Apparently my old stomping grounds of Ft Lauderdale have passed an ordinance making it illegal to feed the homeless. WTF, Florida? Anyone who is active in church should be fighting this with civil disobedience. They can’t arrest all of you!

Yesterday I read through the intro of Don’t Know Much About Mythology. It posited that one possible reason for myths was for the rich to control the poor. I thought, “Yeah. Makes sense back then with their god-kings, but we’re smarter now.” Then I thought about American politics and realized nothing has changed over the past 10000 years.

By the way, so much of the Christian discourse in America is so far away from the actual content of the Bible that regardless of whether you believe in Yahweh/God and Jesus’ divinity, you should regard most of what you think you know about Christianity as mythology.

Welcome to my new series where I wonder if some concepts and technologies are now obsolete thanks to our new paradigms and technologies.  Today’s topic - evangelism.

Short term readers of my blog will think I only write about Linux and technology.  Long term readers will know that I’m a Christian.  I was brought up  (what the media refers to as) an evangelical.  Specifically, I was brought up as a Baptist.  My entire church life though high school involved being told how we had to spread the Word of God.  Indeed, if you believe in the divinity of Jesus and the infallibility of The Bible, it even says in the Gospels that Jesus commanded his followers to spread the “Good News”.  And so they became the first missionaries.

If you take the Biblical story of Adam and Eve literally (as opposed to figuratively or allegorically) there is one possible explanation for the world as science sees it that I’ve never, ever heard anyone propose. This shocks me as it seems to be a convenient answer that fits with the science. The Bible tells us that when Adam and Eve ate the fruit of the Tree (not the apple…) they had to die. This means that prior to that, they were immortals.  At least that’s the only possible reading of the story of Adam and Eve that doesn’t make God a liar.

This joke’s been around the nets for a while, but here’s a new and novel presentation.

(I’m writing this on the 21 around midnight, but I have a lot of posts coming up so I time-shifted this to the 24th)

If you’ve read my blog long enough, you know that I believe in events transpiring when they should. In other words, God places things in our lives at the right time. If you call it luck, what is luck, but another name for God? You’re still ascribing it to an unexplainable force.

In " Things that Shouldn’t Make Me Happy", Scott Adams hits on one of the most poignant things I’ve read in a while. For a humorist, he has been making some amazing points recently.

If you think about it, wars are generally fought because of a false sense of certainty. Usually some leader thinks he is a God, or talks to God, or descended from the Gods, or thinks God gave his people some particular piece of real estate. The leader’s opinion is the most certain in the land. People flock to certainty and adopt the certainty as their own. The next thing you know, stuff is blowing up.

I’m reading through Leviticus right now and boy is it tough going. The entire Biblical narrative has come to a complete halt as rule after seemingly arbitrary rule is spelled out. And the killer is the repitition. Instead of lumping twenty offenses together and saying, for all of these the punishment is X, it lists the punishment each time for each specific offense!

I used to think that these rules were pretty arbitrary and marveled at just how detailed the regulations concerning their lives was. One thing I’ve always wondered about is what the point of it all was. Why did God have to have all these rituals - did He really need the Isrealites to kills goats, pigeons, and sheep? Couldn’t he just have told them to pray and He would answer their prayers?