tom.bl*g

Recipe for Squash

"Every time I convince myself that there is no better way to prepare squash, a grizzly old crone in a mud-walled hut teaches me the error of my ways. So far this has happened once."

(an Artifact From Captain Park's Imaginary Polar Expedition)

Resolutions for 04

1. Take Josh et al. from the house and jump out of a plane.
2. Take the newly engaged Katie et al. to visit an Orthodox church.
3. Set out from Harpers Ferry, VA, and walk along the Appalachian Trail for approximately 1143 miles to Katahdin in Maine.
4. Finish the 45 remaining Pimsleur Mandarin Chinese lessons.
5. Not upgrade my computer until this coming September.
6. Visit Shanti.

Up till 0300 coughing

Boy was last night fun. On one hand, it's been almost two weeks since I've been to the gym, so I appreciate the ab workout. On the other hand, I was up till 0300 coughing. A mixed blessing.

Late blogging

The onion has some tips for drinking responsibly this Christmas.

If someone you know is too drunk to drive, demand that he let you have his car keys. If he refuses, pull out a gun and demand the car keys again. This also works with people who are not drunk, and whom you do not know. [link]

Another National Review conservative writes against the failing war on drugs.

Why government tosses pot smokers in jail while tolerating use of alcohol and cigarettes, far more dangerous substances by most measures, has never been obvious. There is good reason for people to abstain from all of them; there is no good reason to imprison them if people do not. [link]

Steven Den Beste writes intelligently on Libya's recent actions.

It was not "We're all reasonable men here" diplomacy (a la Solana) which ultimately did it; it was a clear and naked threat. Qaddafi was afraid of American military power and afraid of President Bush's determination.

Why did he call the British, rather than the French or the Russians or the EU or the UN? That's another interesting piece to the puzzle. What has developed over the last couple years is that Blair and Bush are doing a superb good-cop/bad-cop act. ... [link]

Christendom

To the best of my knowledge, Christianity stands alone in history. Admittedly, history is herself unique; each of her religions is also unique, so I should elaborate. No other religion has spread as much as Christianity, or shattered as hard. Islam ought to take notes, since it may soon control Europe. At least it should take care and not raze the libraries. There will be our example to learn from and our mistakes to avoid.

Meanwhile, I find myself in what might be the last rotten gaps of a decadent civilization, searching through what might the rubble of an ancient temple for... a bad D&D module, apparently. Wikipedia maintains a rather objective List of Christian denominations. How did all this happen? Father Arnold Damen writes,

Christ sent His Apostles throughout the whole universe and said: "Go ye, therefore, and teach all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost; teaching them to observe all things whatsoever I have commanded you."

Christ did not say, "Sit down and write Bibles and scatter them over the earth, and let every man read his Bible and judge for himself." If Christ had said that, there would never have been a Christianity on the earth at all, but a Babylon and confusion instead, and never one Church, the union of one body. Hence, Christ never said to His Apostles, "Go and write Bibles and distribute them, and let everyone judge for himself." That injunction was reserved for the Sixteenth Century, and we have seen the result of it. Ever since the Sixteenth Century there have been springing up religion upon religion, and churches upon churches, all fighting and quarreling with one another. And all because of private interpretation of the Bible. [link]

There you have it. Unless you aren't sympathetic to this Catholic reasoning.

[D]enominations have clearly grown since the birth of the New Testament Church. Why? Because of pagan influence. Because of Jewish hatred toward Jesus Messiah, instigating hatred and discord toward the Apostolic Christian church, by influencing the leadership of Rome. For these reasons, and because of Rome's lust for power and global influence, we have denominationalism as we know it today. [link]

That's what a oneness pentacostal might say. A Restoration movement Christan will argue differently.

