Christian television is pretty lame. Especially Christian prank shows. Especially Christian prank shows that prank people on the basis of their beliefs about the rapture. And yet. This actually made me laugh.
Author: Nathan Campbell
Nathan runs St Eutychus. He loves Jesus. His wife. His daughter. His son. His other daughter. His dog. Coffee. And the Internet. He is the pastor of City South Presbyterian Church, a church in Brisbane, a graduate of Queensland Theological College (M. Div) and the Queensland University of Technology (B. Journ). He spent a significant portion of his pre-ministry-as-a-full-time-job life working in Public Relations, and now loves promoting Jesus in Brisbane and online. He can't believe how great it is that people pay him to talk and think about Jesus. If you'd like to support his writing financially you can do that by giving to his church.
How to dress good and preach at people
I’m all for looking good while in the pulpit. Dressing badly can be an unhelpful distraction. But I’m colour blind and have no fashion sense. I walk into some shops and can’t tell where the women’s clothes end and the men’s clothes begin. Walking around Brisbane’s inner city I can see that this actually isn’t such a big problem anymore, and I could, if necessary, pull off (though probably not remove) a pair of women’s jeans if I was that way inclined…
Anyway, help is at hand. Beauty Tips for Ministers seems mostly aimed at women (as in women ministers) from a “unitarian” (read liberal stand for nothing denomination in the states) background – but fear not, there’s advice for men too… and for Bible college students, and for what to wear to assembly, and for what to wear to a job interview, the list is seemingly endless… there’s even advice on how to pull off moving to a new climate:
“Moving to a new climate almost always creates problems with the hair and complexion. You may find it useful to stick with the most gentle products for awhile (Cetaphil cleanser, fragrance-free moisturizers and eye cream) to let your skin calm down. Stay hydrated. Do not panic and start slapping all kinds of chemical treatments on your face, which will only exacerbate problems: stick to a simple routine of cleansing, moisturizing and gently exfoliating. Use a good eye cream and sunscreen year-round. See the BTFM archives for TONS of product reviews of skin care products.”
I’ll no doubt be much more compelling next time I preach because I’ll have done away with the frumpy me, and be looking good…
The author of Tarzan on writing fiction
Are you reading Letters of Note yet? If not you’ll have missed this interchange between a youngster (a boy named Forrest Ackerman who later went on to coin the term “sci fi”) and Edgar Rice Burroughs, author of Tarzan.
Ackerman, at 14, wrote Burroughs after his English teacher spend a lesson decrying the author’s popular schlock fiction. He describes the tirade as follows:
Well with that she burst into a perfect tirade! “If I were to buy the highest priced box of chocolates obtainable,” she said, “and were to offer it to you along with a box of old cheap stuff, which would you take? Why the good candy of course! Yet you’ll go to extremes to pick up this horrid literature out of the garbage cans such as Burroughs writes.” — and she went on for hours and hours and hours. I got in a good word for you every chance I could.
And then signs off with class belying his age:
“I don’t expect you’ll bother to answer this–maybe you haven’t even read it–but anyway will you please autograph the enclosed card and return it to me. Thank you, so much!
And now I’d better sign off. I certainly envy the fellow–if there is such a fellow–that is friendly enough with you to call you Eddie!”
Burroughs did reply. With a lesson on good fiction and bad criticism.
“Tell your teacher that, though she may be right about my stories, there are some fifty million people in the world who will not agree with her, which is fortunate for me, since even writers of garbage-can literature must eat.
My stories will do you no harm. If they have helped to inculcate in you a love of books, they have done you much good. No fiction is worth reading except for entertainment. If it entertains and is clean, it is good literature, or its kind. If it forms the habit of reading, in people who might not read otherwise, it is the best literature.
Last year I followed the English course prescribed for my two sons, who are in college. The required reading seemed to have been selected for the sole purpose of turning the hearts of young people against books. That, however, seems to be a universal pedagogical complex: to make the acquiring of knowledge a punishment, rather than a pleasure.”
