Ascent or Descent pt. 5

Start with part 1.

One cannot choose who to trust simply by looking at issues. You have to look at motives and intentions.

For instance, I have always disliked the environmentalist movement because of its primary motive force. This movement has a new age, Aquarian, enlightened, “just a movin’ on up” feel to it. It uses questionable liberal global warming “science” to scare people into caring for the earth. It’s primary motive force is liberalism.

However, the National Association of Evangelicals has relatively recently begun promoting stewardship of the earth. I think they’re a bit misguided in supporting the liberal crack science behind global warming, but the motive force is not new age philosophy. It is stewardship of God’s creation.

Likewise, divisiveness is an indicator of poor motives. When President Clinton sent troops into Bosnia, Republicans were supportive. America stood together to support our president and military – whether we agreed with the action or not. During the Iraq occupation, however, many liberals have been extremely divisive and have publicly ridiculed President Bush and divided the country for political gain. On the other hand, some Democrats (e.g. Senator Lieberman) have been supportive of our president in a time of war. It’s OK to respectfully disagree, but not to ridicule the holder of our highest and most honored office in a time of crisis. It’s just bad form.

Ascent or Descent pt. 4

Start with part 1.

Ok. The ending of my last post was a bit abrupt. But it was intended to be.

The fundamental difference between liberalism and conservatism is the direction in which each viewpoint thinks humanity is moving. Liberalism believes mankind is “just a movin’ on up.” Conservatism believes mankind is falling.

Liberalism is different from “being liberal.” You can “be liberal” with your money and give a lot of it away to the poor – which is a good thing. Likewise, you can be conservative in your spending and still not participate in conservatism.

Now you’re all thinking I’ve just jumped from the world of Christianity to the world of politics. But only because Christianity impacts every part of our lives. And only because politics impacts a fair portion of our lives also. They overlap. They do not, however, overlap 100%.

For instance, while I am a Republican and am opposed to most forms of welfare, entitlements, etc., I do not believe that a choice in favor of welfare is dependent upon whether or not you believe man is ascending or descending. Tradition and the Bible say we should take care of the poor. I prefer to leave that responsibility in the hands of churches and other charitable organizations rather than instituting enforced redistribution of wealth. But that does not make such a political position un-Christian. In fact, there are examples of both in the history of Christianity and Israel before Christ.

No single political party has a monopoly on either. For instance, care for the environment is a conservative issue (God established us as stewards of the earth), but the Democrats are the ones who most strongly push it (though using the questionable science behind “global warming” to promote it is liberal).

The fact is that liberalism vs. conservatism – ascent vs. descent – is a larger issue than politics and impacts how you think about practically everything in life.

Ascent or Descent pt. 3

Start with part 1.

The choice of whether or not you believe man is ascending or descending is huge. This choice affects your perception of the entire direction of reality. Are we climbing a mountain? Or are we descending into a pit?

I can tell which you believe by the people you trust.

Do you trust modern morality to tell you how to live? Or do you trust traditional values, family structures, and the Bible? Do you think homosexuality and baby killing is OK? Or do you think murder is evil and God designed marriage to be between a man and a woman?

Do you trust modern scientists using theoretical models and speculation to tell you what happened in the past and what will happen in the future? Do you believe we evolved from single celled organisms and that the earth is warming up because of us? Or do you believe, as did our ancestors, that we were created by God and we don’t know what the future holds?

Do you trust modern revisionist historical scholars who build their entire work on probabilities, speculation, and assumptions to tell us what “likely” happened in the past? Or do you trust the people who were actually there to write about what happened?

If you believe we are ascending, you will advocate continued motion in the direction in which we are already heading. If you believe we are descending, you will advocate reversal of direction.

Liberalism denies the most fundamental teaching of the Bible – that man is falling and needs a savior.

That is why I am conservative.

Ascent or Descent pt. 2

Start with part 1.

So when it comes right down to it, the devil has succeeded in ensnaring man with his original temptation – pride. “For God knows that when you eat of it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil.” – Gen 3:5

Pride separates us from the past. C. S. Lewis aptly portrayed this in The Screwtape Letters. The senior devil, uncle Screwtape, explains to his nephew Wormwood that the strategists down below have engineered human thought in such a way as to cut each generation off from previous generations. That way they are kept ignorant of things the previous generations have learned. By seeing old books and thoughts as being inferior and obsolete, we are cutting ourselves off from the wisdom of our ancestors.