The denominations have failed to teach the truth on some of the most fundamental and obvious of biblical truths. Is it any wonder that they flounder with regard to the moral issues which plague our country? If the bible is not the standard of authority with regard to our salvation and our relationship with God, then why should we trust it with regard to these moral issues? We will prove that the denominations have rejected the bible as their standard of authority. [link]

This, and many other fascinating details, occupy my mind.

Return from Return of the King

Boy howdy that was a good movie--and long, too. Now off to bed so my new flu vaccine can continue to infect. It's like there's an apocalyptic battle of good versus evil inside my body. Or maybe I'm tired and feverish. Also, the projector was slightly unfocused, so we were all like "Gah! Look at that great cgi; let's wait for the dramatic zoom to see the details of his face."

Morning, 16/DEC/2003

1. I borrowed Joel's digital camera (Canon S230) and took it with me yesterday for another photoshoot of campus. What a minimalist style I have.
2. Yesterday I installed the latest virus vaccine beta, FluMist™: live, but weakened viri are administered nasally. So far I've been afflicted with nothing but a runny nose.
3. Tonight, we will see ROTK. There will be a pre-game viewing of FOTR and TT at our place. That's a lot of time on the couch.
Posted by Tom at 09:08 AM | Comments (1)

Catagory Kickoff Party: QOTD

The chaps at Cheapass Games have produced an excellent series of parlor games, including Kill Dr. Lucky and Unexploded Cow. I want to share with you. Consider--from Captain Park's Imaginary Polar Expedition--the following Tale of Ice Death,

Freezing to death is a harsh mistress.

Now isn't that just the funniest thing since the Interrupting Cow?

...

Lovely.

Life Imitates Simpsons

Quoting Marge,

FOX turned into a hardcore porn channel so gradually, I hardly noticed.

In that light, I'm going to put off becoming an exclusively religious (or worse, Catholic!) blog for as long as I can.

Sola ...?

Prelude: I've been a big fan of Christianity for as long as I can remember. At the same time, I haven't ever been much of a Christian. I've finally decided to climb down off the bleachers and being seriously appplying myself to faith.

The other day I ran across an transcribed talk by Scott Hahn, a Catholic apologist and ex-Presbyterian minister (his conversion story). It's entitled "The Bible & The Church: Both or Neither," and argues--from scripture--for sola verbum dei (the Word of God alone) and against sola scripture (the Bible alone).

He starts by reminding Catholics of the importance of scripture. He draws from the old testament, the new testament, popes, and saints (at this point in the essay he is reminding his fellow Catholics that they cannot be good Catholics if they are not steeped in the Bible). I especially like this quote he takes from St. Theresa of Avila:

All troubles of the Church, all the evils in the world, flow from this source: that men do not by clear and sound knowledge and serious consideration penetrate into the truths of Sacred Scripture.

In the second half, he turns around and challenges "Bible Christians",

I want to give you a series of texts that you should look up and read to understand why Bible Christians, to be consistent, must become Catholic Christians.

He starts with Matthew 16, 17-19 ("..and upon this rock..."), works back to the old testament, and then returns to the early church described in the new testament, quoting scripture and referencing church history.

If you're interested, read the full transcription.

Comments on the Vatican's comments on Gibson's Passion

There is occasional house-talk about Mel Gibson's Passion, eventually asking the archtypical question, "Isn't Mel part of some schismatic radical traditionalist (google: radtrad catholic) sect that rejects Vatican II, the new mass, recent popes, and still blames the Jews for the death of Jesus?"

...

Ugh: after some grunt work, I believe the truth goes something like this: yes, Gibson is part of a schismatic church (but so are the Eastern Orthodox churches, which JP2 has called the light of the East). As so the film's anti-semitism, I'd rather wait to see it myself than try to guess, but it seems that everyone Gibson has screened the movie to really likes it. Here's a excerpt I found on Church of the Masses,

Q: Does "The Passion" blame anyone for what happened to Christ?

Father Di Noia: That's a very interesting, and very difficult question. Suppose you pose it to someone who was unfamiliar with the Gospel passion narratives until seeing this film.