Brilliant.
Pixar by pixel
Here’s a cool infographic. 100 Pixar characters side by side and to scale.
It’s at Flickr and is available in mega size (it’s worth a look). The main characters from each franchise are in yellow.
How to mix stuff through your ice cream
Here you go readers. A free tip. I bought some cookie dough and some ice cream at the grocery store. Intending to combine them for some homemade cookie dough action. But how to do it? How does one take two fairly solid substances and mix them thoroughly to create the desired effect? You use a potato masher, that’s how.
It worked brilliantly. I didn’t have to melt the ice cream. Which is always a no-no – it doesn’t freeze well afterwards.
To tweet, or not to tweet*
It had to happen sooner or later. Such Tweet Sorrow is a dramatic rendition of Romeo and Juliette conducted through the construct of Twitter. The actors don’t follow the dialogue so much as commentate on the action, in true Twitter style. It’ll run for five weeks.
“The scriptwriters have played out a story grid with key events in the play being scheduled over the next month. But the actors playing the characters on Twitter will improvise the dialogue throughout the day, including interacting with their Twitter followers.
Every morning the actors receive a three-page mission document which informs them of the key events that need to take place during the day.
The project was jointly funded by the Royal Shakespeare Company, Channel 4’s 4IP fund and Screen West Midlands.
On the Such Tweet Sorrow website, it’s possible to gain an overview of all of the different Twitter accounts, including the ability to view the entire play in a time-line.
Set as it is in the real world, the play will react to news events taking place during the next month. This obviously means the general election, one of the most tweeted subjects on Twitter, but also the London marathon, where one of the characters will be taking part.”
To follow, or not to follow*…
*I am aware that this is actually from Hamlet. If you feel the need to correct or castigate me for misappropriating a line from one of Shakespeare’s plays to head a post about another please do so constructively – with a better reference.
McFossil
If you watched the DVD extras of Supersize Me you already probably know what happens if you leave McDonalds on the shelf for a year – but if not, this blogger has put the Happy Meal to the test.
Before
After
A fascinating insight into hoarding
I am a semihoarder. I don’t have rooms and rooms of junk, but I don’t like to throw functional things out (nor have I sold much stuff on eBay).
My house isn’t bursting at the seams with unwanted stuff – but we’ve all seen those houses on the news (or perhaps know people who have collected hundreds or thousands of old magazines in case they want to refer to an article later.
Anyway, there’s an online support group for hoarders, and they’ve got a “bulletin board” type function where such hoarders can share about why they hoard. It makes for kind of depressing reading. Here’s a sample.
“I hoard items and also buy defective items in the supermarket or department stores because I tend to imbue personality and feelings onto inanimate objects. When I see a dented can or a perfectly new shirt missing a button I feel extremely sad for the item because I fear that no one will want it and it will not serve the purpose for which it was created due to a small defect… so I buy it. The mentality is similar, I suppose, to people who adopt lots of homeless pets or children (by the way, I also have 6 cats). If I cannot buy the item or if I make a point of consciously passing the item up, I am guilt ridden for days. Sometimes I think I buy these things just to avoid the guilt of feeling I have “abandoned” an item or “rejected” it by failing to provide an opportunity for it to “fulfill the purpose for which it was created.” In the last few years I have developed rules for what I allow in my house and tend to buy things online where only new and perfect things are sent though the mail… thus avoiding the defective items sometimes seen and found in stores. I suspect my manifestation of hoarding is due to being an only child raised by an ambivalent single parent who abandoned me in many ways and on many different occasions. I suspect I’m attempting to “rescue” the child I once was by projecting unresolved feeling and issues onto items that would be deemed by others as “imperfect” and thus “unwanted.””
