Go ahead. Do a Google Image Search for the “coolest picture ever”.
See that picture with the guy shooting a dart gun at the camera.
I took that picture. It’s my little brother on my littlest brother’s birthday.
Awesome.
Monthly Archive for August, 2006
Rev. Gregory A. Boyd, an evangelical pastor of a church in Maplewood, Minnesota, preached a series of messages entitled “The Cross and the Sword” in which he stated that the church should stay out of politics.
According to the New York Times, the pastor is not a liberal; he opposes both abortion and gay marriage. His message, although presented for his conservative church, is intended for all politically-motivated churches, whether Republican or Democrat.
From the article, Boyd in his own words:
“America wasn’t founded as a theocracy,” he said. “America was founded by people trying to escape theocracies. Never in history have we had a Christian theocracy where it wasn’t bloody and barbaric. That’s why our Constitution wisely put in a separation of church and state.
“I am sorry to tell you,” he continued, “that America is not the light of the world and the hope of the world. The light of the world and the hope of the world is Jesus Christ.”
I have long maintained that separation of church and state is not the great evil that my Christian school teachers and pastors have made it out to be. In fact, separation of church and state is one of the things that makes this country great.
Think about it: Should you have to be a member of a certain church to vote? Should the government be collecting tithes in the same way they do the income tax? Should the government publish Bibles? What about Korans? Which church should the government promote?
Likewise, from the church’s side: Should your church promote the candidate that opposes abortion and gay marriage, or the one that supports feeding the poor and giving medicine to the sick?
Here is the primary reason that evangelical churches should not push politics from either side of the aisle: The goal of the church is to get as many people saved as possible and to get those people to follow Christ’s teachings to the best of their ability. But when the preacher starts, say, praising the war in Iraq, people who oppose the war are instantly turned off from the whole message. At best, it’s a distraction from the gospel. At worst, the people who oppose the war reject the gospel along with your politics. In other words, people are going to hell because you wouldn’t stop promoting your politics from the pulpit.
By all means, promote your politics with rallys, advertising, protests, and petitions. But for God’s sake–and I mean that literally–don’t try to affililate Christ with your political views. Stick to preaching about Christ and his teachings from the pulpits of your churches.
(Thanks to The Sycamore Tree for the link.)
Today, I discovered a far more accurate term for what has traditionally been called Gun Control: Victim Disarmament.
Since the current restrictions on guns tend to prevent law-abiding citizens from having guns while failing to stop criminals from acquring them, the current policies effectively prevent victims from defending themselves. This term draws attention to that defect in our current policy.
Thanks to Tom W. Bell of Agoraphilia for pointing the term out on his blog.
For the past several days I have been trying out a game called EVE Online. It’s an MMORPG (Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Game), which means that instead of playing the game by yourself on just your own computer, you log into a server and play with all the thousands of other people who also own the game.
As you can see from the screenshot, this is a very pretty game. That’s what first got me to download and play the game under a free 14-day trial period. The graphics on this game are phenomenal. The style of the game reminded me of Homeworld, an excellent 3D space-based real-time strategy game I played several years ago. It’s obvious that the developers have taken a lot of time to make this game look as good as possible.
Like most MMORPGs, there is no real goal to the game. Rather, you choose your own goal. Players can become better fighters, miners, researchers, CEOs, or even artists. Alternatively, they can work to improve their company or even just make friends with other people in the game. It’s very deep; there’s a lot of neat stuff to explore.
The problem with this game, as with other MMORPGs such as World of Warcraft and Everquest, is that the games are huge time sinks, much more so than with traditional computer games. It’s easy to get obsessed with completing just one more mission or learning one just more skill. Also because the games encourge players to build communities with other players, people can end up spending much longer in the game world than they would if they could just save and go do something else.
