July 22, 2013
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A Drunken Sailor and a Sinner

During a stop at Roosevelt Roads Naval Station in Puerto Rico I  was assigned shore duty. The night before the ship was to get underway I went to the sailor center on base to tell my shipmates to head back to the ship. One sailor was missing, however. This sailor’s alcohol issues had caused trouble for me in the past. During a stay at my home he damaged the interior walls and during a drunken fit he kicked a hole in an acoustic guitar that I had let another sailor borrow. Based on this, I guessed alcohol was involved his disappearance. Sure enough, I found him semi-conscious in a bathroom stall. He had vomited and urinated on himself and the smells of bile and urine combined with the smell of alcohol to make a terrible odor.

I tried to walk him the 3/4 of a mile or so back to the ship, but quickly realized I’d have to hoist him, putting one arm over my shoulder and one hand on his belt. During the long trip back to the ship he would occasionally gain enough lucidity to curse at me for a few moments before lapsing back into a semi-conscious state. When I finally got him to the ship and the BMC took him down to his bunk, I was happy to be rid of him.

Do you not know that as many of us as were baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into His death? Knowing this, that our old man was crucified with Him, that the body of sin might be done away with, that we should no longer be slaves of sin. For he who has died has been freed from sin. Romans 6:3, 6-7

When I carried this sailor back to the ship, I saved him from the wrath of the chain of command. I didn’t bear his punishment for him, I merely moved him from a position of danger to one of relative safety. When I finished, I didn’t want to see him again. I liked him less then than I ever had before. All I wanted to do was change clothes and take a shower. But when Christ died on the cross, he satisfied the just requirements of the holiness of God toward the sins of the world – every sin – past, present, and future.1 Understand this: The sin of mankind is far more horrendous and obnoxious to God than any physical filthiness that has ever existed on human skin. Jesus Christ was not merely exposed to this sin, he became our sin.2  God the Father was required by his very nature to smite his Son with all the wrath that mankind has ever deserved. This is why we who believe are free from sin: Christ died for us. When we identify with him, we receive the benefits of the crucifixion – The removal of “the body of sin.” We are dead to it.

Now that’s a good deal in itself, far better than we ever could have hoped for. But it gets better.

Therefore we were buried with Him through baptism into death, that just as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, even so we also should walk in newness of life. For if we have been united together in the likeness of His death, certainly we also shall be in the likeness of His resurrection. Now if we died with Christ, we believe that we shall also live with Him.  Romans 6:4-5,8

The sacrificial death of Christ freed us from the power of sin. Even better, he was resurrected by the Glory of God to new life. Again, in identifying with him, we also receive new life. I never wanted to see that drunken sailor again and even after he was sober and clean smelling I avoided him as much as possible. God the Son does the opposite. He pursues us, he woos us, he wants us to live with him. Not only that, he compares our relationship to a marriage relationship3 – the most intimate relationship mankind can boast of, a relationship which functions on the closest thing to unconditional love humans can muster. He didn’t just save us from sin, he brought us into his family – to be treated as a bride, a kinsman, as sons and daughters.

I’m glad that God’s ways aren’t my ways, and his thoughts aren’t my thoughts. I’m glad that Jesus Christ, God the Son, wants me to be identified with him. I’m glad that when God the Father looks at me, he sees Jesus Christ, his Son. In him I have died to sin, and in him I live a resurrected life.

  1. 1 John 2:2 – And he himself is the propitiation [satisfying sacrifice] for our sins, and not for ours only but also for the whole world. [↩]
  2. 2 Corinthians 5:21 – For He made Him who knew no sin to be sin for us, that we might become the righteousness of God in Him. [↩]
  3. Romans 7:4 – Therefore, my brethren, you also have become dead to the law through the body of Christ, that you may be married to another—to Him who was raised from the dead… [↩]
July 22, 2013
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Software Pick – Freemake Video Converter

Freemake Video Converter

Freemake Screenshot

This is my go-to software for video conversion. It does almost everything I want. You can create slideshows from pictures, rip Blu-ray and DVDs, convert and save YouTube and other streaming video files, add music,  and join files. I have yet to find a media file it can’t recognize. It even converted video clips in an obscure format from an 6 year old feature phone I had thrown in a box. It supports more than 200 file formats.