“This is weird, but for me about half of the hoarding problem stems from problems with how other people will view me. I can’t stand for others in my apartment to see me bringing groceries or supplies in, nor can I stand to be caught taking garbage to the tip. It seems to be predicated on the idea that if people see what I bring in, consume, and discard, they will assume that I’m spendthrift, selfish, wasteful. I know that one bag of trash a week isn’t all that much, but I’m still petrified of being seen with it. As though I hadn’t made full use of the things I purchased. Anyway, I believe that I have to sneak the trash out of the building after all my neighbors are asleep… if I don’t manage to stay up until three AM, the trash bag just sits there. At times, this has resulted in as many as ten trash bags awaiting disposal at an “inconspicuous” time. Nor can I stand to have identifying information (addresses from junk mail, e.g.) in my garbage. What if the bag were to break? I’d be associated with it. Which results in large amounts of paper standing around until I can go through and remove anything that might implicate me. It’s not so bad if I can get the trash out in reasonably short order, but once it builds up, it becomes a horrible problem. I can’t just take six bags to the tip. Have to sneak them out one at a time, two or three days apart, so no one will know that it’s me who suddenly deposited all this junk. Sometimes I try to disguise the problem by using different colored trash bags, on the theory that they won’t be associated with the same household. I know this is nutty behavior, but I really can’t seem to get a grip on it.”
Umm. Wow.
Some world records are longstanding for a reason
Did you ever play the game Asteroids? Did you ever score more than 41 million points? If you answered yes to both of those questions you may have just lost your claim on a world record.
On Saturday, John McAllister sat down at a friend’s house near Portland, Oregon to play a game of Asteroids. By Monday, he was still playing.
At 10:18 p.m. Pacific, he scored 41,338,740 points, a new all-time high score. In doing so, he beat a record that has stood for over 27 years.
The official Asteroids high score of 41,336,440 is the longest-standing record in gaming history, having been set on November 14, 1982 by 15-year-old Scott Safran. He stayed awake for three days to accomplish this feat.
Oh well. Nobody is going to beat my score at “Roller Skater Evader” – a vaguely similar game I once coded in QBasic. For fun. Mostly because I changed the scoring system to give me hundreds of thousands more points than the magazine I copied it from said to. Basically you had to steer a little dot through a screen of other little dots. And it made annoying beeping sounds because I realised that you could program musical scores by typing “play AA#BB#” etc… or something like that. I don’t remember how you made it play flats. Does anybody? I made the theme song “Mary Had A Little Lamb”…
Make zombies, not war
Want more zombie movies? Just inspire mass panic by creating a war and Hollywood will acquiesce to your desires.
This graph charts the link.
This article explains the graph.
Cool stuff, everyday
Just to prove my point about art last week – this guy produced something cool almost every day of 2009. The M&Ms and shattered photography below are examples. Here are some more that I like.
1/12/09: Scrapped / Crushed Matchbox Car – matchbox car + sledge hammer + clay
1/03/09: Rules – blank paper + thread + tape + exacto
7/16/09: fencing
4/4/09: fatal paper airplane crash
Shattering photography
These “shattered” everyday objects are tops.
1/24/09: Shattered coffee cup
1/25/09: Shattered banana peel
1/26/09: Shattered rubber ducky
1/27/09: Shattered cap
1/28/09: Shattered pacifier
1/29/09: Shattered queen of diamonds
Via here.
Pop culture M&Malism
These are cool. I’ll be posting more from where they come from shortly.
2/28/09: the simpsons
3/2/09: the blue man group carving a pumpkin
3/3/09: kermit the frog about to walk across hot coals
3/4/09: papa smurf gets angry, turns into the hulk
Via here.
Eight things I’ve learned from arguing with atheists online and why I (mostly) can’t be bothered anymore
I’ve spent a fair portion of my time in the last two years entering arguments with atheists online. These are different to arguments with atheists in real life. Steve Kryger at Communicate Jesus has posted a couple of thoughts on this matter lately – and even been roundly panned by an atheist blog for his trouble. Steve’s posts:
- Why I’ve decided online religious debate is a bad idea
- Why debating atheists online is a fruitless pursuit
- Where are the Christians?
