Monday, April 30, 2012 

Who knew????

From PC World (New Zealand):

Symantec found that the average number of security threats on religious sites was around 115, while adult sites only carried around 25 threats per site -- a particularly notable discrepancy considering that there are vastly more pornographic sites than religious ones. Also, only 2.4% of adult sites were found to be infected with malware, compared to 20% of blogs.

Why religious sites you might ask? “We hypothesize that this is because pornographic website owners already make money from the Internet and, as a result, have a vested interest in keeping their sites malware-free -- it’s not good for repeat business,” said the report.

Who knew????

Friday, April 27, 2012 

Embracing my inner geek

I've been speeding the past month trying to update the old computers at church.  We bought "state of the art" stuff about seven years ago - meaning that they are over glorified paperweights today.  I took the old Dell desktops that were running Window XP (rather poorly) and upgrade them to Linux.  I've used Ubuntu before in the past, but I really don't like the new Unity desktop.  This time around I've been messing with LinuxMint with the KDE desktop.  I find that I really like the feel and look of it and it seems to be very stable with those old Dell's and can do pretty much everything that we need.  The next challenge for me was my old Dell Inspiron 600m lap top.  Last year I cannibalized my computer and Cindy's computer to try and make one lap top that was stable (I had the good hard drive and Cindy had the good motherboard) for Charlotte to use when she visited.  The computer worked (somewhat) for Charlotte, although it was extremely slow and somewhat buggy (that's what I get for running an out of date XP).  When I went to Puerto Rico this year, I decided to see what would happen if I turned it into a Linux box.

I installed Ubuntu on it and took it to Puerto Rico.  I was just looking to get a stable computer that could check e-mail and upload some pictures to the internet.  Ubuntu worked but would get stuck every now and then (also - did I mention I hate the new Unity desktop?).  A few weeks ago I tried to put a KDE desktop on top of the Ubuntu system which work somewhat OK - although it seemed slow at times.  Yesterday I decided to see what else I could do to it.

I blasted the hard drive and installed Kubuntu - the KDE version of Ubuntu.  After fixing some video card bugs, I got it to load, only for it to continually hang up during updates.  Next, I blasted the hard drive and installed Mint 12 KDE.  Same update issues (which is funny, considering that there were no problems with Mint 12 KDE on the desktops.)  Finally, I tried Mint 12 LXDE.  This computer has been working like a charm ever since (this is actually the computer that I'm writing this post on).

All this reminds me of the good old days when I was a computer geek in High School playing with my good old Commodore Vic 20.  It only had 4k worth of memory (expandable to 16k) but who could want more?  It was so state of the art - with it's cassette recorder storage and a 300k modem- even William Shatner loved it.  Oh - those were the days!

Wednesday, April 25, 2012 

The Hunger Games


I just finished reading The Hunger Games Trilogy.  I really didn't know a lot about it before the movie came out but with all the buzz about the movie, I figured I should read the books.  I wasn't expecting a whole lot out of them, but they caught my interest and I found I couldn't put them down.  In reading the reviews, there seems to be a lot of frustration regarding the last book.  It seems that many people did not like the way the series ended.  Without giving anything away, the ending caused me to pause.  I found myself in a state of wonderment for quite some time after finishing it.  It is not that there is some dramatic ending, on the contrary, the book ends somewhat introspectively.  And it is in that ending that I thought the series was most powerful.  The ending was real in its rawest form.  Interestingly, Wendy Horger Alsup at her blog makes a comment that there is something about these books that will "endure the test of time".  I tend to agree.

I'm not looking to give a full review here, but there is something in the meta story that got me thinking.  I'll try not to give too much of the story away, but fair warning - there may be spoilers here.  The backdrop of the world that Katniss, our main character, lives in consists of two societies - or world views.  The first and most prominent in most of Katniss' life is the Capitol.  The Capitol, in many ways, gives us a picture of capitalism gone to an extreme.  The residents of the Capitol live in luxury off the labor of the districts which surround it.  The districts produce and the Capitol consumes and the name of the game is to keep that model in place.  The districts are so under the control of the Capitol that they literally give their children up as human sacrifices for the entertainment of the residents of the Capitol, so as to keep peace.  Talk about the 99% - that is the picture that we have here.  To be a resident of the Capitol is to never know need.  To be a resident of the districts is to be in extreme poverty.  A vivid picture of survival of the fittest.

The other world view is that of District 13.  District 13 is the secret district, the one district that broke free from the Capitol, but at a tremendous cost.  District 13 survives underground - supplying all of their own needs, but continually living in a state of shortage.  Because of this, there are strict controls on consumption and on all areas of life.  The value of the individual is only as great as what they bring to the whole.  The more I read, the more I got the sense that this was a picture of Socialism gone to an extreme.  What is interesting is that the book doesn't pick one side or the other as the better - a more upright side.  In the end, they are both evil.  They both manipulate, murder and become corrupt.  The ending is so powerful simply because of this - there is no golden lining - just raw inhumanity.

