Apr 30 2008

17 Rumors We Heard From Some Kid In Third Period

Category: funny stuff, miscellaneous — Steve @ 14:02 pm

Looks like things haven’t changed since I was in school, except that back then the rumor was that you could die if you ate five packs of PopRocks and drank a Coke.  (HT: WootBlog)

  1. If you hiccup and fart at the same time, your stomach will turn inside out.
  2. If you combine turkey, mashed potatoes, cranberry sauce and one green vegetable, you get the chemicals which make LSD, which is why Thanksgiving always gets so freaky and everyone gets into fights.
  3. AIDS came from people French-kissing their dogs.
  4. The secret ingredient in Taco Bell 7-Layer Burritos is horse blood.
  5. Simon Cowell is actually from Oklahoma, and just talks that way on TV.
  6. If you fold a dollar bill a certain way, you can see Betsy Ross naked.
  7. Daddy Longlegs’ legs taste like spearmint.
  8. The inventor of Elmer’s Glue was born with horns, and that’s his picture on the bottle.
  9. Everyone who has ever beat Ninja Gaiden Black has died the next day.
  10. ABBA stands for “All-father Baal Beats Angels”.  [Hah! I knew it!]
  11. Yu-Gi-Oh! was supposed to have a new season but the FBI stepped in and shut it down under the Patriot Act, and no one knows why.
  12. The phrase “Every Good Boy Deserves Fudge” is propaganda created and promoted by the American Fudge Council.
  13. Girls don’t wear underwear in Canada.
  14. The film rating XXX is pronounced “kccchhggh”.
  15. If you have ever touched a baked potato without gloves, the government has your fingerprints on file.
  16. There is cocaine at the center of Polly-O String Cheese.
  17. If you play Paper Mario for exactly fifty-five hours, fifty-five minutes, and fifty-five seconds, you’ll get a cheat code that lets you play as Lara Croft…naked.

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Apr 29 2008

Spurgeon on Calling a Spade a Spade

Category: faith — Steve @ 15:20 pm

I’ve been wrestling with the propriety of confronting unbelievers with their sin in an effort to evangelize them.  On the one hand, it smacks of self-righteous religious hypocrisy.  On the other hand are fingers.  Here’s what Charles Spurgeon had to say on the matter:

windowslivewriterspurgeononcallingaspadeaspade d7a2spurgeon 3 Spurgeon on Calling a Spade a Spade“Men are perishing, and if it be unpolite to tell them so, it can only be so where the devil is the master of the ceremonies.

Out upon your soul-destroying politeness; the Lord give us a little honest love to souls, and this superficial gentility will soon vanish. I could with considerable refreshment to myself pour sarcasm after sarcasm upon religious cowardice. I would cheerfully sharpen my knife and dash it into the heart of this mean vice. There is nothing to be said in its favor.

It is not even humble; it is only pride of too beggarly a sort to own itself.”

(HT: Pyromaniacs)

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Apr 25 2008

And In ‘Pot Calling the Kettle Black’ News Today…

Category: news and politics — Steve @ 10:25 am

You kids get off my lawn!

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Apr 25 2008

A Sub in the Canal

Category: military, miscellaneous — Steve @ 08:50 am

The webcams at the Panama Canal occasionally catch some interesting critters, and with the addition of a hi-res cam at the Miraflores lock you can get an even better view of things.  This morning there’s a submarine transiting the canal.  Any idea whose?

If you can’t get a picture, click the Get Java link at the bottom of the webcam page, install it and then reload the page.

Sub in the Canal

Sub in the Canal_zoom

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Apr 24 2008

Must Be the Demon of Rotisserie Chicken in that Boy

Category: religion — Steve @ 14:09 pm

Brant Hansen at Letters From Kamp Krusty has an odd piece about a spiritual experience at a chicken joint:

My friend went to “C.R. Chicks” to eat some chicken.  It’s a little place where they have rotisserie chicken, and it’s pretty good, I think.  That’s my opinion.

He ran into a person he used to go to church with.  She asked, “Hey — haven’t seen you for awhile.  What’re you up to?”  He’d actually stopped going there a year and a half ago.  He told her he found some friends who really loved him, and he’s really growing and stuff, and no, he doesn’t go to that church anymore, but it’s all cool.

She loudly began praying for the “spirit of rebellion” to come out of him.  My friend says he didn’t really feel anything happen after that, but he finished his chicken there at C.R. Chicks.   

C.R. Chicks also has meat loaf sandwiches which are pretty good. 

I’m thinking that chicken joints should be exorcism-free zones.  At least when they have good meatloaf sandwiches.

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Apr 22 2008

Wrong Way of the Master?

Category: faith, ministries — Steve @ 17:07 pm

Ray Comfort did a video series on ’sharing your faith’ awhile back called the Way of the Master.  It usually involved confronting someone with “If you were to die tonight, why should you get into heaven?”  The point was to get bystanders to admit that they have lied, cheated, stolen, then tell them that they’ve violated God’s laws and were therefore guilty and needed to get right with God.  After all, God has a plan for their life, right?

Michael Spencer at internetmonk has an excellent piece on the problem with this approach.  His point?  Jesus never asked those kind of questions.  In fact, he didn’t come asking questions at all.  Michael says:

I think it’s telling that the two most prolific evangelism programs in evangelicalism both approach their audience with questions that Jesus never used.