My motivation for doing so has been twofold – on the one hand, I don’t like seeing people bagging out Jesus without anybody mounting a defense, and on the other, I realise that people google for all sorts of things and read blogs and their sycophantic comments to help make up their minds. I want to present Jesus as an alternative worldview to militant atheism.
But I’m on the verge of giving up. Here are eight lessons I’ve learned (at times the hard way) from arguing with atheists that have left me close to pulling the pin on this particular avenue of evangelism.
- If you argue with atheists online, especially on their turf, you will almost always be outnumbered. There’s something about the nature of community that stops Christians using the Internet the same way atheists do. I suspect it’s because atheists are a minority with no real world equivalent to church. They meet virtually. They encourage one another through forums and blogs. The Internet, in my opinion, is their nexus of community.
- Being outnumbered makes actually engaging with arguments hard. If one hundred commenters on a forum each ask the token Christian a question and that Christian only picks three to answer (which is a 3:1 comment ratio ie those hundred post one comment each, the Christian posts three) then the forum often jumps on the one person, suggesting that they are being duplicitous or purposefully evasive. It’s a trial by numbers and “victories” are awarded to the masses.
- If you’re going to talk about science, logic or morality you need to be careful to frame your terminology accurately. If you want to engage and give a good account for yourself you need to be familiar with strawmanning, Godwin’s Law, ad hominem, Pascal’s Wager, and the “no true Scotsman fallacy” – Christians are often guilty of transgressions of the first two, the chances of an atheist resorting to an ad hominem attack in response to a Christian rapidly approaches one the longer the conversation continues. Atheists think they’ve debunked Pascal’s Wager, while the “no true Scotsman fallacy” is a favourite “trump card” they play in order to lump all theological beliefs together so that they can strawman us.
- Atheists have no interest in nuance. They don’t pay any regard to context. They interpret everything literally – be it text from the Bible, sarcasm in discussion (or irony), or anybody’s claim to be a “Christian.” They love quote mining – especially from the Bible. I’ve seen atheists take bits from Jesus’ parables to suggest that God wants his followers to put people to the sword. They aren’t interested in theology, they aren’t interested in why Christians can justify believing things they find abhorrent, they won’t ever really put themselves in “Christian” shoes when understanding things Christians say – they prefer to maintain distance because it’s easier to ridicule the “other”.
- “Christians” are your own worst enemies in these contexts. A week’s worth of reasoned and fruitful discussion can be very easily undone by one comment made without being mindful of presenting the “truth with love.” Stupid “Christian” statements, along the lines of the Answers in Genesis billboard advertisements form last year spend any credit lovingly Christ centred arguments develop.
- Most “atheists” are antitheists, most hold atheism at the core of their identity – but this is not true for all of them. You can’t generalise when describing atheists – some are like Dawkins who are atheists through a philosophy of scientific naturalism and evolutionary biology through “natural selection” – this view leaves no case for a creator, others are ex-Christians who had rejected all other gods already, and have since rejected God, some, like Christopher Hitchens, seem to be atheists philosophically first, and scientifically second. Each atheist is an individual. This is part of their problem when dealing with the “no true Scotsman” fallacy. They think self definition is all that matters for assessing claims – there are, in fact, external issues to take into account when deciding if a Christian is a Christian.
- You’ll almost never change anybody’s mind online. Particularly if you’re outnumbered. They who shout loudest win. Ten idiots in a room yelling loudly will always feel like they’ve beaten one genius speaking quietly.
- Your best bet in these situations is just to bring everything back to a question of the historicity of Jesus and his resurrection, this, after all, is the lynchpin of our belief. If they can disprove the resurrection then our faith is in vain. And it’s this argument that needs to be convincing. Questions of science and methodology are secondary.