"Who is to blame for what happened to Jesus?" you ask. The other person pauses for a moment to think about this, and then responds: "Well, they all are, aren't they?" This answer seems exactly right to me.

Looking at "The Passion" strictly from a dramatic point of view, what happens in the film is that each of the main characters contributes in some way to Jesus' fate: Judas betrays him; the Sanhedrin accuses him; the disciples abandon him; Peter denies knowing him; Herod toys with him; Pilate allows him to be condemned; the crowd mocks him; the Roman soldiers scourge, brutalize and finally crucify him; and the devil, somehow, is behind the whole action.

Of all the main characters in the story, perhaps only Mary is really blameless. Gibson's film captures this feature of the Passion narratives very well. No one person and group of persons acting independently of the others is to blame: They all are.

[link]

Read the whole thing, and then read the previous story about how the Ain't It Cool News movie geeks reacted to The Passion.

I've just wasted half an hour on google, blegh.

I am not worthy

My new work setup:

• Sun Ultra 10 with 0.5G RAM running SunOS 5.8
• Dell 2.66GHz P4 with 1.00G RAM running Windows XP
• Tangerine 400MHz Apple iMac with 128M RAM running OSX 10.2.8

It's not a powerhouse of FLOPS or nothin, but I really dig the technical diversity.

I use Cadence tools on the Sun to design, simulate, and layout circuits. The XP workhorse runs Matlab and various sundry applications. The iMac is my latest addition, through which I achieve many computer-geek points. Now if I could only see Panther installed. Mmm, Expose... *drool*.

Morning, 08/DEC/2003

1. T.G.I. Friday's, Applebee's, and Ruby Tuesday are introducing low-carb menu items for the Atkin dieter in you. According the nice man on the excellently irreverent Daily Buzz (P.S. Ron is adorable), 20% of Friday's customers are on Atkins. This is great news for carb nazis everywhere.
2. Our kitchen sink drains overnight. Last week two a day and a half had pass after a dishwasher run before the sink was usable. This is mixed news. Sure, our kitchen is closer to both "normal" and "working", but self-repair was--I thought--a property exclusive to biological systems.
3. I am unable to predict the Mackey Glass timeseries (with tau=30, sampled at T=6, aka MG30) beyond a 50 step horizon, despite extensive training, heavy tweaking and evidence that it can be accurately predicted for 100 steps. Typical results:
   
   That's 80 steps. MG30 is blue and my predictor is red.

Weak Apologetics

Tom and Josh have a conversation:

Josh: What's RCIA?
Tom: It's the "I want to become a Catholic" class.
Josh: Why do you want to become a Catholic?
Tom: ...

Josh waits patiently.

Tom: ...

Tom eventually mutters something half-hearted and unconvincing.

Brrr.

I spent the final hour of the night comfortably buried under three different heavy blankets, wearing my knit hat with the sheets pulled up over my head. Sitting up, I remembered taking off that ugly blue fleece pullover in the living room leaving it on the couch. I set my feet on the smooth wooden floor, and in a flashing instant I thought, "my room is over an uninsulated crawl space, filled with cold, cold air. This is why my feet sting from the shock of the cold."

Playing games with dreidels

A story from the Independent Florida Alligator, UF's campus paper:

Hanukkah observers celebrate with Hawaiian twist

...students will play games with dreidels, which are spinning tops with Hebrew letters on each side

The game originates from Jews pretending to be playing the game when they were really practicing Judaism...

I think that's an interesting progression.