“Do you know that God loves you and has a wonderful plan for your life?”

“If you were to die tonight, and God were to asked you, why should I let you into my heaven, what would be your answer?”

According to Mark, Jesus did not approach his world with a question at all, but with a proclamation[:]  Mark 1:14 Now after John was arrested, Jesus came into Galilee, proclaiming the gospel of God, 15 and saying, “The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God is at hand [my emphasis];  repent and believe in the gospel.”

Christ spent a lot of time talking about ‘the kingdom of God’.  He didn’t invite people to make a decision for him and He didn’t do altar calls.  He showed that He was the son of God, He called sinners to turn from their lives of sin, and He died and rose that we might partake in the Kingdom of God.

Spencer is an amillenialist and I’m not.  We have differing views of what heaven is or will be, but we agree that the result of a ’salvation experience’ is a turning away from sin toward a life that is a new creation.  He says,

Inviting people to reserve a place in heaven is shortchanging the Gospel, and creates the problem of justifying the demands of the Kingdom of God in the interim. In the Great Commission, Jesus calls us to evangelism that invites persons to become disciples, obeying all that he commanded. This is not a second level of “fine print.” It is the Kingdom of Heaven and Jesus the Messiah as they are to be presented to the world.

Where fundamentalists and evangelicals typically get into trouble is the “what happens next” when a wayward sinner repeats the sinners prayer.  It’s more than getting them plugged into a bible church or having them read the Gospel of John, though those are arguably good things to do.  I would contend that even more important is showing them what a Christ-like, Spirit-led life is really about.  It’s showing them what it no-kidding means to be a part of the Kingdom of God.  That’s a tall order and I’ve seen very few folks who can do it effectively.

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Apr 22 2008

Happy Lenin’s Birthday, Oops, I Mean Earth Day

Category: faith, global whining, miscellaneous — Steve @ 07:54 am

In the spirit of the festive occasion, here’s a Kathy Shaidle post from last year:

Did your children celebrate Lenin’s birthday in school last week?

Don’t answer “no” right away.

The first Earth Day “teach-in” was celebrated on April 22, 1970, to protest the Vietnam War, pollution, and littering – and to commemorate what would have been the 100th birthday of one of history’s most notorious villains.

As the father of communism, the deaths of tens of millions of people can be laid at that Soviet dictator’s doorstep. That now forgotten fact about Earth Day’s origins should place your child’s sudden enthusiasm for recycling, saving the panda bears and energy efficient light bulbs in a new, well, light.

Like the Marxist philosophy that inspired it, today’s environmental movement has become, for its most ardent proponents, an ersatz religion. As Joseph Brean recently observed, “in its myths of the Fall and the Apocalypse, its saints and heretics, its iconography and tithing, its reliance on prophecy, even its schisms – the green movement now exhibits the same psychology of compliance as religion.”

Hmmm.  In Canada, the greenies are mad because (gasp!) corporations got the message.

In honor of Earth Day, I think I’ll fill the tank in my SUV.  IMAO celebrates with interesting earth facts.

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Apr 19 2008

Universalism, Salvation, Hell and God

Category: faith — Steve @ 13:05 pm

In no particular order…  Here is a definition from the Theological Word of the Day from the good folks at Reclaiming the Mind:

UNIVERSALISM:  This is the doctrine that states all people of all time will be saved by being reconciled to God and go to heaven, whether or not faith is professed in Jesus Christ in this life. There are a few variations of this teaching that accept “hell” as a real place, but all Universalists unequivocally agree that no person will ever go there.

My question – if this is a valid description of universalist belief, why bother with faith at all?  Why bother with good works, reading Scripture, or even getting out of bed in the morning?  If all are saved and there is no hell, then God’s word can’t be trusted and He obviously is not who He says He is.  There are a slew of passages from both the Old and New Testaments that speak to God’s righteousness and his judgment.  What do universalists do with these?  Ignore them?  What use is Scripture if you can pick and choose which parts you want to believe and which to ignore? 

Evangelicals, and especially fundamentalists, tend to dwell on the righteous anger of God at the expense of His love and His calls for social justice, while universalists take the opposite extreme, emphasizing social justice while minimizing His righteousness and judgment.  The more I come to know God, the more I see that God is complete in Himself: He contains all these traits, and more.  We trivialize Him and recreate Him in our own image when we emphasize one trait over all the rest.
 

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Apr 18 2008

Global Whining Quote of the Month

Category: global whining — Steve @ 14:10 pm

“I have no doubt, none at all, that we are in the midst of a global warming, or, as I prefer to call it, spring.“   (Vice President Cheney at the annual dinner of the Radio and Television Correspondents’ Association)

I always knew I liked that guy.  (HT: Tim Blair, by way of Dustbury)

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Apr 17 2008

A Prayer Request

Category: faith — Steve @ 21:46 pm

My sister-in-law was taken yesterday to a VA cancer treatment center in Indianapolis for a recently discovered cancerous lump in her lung.  Docs said that it is a particularly virulent form of cancer and that it has already metastasized to her brain.  Join me in prayer for a spontaneous remission of Suzy’s cancer.  Pray for wisdom for the docs as well as peace and comfort for Suzy and my brother Jim.

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