Some bonus reflections – if you’re familiar with online bookmarking services like Digg and Reddit you’ll know that they are full of atheists who like to post, share, and comment on articles relating to atheism. There is almost no Christian presence (that I’ve found here). Christians need to come to terms with discourse on the Internet – because it’s, like it or not, a form of community. And a nexus for people looking to discuss new ideas. Sending people in to these forums “solo” doesn’t work. Constructive conversations in this format need more than a lone voice. I don’t know how you arrange a “team” approach – but that might be worthwhile.
If you’re an atheist who arrives here and thinks “these claims are all generalisations with no substantiation” – I can, if requested, point you to different threads (mostly on my blog, on the Friendly Atheist and on Pharyngula) where situations have arisen. Here’s one example, with a follow up, here’s a post I wrote that created quite a lot of atheistic consternation, and the response on Pharyngula. Or check out guest poster Dave’s three fantastic posts on why he’s not an atheist…
- Why I’m not an Atheist #1 – Because my Parents weren’t
- Why I’m not an atheist #2 – Scientific Naturalism is powerful, but not enough.
- Why I’m not an Atheist #3 – Jesus
I’m not giving up arguing online – though I won’t spend as much time and I’ll try to establish my commitment to arguments early in the discussion, but I’d much rather chat over a beer in a pub where there’s not the ability to hide behind a computer screen and thousands of kilometres. Non verbal communication is important. And it’s much harder to be nasty to a person if they’re right in front of you (incidentally this is why you should always do radio interviews in studio rather than over the phone).
UPDATE: Hermant from the Friendly Atheist has kindly responded to my list. I’ve posted a response to his response in the comments on his blog.
I’d also like to make a small amendment to point 4 – atheists (as a general rule – not all atheists) also pay no regards to “medium” a blog entry is to be deconstructed, analysed and critiqued the same way a scientific hypothesis or peer reviewed journal is. They disagree with a sentence without paying any regard to the paragraph it builds. They interpret things they disagree with at extremes – for example – I put quotation marks around the word “Christian” above as a shorthand way of describing those who take the Christian label (making no actual judgment on whether they are Christian or not – I think you can be a Christian and be very wrong about things). And it is interpreted in the following manner:
“Oh, and putting Christian in smarmy little “scare quotes” whenever you’re using it to describe a person whose actions you disapprove of? That’s what we call a “cop out.” The claim that YOUR interpretation of the Bible is flawlessly correct and that ANY judgment you make about whether a person is or is not a Christian places YOU in a position of purported omniscience. Talk about hubris!”
That might be one way to interpret such punctuation – the traditional usage is to indicate direct speech.
A further contribution to the UFC debate
I’m on of those bandwagon jumping fanboys who thinks that my Bible College principal knows everything. I’ve also been wondering what the early church’s position on ancient wrestling was – a sport that was essentially the same as UFC – it barred eye gouges and groin shots. Paul seems to allude to fighting in his analogy in 1 Corinthians 9:26… but while googling for an answer to an unrelated question I found this statement from B.W. Winter…
The early Christians faced this question just as we do. Entertainment in their day involved the Roman spectacles, chariot races, gladiatorial fights and those sorts of things. Some of these activities encouraged a perverse interest in violence and sex, so in that sense, they were unhelpful to a Christian’s growth. Should a Christian be aware of what is going on in the wider culture in terms of entertainment? I don’t think we can be ignorant of it. However, what most people are unaware of is that many of these forms of entertainment have a subliminal effect on our thinking. This means that we need to be very selective about what we choose to entertain us. It’s easy to stumble if you simply want to be amused and suspend your critical faculties. I may sound like a bit of a killjoy, but I think it’s important to be evaluating films as we watch them. Too many Christians fail to do this, and stumble. If you suspend your critical faculties, it’s possible to assimilate all sorts of ungodly ideas and behaviour.
Seems relevant – though I think the “perverse interest” is the key. I think it’s possible to watch UFC without being perversely interested in violence. But I think there’s a real danger that this isn’t the case.