NOTE: THIS POST HAS BEEN REMIXED AND INCLUDED IN GOD’S KITCHEN.
I listened to a White Horse Inn podcast recently, titled Boredom and Entertainment.
Compared with an action-packed movie, most people would probably characterise the ministry of the word and sacrament as “boring.” So in order to reach out, should churches make their services more entertaining? Joining the panel for this discussion is Richard Winter, author of Still Bored in a Culture of Entertainment…
Imagine finding a dinosaur alive in your backyard.
Dave Noble found some in the Blue Mountains near Sydney in 1994. This species didn’t die out 200 million years ago after all. A small colony survived. Now you can buy one for your garden. This dinosaur is the Wollemi Pine, the tree that time forgot.
Apparently, Expelled wasn’t bad enough. Creationists are putting out yet another pseudo-documentary about evolution, The Voyage That Shook the World. But this time it looks like they’re being subtler. Althought the trailer for the film comments Darwin’s ideas still being controversial, there’s not much there that would give one the impression that the film was anti-evolution. However, with very little effort, you can find out that the film was produced by Creation Ministries International. And according to PZ Myers, they’re also using the same old tricks employed in Expelled:
The Modernist Bible is very thin. The Old Testament is a mix of myth and history, and Revelation is just a general picture book of the gospel’s work in the world (or a polemic against first century Rome). It boils down basically to some key statements by Jesus and the letters of Paul. And even here, there are problems. Evangelicals love Paul because he communicates like a Greek, but even evangelicals choke on some things he says.
“What’s so great about Christianity? D’Souza gives this question a book-length answer, exploring Christianity’s effect on government, science, philosophy and morality, while answering the objections of atheists along the way. He also gives a warning: most of the West is living on the inheritance of the Christian culture handed down to it by previous generations, but the secular worldview is slowly eating away at the best things Western culture offers. Continue reading
A brilliant thought (I think) from shotgun over at the AV forum:
I’m currently reading Gary North’s commentary on Genesis, “The Dominion Covenant.” It is probably one of the most enlightening books I’ve ever read, especially in terms of economics.
Anyway, I ran across some ideas that might serve to savage any and all attempts to intertwine the Genesis account with modern theories of evolution. (Gary North doesn’t apply these conclusions in this way. This speculation is all Shotgun.)
Gary North says this:
Under covenantal dominion, cursed nature’s restraints are progressively lifted. (Pg. 84)
He claims earlier that the “Earth was never designed to be autonomous.”
It seems to me that those who would posit long periods of time before man arose (as man) are implying that the Earth (and nature without man) has some sort of autonomous purpose apart from man. Implicit then, in systems like those of Hugh Ross, is the assumption of an autonomous sphere of sovereignty allocated to nature.
This cannot be true since there is no neutrality. In seeking to critique theistic evolutionary models, then, we should be on the lookout for any implications of an autonomous wilderness.
“I am very clever king… tok tok tok tok… I am super genius… I am robot king of the monkey thing… compute… compute.”
–Julian, King of the Lemurs, Madagascar (2005)
Concerning the ridiculous hype over a long dead lemur trotted out in desperation after a quarter of a century to prop up a failed theory, Don Batten writes:
The orchestrated multimedia blitz over this fossil is almost unbelievable. The paleontologists even got Michael Bloomberg, Mayor of New York, to officiate at the public “launch” of Ida (the cute nickname for the fossil), when it was unveiled—like a new sculpture by a famous artist—to the assembled journalists.
According to brilliant fool David Attenborough, this little creature “is going to show us our connection with the rest of all mammals.” That’s a lot to expect from a dead lemur. Guess they’ll have to call in DreamWorks for some CGI for Ida to accomplish this.
or How Modern Conservative Theologians Unwittingly Use Literary Genres to Mask Their Unbelief
One of the big problems with modern theology is its habit of categorising parts of the Bible into literary genres. For sure, the Bible contains historical prose, visions, poetry and songs. But many passages won’t actually fit into these neat little pigeon holes without hamstringing their intended purpose. And as it turns out, these “genre-lisations” are excuses to compromise with humanistic pop-philosophy and pop-history.
The three main gripes I have are misuses of the genres poetry, polemic and apocalyptic.
I think this was a line from the movie Bug’s Life, when a moth responds to calls from other bugs to stay away from the flame (or lightbulb).
A friend recently told me that moths use the moon to navigate. They continue in a straight line by keeping it on one side, which is why smaller lights get them flying in circles.
I thought this was a great analogy for the way idolatry gets us spinning our wheels.
Mike Bull is a graphic designer who lives and works in the Blue Mountains west of Sydney, Australia. His passion is understanding and teaching the Bible, and he writes occasionally for Theopolis Institute in Birmingham AL, USA.