On the export side, it can convert to just about any format. It has templates for nearly every style of mobile device, can create HTML5 videos, can burn Blu-ray and DVDs as well as create ISOs, and it can strip audio from YouTube files and save them as MP3s. It will also upload video to YouTube. It supports subtitle files on DVD burns, so if you make a disk from a ripped movie you can get the subtitles back. It also has video editing capabilities.  Lastly, it supports batch processing, and you can put multiple media types in the same batch.

I have two gripes, though. The first is that, while you can add music to a slideshow, you can’t create a slideshow with both video and photos in the same presentation. The second is that the software will change your search settings if you don’t choose “Custom Installation” and uncheck that option. Also, Mac users are out of luck, this is Windows only. Sorry.

You can download Freemake Video Converter here.

 

 

July 22, 2013
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Suitable Suitors

Camp BabiesMy wife and I joke about betrothing our daughter Elanor (orange shoes) to our friend’s children. But when I saw this picture I was impacted with a feeling of hope that rather surprised me. I think this is why: When I think about Elanor’s future husband, I think about Job – Kathleen and Rafa’s son, being raised in Mexico as his parents serve the Lord in the squalor and risk of a third world country. I think about Machiah, the red-head in the picture above. His parents are moving to Niger this year in order to spread the gospel to the sprawling masses of Niamey. I think about Marshall, sitting next to Elanor, a boy who is being brought up by a parents who have endured much to conform to the will of their Father. I think about Griffith, born in the decay of Detroit where his parents moved in order to support a faltering assembly. There are many boys like these, and they give me hope for Elanor’s future. We joke about who she will marry but we really have no idea who that man will be. Still, these children remind me that there are God-followers out there, men and women who will do anything to see that their boys grow to love God as their parents do. I hope one day my daughter marries one of them.

July 12, 2013
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Cow Appreciation Day at Chick-fil-A

Cow Appreciation Day

My wife hand lettered the signs and purchased the costume from the flea market for one dollar. This cute costume scored us a free meal, but the collective oohs and ahs from the employees was the best reward!

July 11, 2013
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If ever there was a pious myth and a piece of credulous superstition, it is the liberal-rationalist belief that, a few hiccups apart, we are all steadily en route to a finer world.

– Terry Eagleton Reason, Faith, and Revolution: Reflections on the God Debate (ISBN 030016453X) p. 70
July 11, 2013
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Music Pick – Bell Canada 2010 Commercial by Darren Fung

This entry is part 1 of 6 in the series Music Picks

This commercial played in the 2010 Winter Olympics. One thing you’ll notice about my music picks is that I’m a sucker for brass and bells. This one has both, along with some stirring opening strings. Factoid: I remember reading an interview in which the composer Darren Fung said that he disliked the chimes at the end but was told by Bell Canada to put some “sparkle and magic” in the finale.

July 10, 2013
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Naturalistic Humanism as Religon – Part 2

This entry is part 2 of 8 in the series Humanistic Naturalism as a Religion

In my last post on the subject, I mentioned that naturalist humanism has to borrow from religion in order to function in real life. I found the following bit in an Answers Research Journal article on the philosophy of Stanley Fish:

Fish’s aim is yet again accurate when he takes on liberalism’s failure to invest human life with meaning. Fish relates a story philosopher Jürgen Habermas tells about his own life. Habermas had a Swiss friend who, though never a religious believer during his life, elected to have a church funeral. Habermas says his friend

had sensed the awkwardness of non-religious burial practices and, by his choice of place, publicly declared that the enlightened modern age has failed to find a suitable replacement for a religious way of coping with the final rite de passage.

