So I am reading The Blind Watchmaker by the rather famous atheist Richard Dawkins. I am not a scientist, so excuse me while I butcher some things. (more…)
So I drove around in Ireland for a few days, and then met my brother in Italy. Click below to see the pics (you might want to give it a sec to load, as there are nearly 200).
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So. I am reading Miracles by C.S. Lewis:
Unfortunately we know the experience against [miracles] to be uniform only if we know that all the reports of them are false. And we can know all the reports to be false only if we know already that miracles have never occurred. In fact, we are arguing in a circle. (p. 162)
Miracles never happen because all reports of miracles (ex: resurrection) are false. All reports of miracles are false because miracles never happen. Hmmm. I’ll bet this kind of thinking is subconsciously going on in alot of heads.
He goes on (p. 157-158) to describe how some think of miracles as arbitrary injections into stories, “to get the characters out of a difficulty”. “Some people probably think of the Resurrection as a desperate last moment expedient to save the Hero from a situation which had got out of the Author’s control.” No, says Lewis. Miracles are the core of the story. They are not “exceptions” or “irrelevancies”, but they are “what the story is about”.
If you have hitherto disbelieved in miracles, it is worth pausing a moment to consider whether this is not chiefly because you thought you had discovered what the story was really about?–that atoms, and time and space and economics and politics were the main plot? (p.157)
I’ve picked up on a couple of interesting aspects of human gossip. Maybe this is just general knowledge, and I’m a bit slow.
Phrase:
“I love him to death, but…”
Counterintuitive, true meaning:
“What follows is a list–not comprehensive–of reasons why I dislike him:”
Phrase:
“He’s a great guy, but…”
Counterintuitive, true meaning:
“He’s a bad guy because…”
Everyday-use examples:
“I love him to death, but his breath smells terrible, I can’t stand to be around him, and he stole my wife and all my money.”
“He’s a great guy, but he has a habit of leaving the seat up, talking nonstop, and murdering women and children. Eventually I just couldn’t put up with it anymore.”
Next time you are listening to or participating in the practice of gossiping, you’ll see that this is definitely the case. Perhaps prefacing gossip with a complement is intended to morally cancel out the enjoyment of badmouthing other people. Interesting.
A couple few weeks ago, I came across this tidbit in a book* I was reading, taken from a 1912 address by J. Gresham Machen at some Princeton thingy:
False ideas are the greatest obstacles to the reception of the gospel. We may preach with all the fervour of a reformer and yet succeed only in winning a straggler here and there, if we permit the whole collective thought of the nation or of the world to be controlled by ideas which, by the restless force of logic, prevent Christianity from being regarded as anything more than a harmless delusion.
There are all sorts of nonsense ideas in our culture, the acceptance of which pretty much prohibit even seriously considering the gospel on its merits. It’s not like all people hostile to the gospel are actually taking a group of facts, weighing everything, and then deciding against Christianity. People have false ideas about Christianity or the world that prevent them from getting anywhere close to a fair evaluation from the start. If these ideas are held, Christianity must (”by the restless force of logic”) be discarded.
*the book is Love Your God With All Your Mind, by J.P. Moreland
If I haven’t mentioned frozen grapes on here yet, it’s high time. Here is my recipe:
Buy bag of green grapes.
Buy bag of red grapes.
Rinse.
Place in freezer.
Let sit in freezer.
Remove from stem, and eat.
You won’t be disappointed. For reals.
So I called in awhile back to cancel my TV cable service. It turned out that I was getting a bundle discount–meaning that since I was getting the cable TV service on top of cable internet service, my price was lower. If I cancelled my TV service, my internet price would go up. In fact, I would only save about a buck by cancelling TV. In essence, cable TV for only a buck? Not bad. So I decided to hang on to it and think about it.
I finally called in to cancel my TV anyway. At this point, they offered me a discount on the cable TV. If I KEPT the cable TV, this would decrease my current price by about 5 bucks. If I cancelled the cable TV, I would only get the 1 dollar decrease mentioned above. They would not apply the discount to internet-only. Which do I want: cancel the cable TV, and save a buck, or keep the cable TV, and save 5? Essentially, I have to pay four dollars more a month to NOT have cable TV. Less service costs MORE money. Neat, huh?
I decided to go through with it anyway. I wasn’t really cancelling to save money, but rather for other benefits. Hopefully, less really IS more. Maybe that pricing isn’t so wrong.
Seriously. You’re like a bunch of little children. A bunch of dangerous little children, stuck in adult bodies. Watching your behavior is like watching the villian in a cheesy movie. A villian so ridiculous that nobody would buy actually exists in real life. But, strangely enough, you do exist in real life.
Twice now, I have been driving along on the 520 bridge, and there has been a bald eagle just sitting on one of the street lights. A crow, I could understand. Or a seagull. But a bald eagle? That just doesn’t belong. I was kind of wondering why there was an unusual traffic slowdown here. Either it was a complete coincidence, or I’m not the only one who noticed this big guy just sitting there, out of place, on the street light.