Melchisedech, :) or :(

This morning I learned quite a lot about Melchisedech. To the Marcionites, he is the high priest of the evil and material Jehovah. To Seventh Day Adventists, he is arguably God, the Holy Ghost, or "The voice of God in the world". To both Judaism and the Catholic church I belive he was a mundane human priest. However, when you enter the world of "Christian" new-age mysticism, you'll find some odd stuff. It's not to surprising to find him written up as a tarot card figure:

Angels - Archangel Melchisadec

Meaning of Melchisadec -- Prince of peace and light - spiritual awakening

Colour -- White or Silver

Message -- Often known as the father of the angels he guides the angels as the great prophets have guided mankind. He offers you pure white light, the symbol of purity and wholeness. [...and so on]

Related Chakras -- Crown

Related Emotional Issues -- Depression, loss of purpose

Related Health Issues -- All serious illness

Aromatherapy Oils -- Frankincense, Lavender, Yang Lang

Crystals -- Rainbow quartz, clear quartz, amethyst

[link]

Pretty mundane stuff, in all. However, I ran across Max Heindel's heavily coded Freemasonry and Catholicism. I'll quote a little bit for you:

To understand the mystery of Melchisedec we must revert to the earlier epochs of man's stay upon the earth during the age called the Hyperborean Epoch. The earth was then in an extremely heated condition. Man in the making was then double sexed, male-female, like so many of our present plants, and he also resembled the plants in being inert and lacking in desire and aspirations. At that time man was the tractable ward of the Divine Hierarchs who guided him physically, these being darkly referred to in the Bible as "Kings of Edom." Later, during the Lemurian Epoch, when the body of man had crystallized and condensed somewhat more, mankind was divided into sexes physically. But as the consciousness of man was still focused in the spiritual world they were unconscious of the physical act of generation, as we are now of digestion; neither did they know birth or death and were in fact totally unaware of the possession of a physical vehicle until in time they sensed it during the generative process; it was then said that "Adam KNEW Eve." At that time Lucifer Spirits, fallen Angels and inhabitants of the warlike planet Mars, taught them how to eat of the TREE OF KNOWLEDGE, which is the symbolical name for the generative act.

It goes on like that for quite a while, and was brought to you by The Rosicrucian Fellowship, "An International Association of Christian Mystics dedicated to preaching the Gospel and healing the sick".

Alas, Poor Melchisedech...

I was romping through the blogosphere when I ran across a comment by Oswaldo Carvalho (scroll way down):

Jehovah is not the same as the supreme God our Father. He is a jealous angel whose name is Melchisedec, who revealed all his anger and wrath along centuries, especially against non-Jews. [link]

He then goes on to list scriptural support for this position. I hadn't heard this idea before, and so headed off to google. It took a good bit of work to identify this belief as the gnostic Marcionite heresy, which has an entry in the Catholic Encyclopedia:

Heretical sect founded in A.D. 144 at Rome by Marcion and continuing in the West for 300 years, but in the East some centuries longer, especially outside the Byzantine Empire. They rejected the writings of the Old Testament and taught that Christ was not the Son of the God of the Jews, but the Son of the good God, who was different from the God of the Ancient Covenant. [link]

For those of us who aren't up on our first century heresies. The Overview of World Religions Project has a clickable flowchart. They summarize the Marcionites,

Marcion and his followers believed that there were two Gods: the God of wrath and vengefulness of the Hebrew scriptures and the God of love and mercy revealed through Jesus Christ. It was the God of the Hebrew scriptures who created the material universe, which is evil and is destined for destruction. The God of love is revealed through Jesus. Because Jesus could have nothing in common with the evil material world his human body was apparent, not real. Marcion's followers were required to avoid as far as possible contamination with the material world. This took the form of abstaining from sexual intercourse and from eating meat. [link]

If you read the short article, you'll find that the Marcion compiled his own Canon, which excludes a number of otherwise accepted books: Acts, 1st & 2nd Timothy, Titus, Hebrews, and a couple others. The Center for Marcionite Research states,

Marcion's main claim to fame, as generally acknowledged by most historians, is that he produced the earliest known New Testament canon, which preceded the Catholic version.

Poke through their library or do a google search on "marcionite" if you want to learn more.