But Fish himself can do no better. Although he knows the Bible fairly well, he has yet to recognize that all the foundations of all the interpretive communities in the world must beg, borrow, and steal from the biblical foundation to have morality, a telos, or other things that all worldviews require. Fish has not seen (or will not admit) that every one of the masons who constructed those foundations did his work with at least some—albeit suppressed and twisted—stones of Christian truth.

I read the following definition of an “atheistic” funeral on a funeral planning website:

The humanist view rejects the idea of an afterlife and interprets death as the end to an individual’s consciousness. They believe that human beings are simply another part of nature — and that death is nature’s way of cleansing. Through death, we clear the way for new life.

Humanists view life as a chance to have stimulating, joyful experiences and to live an ethical and good life. The humanist’s funeral affirms these beliefs and celebrates the passing life.

Look at the incongruity here. An atheistic funeral is the celebration of the fact that a loved one’s life has been eradicated by nature in order to “clear the way for new life.” Life itself is described as a chance to have joyful experiences and live an ethical life. Think about it. To a naturalistic humanist, joy is just a chemical reaction designed to promote positive actions. Ethics without an external source are relative to each person’s personal belief. Even the desire to be ethical is just another chemical reaction promoting positive social interaction for the benefit of the group. The entire description above is personally degrading and philosophically useless – unless one borrows from religion the meaning of joy and ethics and good.

July 9, 2013
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Tablet of Babel

While I was in Canada I started coming down with a cold. I’ve used Zicam zinc tablets to good effect in the past, so I found a Canadian substitute from a brand called Jamieson. In typical Canadian fashion, the packaging was bilingual. LozengeThe description read, in English and French, “Lozenges / Pastilles.” Now I’ve always associated lozenges with semi-opaque hard candy, like cough drops, so I was surprised to find fast dissolving tablets in the package. This made me curious about the definition of lozenge, so I looked the word up.

Early 14c., from Old French losenge, “windowpane, small square cake,” etc., used for many flat quadrilateral things (Modern French losange). Probably from a pre-Roman Celtic language, perhaps Gaulish lausa, “flat stone” or “tile.”

Originally in English as a term in heraldry; meaning “small cake or tablet (originally diamond-shaped) of medicine and sugar, etc., meant to be held in the mouth and dissolved,” from 1520s.

Well, that’s interesting. The English word has a French origin. On a package that also has the French word. This made me check up on the origin of the French word for tablet, pastilles.

From Latin pastillus small loaf, akin to Latin panis bread – first use 1658

Well, that’s kind of boring and anti-climactic, but due to the murkiness of etymology there’s another possible source. Via Elizabeth Abbott of Canadian news outlet The Globe and Mail:

Marie de Medici was married off to France’s Henri IV, who hated his homely blond wife and presided over a court whose courtiers mocked her as “the fat banker.” Marie escaped the tribulations of her hostile marriage and surroundings by comforting herself with food, especially sweets. She brought Giovanni Pastilla, the Medici clan’s confectioner, to the French court, where his concoctions delighted the French as much as their queen. The term bonbon – good good – originated from the royal children’s nickname for his wares, as did the word pastille, the small, sugared fruit tablets Pastilla specialized in.

So the English word lozenge comes from French but the French word pastille may have an Italian origin. I know it’s trivial, but I find it humorous.

July 4, 2013
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Naturalistic Humanism as Religion

This entry is part 1 of 8 in the series Humanistic Naturalism as a Religion

Atheist BenchSo an Atheist group had a granite bench placed next to a Ten Commandments monument at a Florida courthouse. It has been inscribed with an odd collection of quotes like, “An atheist believes that a hospital should be built instead of a church.” This got me thinking about the tendency of naturalistic humanism to borrow from religion. I’ve decided to start a series of posts detailing this ideological bleed-over.