The other problem with these games is the financial cost. Traditional PC games cost between $40 and $50; MMORPG’s generally operate on a subscription model. EVE Online, for example, costs $15/month. It’s not a bad deal necessarily, because you get both constant updates to the game (both bug fixes and new features) and high-quality connections between you and other players, but it’s still much more expensive than a traditional game.
EVE Online is a fun, high-quality game with few bugs and excellent graphics. However, because of the high price in both time and money, I don’t plan to renew past my 14 trial period. Life’s too short.
I celebrated my 22nd birthday on Tuesday this week by taking the day off from work and enjoying a day of relative peace. In the evening, my family and I went to an Italian place called “The Italian Pie.”
It’s a great little restaurant, tucked beside a Subway in a strip mall near Wal-Mart. The dining area is dimly lit with low lights and tinted windows, and there’s a constant stream of jazz and Sinatra-style music playing from the speakers hidden in the ceiling. Excellent Italian food is served by good looking people in their early twenties.
(Incidentally, have you ever noticed how different restaurants have different kinds of workers? For example, the workers at Chick-fil-A, my former place of employment, tended to be either very young or very large, sometimes both. Is this unconscious profiling on the behalf of the management, or does the increased size of the average Chick-fil-A worker reflect the effects of a steady diet of Chick-fil-A food during breaks?)
Anyways, after enjoying a delicious chicken calzone from the Italian Pie, we came home and I got to open presents! The highlights from this year are the new 5.1 surround sound system I have hooked into my computer now and my shiny new Nintendo DS Lite. This latter is a shiny white brick that opens up to reveal two small video screens on which I can play some really fun video games. I spent hours today playing Advance Wars: Dual Strike, a fun little turn-based strategy game.
I love birthdays. At this point in my life, they’re still special days that I get excited about. I hope that that never changes.
Over the past few days, terrorists have done immense damage to the air travel industry without even blowing up a single plane.
By creating fear (or, “terror,” if you will), they have caused the airline industry and the government-owned Transportation Security Administration to overreact against all the normal citizens of western countries. Before, flying was a mild inconvenience: you’d have to go through security, take off your shoes, and go through. Now, they’re taking away iPods, books, bottles of water, cell phones, laptops. Basically, you will sit on the plane, staring forward with hands in your lap, hungry, thirsty, and unable to do anything about it.
So, who’s up for a trip to Europe?! Anybody…?
It’s even gotten to the point that people can’t fly because they wear those gel insoles on their shoes.
What makes this all worse is that the TSA is making exceptions for baby formula and medication. Now, if I’m a terrorist, I’m pretty sure that I can get a bottle of medication to hide my “liquid explosives” in. Essentially, the TSA is inconveniencing millions of Americans for no reason at all. If you make exceptions for any reason, then the whole system is worthless.
Here’s what I think they should do: Go back to the system we had a week ago. These ineffective security measures will kill the air travel industry, because no normal customer is going to willingly put up with it. You can’t stop a determined person from bringing liquids onto the airplane, because drug runners have been doing it for years by swallowing them in little plastic bags.
What’s next? Everyone has to get their stomachs pumped at the airport and endure a full body cavity search?
You can’t stop it, so quit hurting the millions of innocent air travelers by trying.
In Isaiah chapter 7, it is written that Ahaz, the king of Judah, was under a joint attack from Pekah, the king of Israel, and Rezin, the king of Syria. His people were terrified; “the heart of Ahaz and the heart of his people shook as the trees of the forest shake before the wind” (verse 2, ESV).
According to the passage, the prophet Isaiah then receives a message from the Lord for Ahaz, informing the king that “It shall not stand, and it shall not come to pass.” Isaiah then offers Ahaz the chance to ask a sign from the Lord, any sign. “Let it be deep as Sheol or high as heaven” (verse 10). Ahaz refuses this offer, saying, “I will not ask, and I will not put the LORD to the test.”