Within this story, there is a vacuum.  There is something that is missing.  There is absolutely no spirituality in this world.  No religion, no spiritual beliefs, no magic, no nothing.  The only hope is in man.  There is a quote in one of the books (the second I think) on what their hope is.  One day they will have a republic form of government that the people choose, with representatives and all.  It worked centuries earlier - perhaps it will work again.  By the end of the story, Katniss realizes that the hope in her leaders is a false hope.  That man is corrupt.  That all is lost.  
It would be great to simply look at the society that The Hunger Games describes and simply dismiss it as fiction.  The distressing part is that we can see many of the unsettling characteristics of that society in our society in a somewhat less developed way.  Look at how we deal with the underdeveloped world.  Do we really care who makes our shoes, computers, TV's as long as they're cheap?  Are we not more interested in consumption then we are in justice?  And on the other side - have we not caused division in our society by vilifying those who's economic status is better then our own?  Are we not willing to sacrifice others for advancement of our own agenda?  This is the world that Katniss lived in and in many ways this is the world we live in.  The problem is that many of us are so close to this world that we don't notice it.
See, this is what happens when our hope falls into our own hands.  When we decide we can do it on our own.  The issues of the garden in Genesis are the same issues that we deal with today.  And as I read this book, I saw where this hope lead to - to death and hopelessness (it's scary that one of the main characters' hope at the end of the story is that we get it right in the next war and completely exterminate the human race - now that's hope for you!)  While I expect to see this world view outside of the church, the truly fearful thing is that it also lives within the church and that has been the wakeup call for me.

We are supposed to be different as Christians.  Our hope is supposed to come from somewhere else (from Someone else).  And even though we give lip service and say Jesus is our hope, our actions betray us.  We place our hope in political parties (or candidates).  We place our hope in our investments, in our jobs, in our educations.  We place our hope in ourselves.  We claim that we hope in God - but in reality, we hope in us.  I read The Hunger Games and was troubled by the lack of spirituality.  Then I looked at my own life and noticed a void that should not have been there. 

Jesus came and announced the Kingdom of God was here.  There is something important about that.  Something more then just a place to go when we die.  Something more then just the spiritual gifts.  Something more then just a club we join.  What should our lives look like if we lived like the Kingdom of God was here and we actually were citizens of that Kingdom.  How would we act?  How would we live?  Where would our hope come from?

I want to spend some time over then next year or two and really dig into that question.  One thing is for sure - if we are citizens of the Kingdom of God, then something in our lives needs to look different, to be different.  We should be living like a people of hope.  We just need to figure out what that hope really is.

Tuesday, April 17, 2012 

"I really like Jesus"

Cindy and I went last Friday to see Blue Like Jazz when it opened.  I had read the book several years ago (as well as several other Donald Miller books) and had been really affected by them.  I felt for the first time someone was speaking to my generation and our experiences in Christianity.  I'm a Gen Xer - meaning that I'm not a Baby Boomer and I'm not a Millennial.  I'm stuck in the middle.  We are kind of like a bridge generation - we have one foot in the values of the Baby Boomers (because they wrote the rules and controlled the game when we became of age to play), and we have one foot with the Millennials (because we really don't like the game we were forced to play).  We were the first "Post-Moderns" in some ways.  Like it or not, the society that most of us were born into does not exist any more.

Those societal changes also happened in the church during our generation.  A change in the way we worship, the music we sing, the view of the gifts (especially healing), the way preaching is done, the way we dress for church, the birth of the mega-church, the way evangelism is done, the way missions are done, even how and when we attend church.  Everything has changed in the last thirty years.  Now I'm not saying that the changes were good or bad - they were just changes.  And for a time, very early in my faith, my generation experienced the tension of being caught in the middle of those changes.  It was coming out of those experiences that the book "Blue Like Jazz" really spoke to me.  I read it and I related to it in a way that few "Christian" books did at the time.  So of course, I went to see the movie.

I enjoyed the movie for the most part.  This is not a blockbuster with a huge budget.  It's just a simple, nice movie.  That's the review - go and see it.  But that is not why I'm writing this post.  Once again, in the middle of his "nice" movie, Donald Miller places a quote that completely messes me up.

Quick premiss: the lead character, Don, grows up in a stereotypical Southern Baptist home and church.  The day the he is to leave for a good Christian College, he has a realization about his family (don't want to be a spoiler here) that shakes his faith.  He instead runs to a stereotypical liberal college and begins his backslide - fully rejecting his faith.  In the midst of this he meets a girl named Penny who he likes and further discovers goes to church.  When Penny is confronted by Don about why she goes to church she says something like this: "I read the bible in one of my classes and discovered I really liked Jesus."

Pow...think about that for a while.  "I really like Jesus."  That line has been haunting me for the past few days.  We preach all kinds of stuff - heaven and hell, get saved, get forgiven, get set free.  And most of the people in our church believe most of the stuff in the bible.  They are trying to be good Christians.  They love God, they come to church, they do the stuff.  But do the like Jesus?  The more I thought of that, the more I got scared.  Because the reality of it all is that we can go through this entire Christian life and not like Jesus.  We can ask him to forgive us, we can get "covered in the blood", we can get saved, we can even decide to follow him, giving him our entire lives but not like him.

The longer I try and follow Jesus, the more I'm learning that it's not about decisions, it's about relationships.  I think that is where "liking Jesus" comes in.  The problem is that I'm not sure what that looks like.  What would it look like if we acted in a way where we really liked Jesus?  How would we tell others about him?  How would we treat others?  How would we treat ourselves?  What would our walk look like?  What would the church look like?  I don't have the answer to this, but I think I want to spend the rest of my life trying to figure it out.  I just want to really like Jesus.

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