In reality man is descending. In our steady descent we trade the wisdom of the ancients for rash and foolish nonsense. In our pride we declare that we are better. Looky what we can do! As a child brandishes his plastic sword at his dad and decries that he is invincible, so we do to our elders. We build our Lego babel towers and show our parents our great advancements in technology. Yah God, we can make it there ourselves. We don’t need your help.

Little do we realize that in the world to come, Legos and plastic swords don’t count for much.

Firefox 2.0

I forgot to mention. In the process of upgrading to Edgy Eft, I also magically acquired Firefox 2.0. IMHO, the improvements are mostly minor.

It might be slightly snappier. Some of the dialogs and menus are slightly more polished. Having the close tab button on each tab is nice. Having Firefox remember your last session (including tabs) is nice. The built-in spell checker (which is indeed very nice) is probably the biggest improvement I can see, but could be added with an extension in past versions.

It’s worth the upgrade, but I’m not sure I would have given it a 2.0 version number.

Ubuntu 6.10 (Edgy Eft)

I’m impatient. I couldn’t wait for the official release so I ran the network upgrade overnight (about 3 mouse clicks). I came in this morning, rebooted my machine, and voila, I’m running Edgy Eft. Try that with Windows or Mac!

I also installed Beryl and WOW! It is sweet. Move over OSX and Vista. Beryl on Ubuntu will eat your lunch.

Ascent or Descent

In a previous post, I talked about how new books weren’t necessarily any better than old books. I talked about the notion that man has evolved rather than devolved. I’ve thought some more about that and will now expound.

I think the whole notion of the ascent of man has its roots in what is sometimes called “the enlightenment.” It all blends together with different labels and events such as the Renaissance, the French Revolution, or the Protestant Reformation. I don’t think you can point to a single year or event during which the change took place (the pivot point might be Martin Luther), but at some point people started to rebel from the authority of the last vestiges of Rome and the Papacy and everything they stood for.

When a youngster rebels against his parent, he basically decides that he himself is smarter than his parents and that he knows best. He sees his parents as being old and dumb and ignorant about how life is in the modern world. He sees the new as being better and the old as obsolete. The enlightenment, revolution, reformation, or whatever else you may want to call it, was essentially the beginning of an adolescent-like stage man is still going through. As everyone knows, you should accomplish all you can during adolescence because that’s when you still know everything. Once you become an adult you go back to being dumb.

It was this atmosphere of rebellion against the past and a belief that man was on an upward trek that prevailed when Charles Darwin came on the scene. You see, Darwin’s “scientific” theories were not the root of the contemporary belief in the ascent of man, but simply a side effect of the enlightenment mentality. It was a pathetic attempt to scientifically justify the reigning attitude of the day. It was wishful thinking.

While Darwin’s theory seems to contradict the first couple chapters of Genesis (assuming those chapters should be taken literally) his theories are actually peripheral to the larger question of ascent vs. descent. The Bible teaches that man fell from a state of perfection to a world of pain and misery caused by sin. Man is descending. Jesus Christ came to save man from certain destruction. Our only salvation is through Jesus Christ.

Secular Humanists would have us believe that we don’t need Christ. Man is “just a movin’ on up.” We started as microbes and we’ve made it all the way to this complex civilization all on our own. Our technology is beyond anything the world has ever seen. It’s the same old rebellion of the reformation saying that we don’t need our parents, our elders, our ancestors, or God. They were just stepping stones to a better man. Aw heck, they don’t even really exist. We did it on our own.

You said in your heart, “I will ascend to heaven; I will raise my throne above the stars of God; I will sit enthroned on the mount of assembly, on the utmost heights of the sacred mountain. I will ascend above the tops of the clouds; I will make myself like the Most High.” But you are brought down to the grave, to the depths of the pit. – Isa. 14:13-15

New Church Management System

Here’s one I’ve not heard of before. It might be worth checking out.

IconCMO

Cooking Blog

OK, after rethinking this, I decided it would be best not to mix cooking and computing all in the same blog. I would love to find a blog that talks about both topics, but most other geeks and/or cooks would probably not. So I started another blog. All future posts on food will be at:

Through the Cooking Glass: Experiencing Nourishing Traditions Through the Eyes of Brian Glass

I will continue talking about both computing and church/Christianity related issues on this blog.

Bread

NOTE: If you hadn’t noticed, I have lost some of my “razor sharp” focus on this blog. I think my blog will continue to move toward being about whatever I’m spending my thought and time on more than about any one particular topic. Yes, I’m still a geek, but I have a life too.