At this, Isaiah informs Ahaz that “Behold, the virgin shall conceive and bear a son, and shall call his name Immanuel. He shall eat curds and honey when he knows how to refuse the evil and choose the good” (14-15). The rest of the passage poetically describes how the attackers will be defeated and how their enemies’ land will be desolate.
So, in other words, this passage is saying that within two or three years–before the child can tell right from wrong–that the land of Judah will be in peace and prosperity, and that they will not suffer conquest at the hands of their neighbors. It cannot only refer to the birth of Christ, hundreds of years later, because it is specifically referring to the upcoming battle with Syria and Israel.
(In fact, if it were not for Matthew 1:23 which specifically states that the prophecy applied to Jesus, I would be hard pressed to draw any connection between the birth of Christ and this passage.)
So, we’ve established that for the prophecy to be true, that A) a virgin must give birth to a son in the near future to be a sign for King Ahaz and that B) the nation of Judah must win its conflict with Israel and Syria.
Now, take a look at II Chronicles 28, which describes these same events. We can see in verses 5-6 that “the LORD his God gave him into the hand of the king of Syria, who defeated him and took captive a great number of his people and brought them to Damascus. He was also given into the hand of the king of Israel, who struck him with great force. For Pekah the son of Remaliah killed 120,000 from Judah in one day, all of them men of valor, because they had forsaken the LORD, the God of their fathers.” The passage goes on to describe Israel and Syria’s exploits against the house of Judah.
…
Isn’t that exactly the opposite of what Isaiah said would happen? Is there some explanation for this contradiction that I’m missing? Or was Isaiah a false prophet?
For the past couple of weeks, I’ve been getting a steady stream of junk mail urging me to vacation in Myrtle Beach. They’re sending out expensive kits and four-color catalogs, and I have no idea how they found my name and address or why they think I’d have any interesting in going there.
My best guess is that the Myrtle Beach tourism department finds out when people in South Carolina graduate from college and send them advertisements for a while, hoping that they’ll celebrate their new-found freedom with a vacation. Any other BJU grads out there experiencing the same thing?
My dad, my brothers, and I had planned to go tubing this morning. In case you’re not aware of the practice, here’s how it works: You float down a river, sitting in a big inner tube (like they used to use for car and truck tires), enjoying the scenery and the experience of sliding down the rapids.
Unfortunately, it’s raining this morning, which would make the experience much less pleasant, so we’ve postponed our trip for a little while.
But here’s what I’m wondering: How many people earn a living from this little industry? For example, the place we had planned to go rents inner tubes with handles and sends a bus down to the end of the course to return you to your car. And then there’s the guys who manufacture, market, and sell the specialized inner tubes. They, in turn, pay folks in the petroleum industry who make the plastics used for the inner tubes.
Isn’t the economy fun?
Welcome to JDHarper.com: Blog Jones Rebranded.
Why the change? There are several reasons, listed below:
First, the name Blog Jones is kind of limiting in what I can do: I can write a blog. If I ever get into podcasting, what would I call it? Podcast Jones?
Second, think that the name “Blog Jones” is a little silly-sounding and (to people who haven’t finished this post) it probably doesn’t make much sense.
The third reason for the rebranding is the origin of the site’s name. See, way back when I was starting my blog, blogging was still pretty new. I believed that I was the only blogger at Bob Jones University. (This may have even been true, in fact, since I started way, way back in August of 2003.) So, since I was the only blogger at Bob Jones, it made sense to call it Blog Jones. Bob -> Blog. Now that I’ve graduated from BJU it doesn’t make sense to carry the Jones name around anymore.
Anyways, welcome aboard, and thanks for migrating with me to my new domain name. If, by some miracle, you treasure some piece of content from the old Blog Jones domain, don’t worry. I’m keeping that up and running too. Your permalinks and bookmarks will not suffer link rot. Just be sure to save this site in your bookmarks and point your RSS Feed aggregators at the new JDHarper.com feed.
It’s a fresh, new start! I hope you all will stick around.