Example #1 comes from well-know Atheist and writer Sam Harris. In an essay titled Science Must Destroy Religion, he laments the need to practice religious tolerance, says that religion is spoiling the fruits of human inquiry, and calls on scientists to blast, “the hideous fantasies of a prior age.” But he ends the essay with a suggestion that, “We must find ways of meeting our emotional needs.” He continues:

We must learn to invoke the power of ritual and to mark those transitions in every human life that demand profundity – birth, marriage, death – without lying to ourselves about the nature of reality… When we find reliable ways to make human beings more loving, less fearful, and genuinely enraptured by the fact of our appearance in the cosmos, we will have no need for divisive religious myths.

The problem here is that in naturalistic humanism, man is a cosmological accident without free will, a “wet robot.” Birth, marriage, and death are just biological necessities, often driven by the function of reproduction. There is no being in control and there is no ultimate purpose for mankind in the universe. This hardly makes us more loving, less fearful, and enraptured by our appearance in the cosmos. Our emotional needs don’t have an answer in naturalistic humanism so they must be “borrowed” from religion. Even Sam Harris doesn’t presume how to do this. That’s not to say that people haven’t tried. I’ll explore some of their ideas in further posts.

July 2, 2013
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God is Good?

C. S. Lewis once wrote about the meaning of the word Gentleman.

The word gentleman originally meant something recognizable; one who had a coat of arms and some landed property. When you called someone “a gentleman” you were not paying him a compliment, but merely stating a fact. If you said he was not “a gentleman” you were not insulting him, but giving information. There was no contradiction in saying that John was a liar and a gentleman… But then there came people who said – so rightly, charitably, spiritually, sensitively, so anything but usefully – “Ah but surely the important thing about a gentleman is not the coat of arms and the land, but the behavior? They meant well. To be honorable and courteous and brave is of course a far better thing than to have a coat of arms. But it is not the same thing. Worse still, it is not a thing everyone will agree about. To call a man “a gentleman” in this new, refined sense, becomes, in fact, not a way of giving information about him, but a way of praising him: to deny that he is “a gentleman” becomes simply a way of insulting him. When a word ceases to be a term of description and becomes merely a term of praise, it no longer tells you facts about the object: it only tells you about the speaker’s attitude to that object. A gentleman, once it has been spiritualized and refined out of its old coarse, objective sense, means hardly more than a man whom the speaker likes. –Mere Christianity

I think the same thing has happened with the word good. Let’s see how it was used in the Bible, in relation to God the Son:

Now behold, one came and said to Him, “Good Teacher, what good thing shall I do that I may have eternal life?” So He said to him, “Why do you call Me good? No one is good but One, that is, God. (Matthew 19:16-17)

The seeker in this passage used the “modern” version of the word good, the idea of something that is acceptable or pleasing. Jesus Christ responded that there is only one Good person – Good with a capital G, if you will. In essence, Jesus Christ was linking Goodness and Deity. It’s as if he said, “Either you’re using that word incorrectly, or you’re calling me God. Which is it?”

The noted late Atheist Christopher Hitchens wrote about the goodness of God:

If Christians modify the dictionary so that no action of God’s could ever be bad, assigning the word “good” to God’s actions says nothing. They hope to make an important statement with “God is good,” but debasing the dictionary makes the word meaningless.

In fact, like the word gentleman, it is the modern definition of good that has been debased.

Let me borrow C. S. Lewis’s words, slightly modified:

To call God “good” in this new, refined sense, becomes, in fact, not a way of giving information about him, but a way of praising him: to deny that he is “good” becomes simply a way of insulting him. When a word ceases to be a term of description and becomes merely a term of praise, it no longer tells you facts about the object: it only tells you about the speaker’s attitude to that object.

When we call God Good, we aren’t paying him a complement, we’re stating a fact; not “God is good,” but “God is Good,” with a capital G. As a gentleman’s title was a characteristic of his position, so the title of Good is characteristic of God’s position. He is the absolute moral standard, and without his standard of Goodness, good hardly means more than what the speaker likes.

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