That said, I’ve been playing with my new (new to me) grain mill and making all kinds of cool things. My family really likes the biscuits (for muffins and pancakes and stuff I just wet-mill the whole grains with the liquids in the blender).

I finally have gotten somewhere with my sourdough sandwich bread. I’ve been making a loaf or two every Saturday with little tweaks here and there to develop my bread making skill.

This Saturday I made the first 100% whole wheat loaf I was truly happy with. The previous were all edible, but even my son and wife liked this one (my daughter wouldn’t touch it after my son mentioned that it was sourdough). I’ve got a few more tweaks to try on this. Once I perfect it I’ll post my recipe.

I bought a couple 50lb bags of wheat (hard red spring wheat and soft white winter wheat). With the price of bulk wheat I figured out that my loaf costs me about $0.40 and its 100% organic to boot. It’s probably one the most nutritious breads you’ll find anywhere. A comparable loaf in the store would run around $5. Of course that doesn’t count my time…

Whole Food

I think it has its roots in Greek materialism. It’s the desire to break everything in tiny pieces and recompose the tiny pieces into something else. The modern American, whether or not he knows it, is big into reductionism.

When I was a sound man, I learned how to cut whole swaths of sound out of an instrument. I even learned to compress the dynamics out of sound. Then I learned how to mix it all back together into a highly controlled song.

I like to use the Gimp to edit graphics. The compositions I (and most people) come up with involve cutting pieces out of other photos and compositing them all together into a completely new composition. The pieces lose their original context and become part of the new work.

Most of the food people eat is refined. That is, some factory somewhere takes some type of food and extracts the little bit they want out of it, puts a bunch of it all together in a bag, and sells it to you. You get white flour with all the bran and germ taken out. You get white sugar with all the molasses, vitamins, and minerals removed. You get milk without the cream.

For some reason we can’t see the beauty of something unless we tear it to bits and put it all back together again in a simplified way that we can more easily understand and control. We miss the beauty of the whole. We miss the individual twang of a guitar string with harmonics all the way up the scale. We miss the simplicity of a raw photo and the story it tells. We miss the wholesome nutrition and round flavor of a grain of wheat.

While you’ve got to feed babies simple foods, sometimes I think we’ve refined the Bible too much. We can’t continue to live on white bread and sugar.

Web Development Tools

In the last 6 months of intense development (you can actually sample our search screens now at http://www.ams.org/mathscinet) , I’ve found a few very handy tools indispensable.

• VMWare Workstation. Practically indispensable for testing browsers in various environments. We tested various versions of IE and Firefox in various version of Windows all in VMWare.
• HTML Validator. This is a Firefox extension that automatically runs HTML tidy on all the pages you go to. This is very cool. It’s not as strict as the W3C checker, but pretty cool nonetheless.
• Web Developer. Another Firefox extension that provides a toolbar for general HTML/CSS information and tools for submitting pages to the W3C checkers. (our site will soon be 100% valid ala W3C checkers)
• VIM 7.0. The new tabbed editing features of Vim 7.0 are awesome.
• Gimp. Great raster graphics editing tool.
• Xara Xtreme for Linux. Awesome vector illustration tool.
• HTML::Mason. An awesome perl-based web development environment. We’ve been using this for years.

Violin

My son Micah has been taking violin lessons for a couple months now. He wrote his first composition last week and played it at his lesson on Monday. It’s called “The Run.”

Grocery Store Meetings

So I met this guy at the grocery store…

I shop Friday afternoons at Arbor Farms Market after work. I happened to be wearing a Crossroads shirt. The guy at the checkout line (he’s actually manager of that area) noticed it and asked me about Crossroads. So I told him and left my Crossroads business card. It turns out he had just moved into the area and was attending a growing church that was meeting in rented spaces at the University of Michigan. They just bought a frat house and are building an auditorium onto the back of it! They had trouble with the local government, but God has worked it out for them and the government has backed down and is allowing them continue.

This guy is really cool. I’m terrible with names, but he remembered me and my name the next week I went shopping. This week we talked some more and shared prayer needs. I may have to check out his church some Sunday just for fun.

It’s a cool experience to simply meet fellow Christians out of the blue like that. It also shows that people do notice what you are wearing. Even if you are too shy to approach people about Christ, you can wear a shirt.

Bye Bye Bloglines

Bloglines has been great. I still like it. However, Google’s newly redesigned blog reader wins (hat tip to Phil Crissman).

The key feature for me is the fact that posts are not marked as read until you actually scroll down and view them. Then they are dynamically marked as read. That feature is worth its weight in gold.