptura, the way they follow the New Testament may possibly themselves be modern ways?

[So, for all you linux/christian nerds out there, ever noticed that Gentoo is totally an emergent church? Besides the _obvious_ (/me pushes glasses up noise) use of emerge as a package manager and religious fanaticism of its adherents, it's all about tweaking the system's front end to make the individual think their happy but leaves the core virtually unchanged (it's still fracking linux!).

Anyhow, if you were actually able to follow that, you have my condolences.]

Human Rights?

So, I've been reading Foolishness to the Greeks by Lesslie Newbigin. It's an amazing book if you are at all interested in Western culture or Christianity and their interaction. The book is full of great stuff but I just wanted to point out one particularly amazing section I came across.

Medieval society was held together by a complex network of reciprocal rights and duties, and the idea of "human rights" in general, apart from this actual web of reciprocal duties and rights, would have been unintelligible. In fact...there is no way in which the idea of human rights could have been expressed in classical or medieval Hebrew, Greek, Latin, or Arabic. The idea would have been incomprehensible.

Wow! It just blew my mind how much our conceptions of rights are tied up in our culture and language. What he is saying here is that the human rights we hold so dear (life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness as our constitution tells us) is not just a new development from medieval thought, it's an idea that medieval thinkers would not have been able to even express. This shows just how much culture and language shape the way we think.

[Also posted at disnetdev]

Useful Link

Hi all! Just found this page on teh intarwebs. It has the full searchable text of Augustine's Confessions.

Book III

Sorry about the length of time between posts everyone. I know I held out the schedule as an absolute good, but maybe this just goes to show the depth of human depravity and the impossibility perfection...or at least my laziness. Could go either way.

Anyhow, on to Augustine and the later years of his teenage life!

One quote that fascinated me was the very first few sentences:

I came to Carthage, where a cauldron of illicit loves leapt and boiled about me. I was not yet in love, but I was in love with love, and from the very depth of my need hated myself for not more keenly feeling the need.

This seems like an echo of his statement at the beginning of the Confessions that "our hearts are restless till they rest in Thee" which is pretty much the theme of his entire confessions (or at least as much as I have read). This is made even more explicit a few lines later when he says "I was hungry, all for the want of that spiritual food which is Thyself, my God".

Book 1 -- Infancy and boyhood

One thing I found pretty interesting this week was Augustine's idea of innocence. The passage of interest is in XIX where he states

Is this [speaking of his childhood sins] boyhood innocence? It is not, Lord. I cry Thy mercy, O my God. Yet as we leave behind tutors and masters and nuts and balls and birds and come to deal with prefects and kings and the getting of gold and estates and slaves, these are the qualities which pass on with us, one stage of life taking the place of another as the greater punishments of the law take the place of the schoolmaster's cane. Therefore, O God our King, when you said, of such is the kingdom of heaven, it could only have been humility as symbolized by the low stature of childhood that you were commending.

Most of what he is confessing in the first book are things I think we all would have a hard time classifying as sin. They are just things we do when young and then grow out of. Augustine seems to be saying here that it is just the particular manifestation of sin that we grow out of. The core problem is still there and we just trade on type of sin for another. It's all ultimately the same.

I also found his brief speculation on where the soul is before birth interesting. He asks in VI "whether my infancy followed upon some earlier age of my life that has passed away before it". He quickly chalks this up to the mystery of God without making any definite statements about it. It's still an interesting question though: where was I before I was born? Or is that just a meaningless question? I suppose you can't exist without existing, but is birth the beginning of existence?

A footnote in my text mentions that Augustine entertained several different theories about the origin of the soul in his life, but never commits to a specific one.

There was also a sentence that sounded funny to my modern ears when he was talking about learning what his infancy was like.

for You have left man to learn these things about himself from others, to accept much that touches him so closely on the word of his womenfolk.

Maybe it's just the word "womenfolk" but it gave me a chuckle to read it.

And so it begins...

We've put it off long enough, but if we want to work our way through all those glorious books before the universe grows cold we should probably start!

I have finally obtained my copy of the Confessions and am ready to begin. Since I believe that schedules are an absolute good, I (and Nick) propose that we read two books per week (~40 pages). I've set up a schedule here to help keep us on track. If we actually follow it, we should be finished with the Confessions by then end of November.