Better yet, how curmudgeonly are you?

Now here's a quiz a crusty curmudgeon can get behind. Test your history knowledge, courtesy of Barking Moonbat Early Warning System.

I scored 17, apparently atypical for someone of my tender years.

Just how nerdy am I, anyway?

What's your Nerd Quotient?

(H/T: Ramblings' Journal.)

How moonbats think, part IV

According to CathiefromCanada, the problem with U.S. Homeland Security nominee Michael Chertoff is that he looks too much like a character Laurence Olivier played in Marathon Man.

Heaven help me, I do believe she's serious.

And now . . . this

Once again, the minds of Great Britain have made another stunning scientific breakthrough:

PEOPLE are to be tortured in laboratories at Oxford University in a United States-funded experiment to determine whether belief in God is effective in relieving pain.

While enduring the agony, they will be exposed to religious symbols such as images of the Virgin Mary or a crucifix. Their neurological responses will be measured to determine the efficacy of their faith in helping them to cope.

[Full Story]

Well, I doubt it will have quite the effect they're hoping for. It might cut down on the indigenous vampire population, however.

(H/T: The Great Separation.)

Cool space news

Here's one of those space stories I can really get behind, as I'm a sucker for blowing stuff up:

A NASA spacecraft with a Hollywood name — Deep Impact (search) — blasted off Wednesday on a mission to smash a hole in a comet and give scientists a glimpse of the frozen primordial ingredients of the solar system. . . .

Scientists are counting on Deep Impact to carve out a crater in Comet Tempel 1 that could almost swallow the Roman Coliseum. It will be humans' first look into the heart of a comet, a celestial snowball still containing the original building blocks of the sun and the planets. . . .

Nothing like this has ever been attempted before.

[Full Story]

Well, that last bit isn't strictly true:

The Infamous Brad Pitt Equalization Device!

Are you honked off because America's Favourite Couple, fashion plates Barbie and KenJennifer and Brad called it quits?

Cheer up. The only antidote you need is a liberal dose of the Brad Pitt Equalization Device. Repeat as necessary.

(Yeah, I've been waiting for ages for any excuse to link to that one.)

Silly but addictive

Being a sometime Flash user who would love to enrich his skills, once in a while I do a Google run to see how people are using Flash and what the current state-of-the-art is. Occasionally, when I'm in a weird mood, I'll google on "weird Japanese flash." The results range from the bizarre to the indescribable. Not understanding a word of Japanese, I just don't get the penchant for technomusic and ASCII kittens, and some of the recurring imagery in animations of this type is enough to induce weird dreams.

But since my last run a few days ago, I've found myself quite addicted to this game. Don't worry if you can't read a word of the text. It's pretty self-explanatory. My high score so far is a respectable 118.

Do not lose heart

I was tempted this week to follow suit with some of the other Godbloggers and engage in a little theodicy this week. But after hearing our Sunday sermon, I was inspired (no pun intended) to move in a different direction.

The sermon was titled "Seeing Forever" and was based on the last few verses of 2 Corinthians 4:

For which cause we faint not; but though our outward man perish, yet the inward man is renewed day by day. For our light affliction, which is but for a moment, worketh for us a far more exceeding and eternal weight of glory; while we look not at the things which are seen, but at the things which are not seen: for the things which are seen are temporal; but the things which are not seen are eternal. (2 Cor. 4:16-18)

It is tempting to look at the here and now and lose heart. The persecution of the Church - by which I mean real persecution, not those petty little annoyances from Barry Lynn that everyone complains about here in North America - in our time is unprecedented in history, even in the Roman Empire at its worst. Even with all our radar and satellite imaging, weather can still kill a quarter million souls without warning. Or on a personal level, we might be unemployed, or broke, or rejected. When our focus is on ourselves in the here and now, it is easy to lose heart.

And for Paul, in his day, it must have been easy to lose heart. As he writes to the Corinthians a few pages later, consider what he himself had had to endure for the sake of Christ (here's a list for you, Rebecca):

• Of the Jews five times received I forty stripes save one.
• Thrice was I beaten with rods,
• once was I stoned,
• thrice I suffered shipwreck,
• a night and a day I have been in the deep;
• In journeyings often,
• in perils of waters,
• in perils of robbers,
• in perils by mine own countrymen,
• in perils by the heathen,
• in perils in the city,
• in perils in the wilderness,
• in perils in the sea,
• in perils among false brethren;
• In weariness and painfulness,
• in watchings often,
• in hunger and thirst,
• in fastings often,
• in cold and nakedness.
• Beside those things that are without, that which cometh upon me daily, the care of all the churches. (2 Cor. 11:24-28)

But what of it? is Paul's point. His perspective was not on the external, but the internal. The outward man was perishing - helped along in his case, I'm sure, by all the abuse he had suffered at the hands of his enemies - yet thanks to Christ, his inward man was getting better.

Paul also admonished his readers to focus on the eternal rather than the temporal. The difficulties of the present day may seem heavy, he says. But against the "weight of glory," they are but a trifle.

The Hebrew Christians were suffering, and it seems as though many of them might have been motivated to pack it in and convert back to Judaism again rather than endure it. If Paul didn't write Hebrews, it almost certainly was someone who knew him and his teachings on this subject. The author concludes the great "faith" chapter, chapter 11, with another list of the sufferings of the faithful of old:

• Women received their dead raised to life again: and others were tortured, not accepting deliverance; that they might obtain a better resurrection:
• And others had trial of [cruel] mockings and scourgings,
• yea, moreover of bonds and imprisonment:
• They were stoned,
• they were sawn asunder,
• were tempted,
• were slain with the sword:
• they wandered about in sheepskins and goatskins;
• being destitute, afflicted,
• tormented; (Of whom the world was not worthy:)
• they wandered in deserts,
• and [in] mountains,
• and [in] dens and caves of the earth. (Heb. 11:35-38)

And on top of all this, unlike the Corinthians (and us!) who had seen the promise of God fulfilled in Christ, these ancient and anonymous heroes had only the faith that God would someday keep his promises. And how much more, as the author says, should those of us on this side of Golgotha not lose heart? He continues his thought in the first few verses of chapter 12:

Wherefore seeing we also are compassed about with so great a cloud of witnesses, let us lay aside every weight, and the sin which doth so easily beset [us], and let us run with patience the race that is set before us, looking unto Jesus the author and finisher of [our] faith; who for the joy that was set before him endured the cross, despising the shame, and is set down at the right hand of the throne of God. For consider him that endured such contradiction of sinners against himself, lest ye be wearied and faint in your minds. (Heb. 12:1-3)

One of my favourite Shakespeare plays is Hamlet, of which, God willing, I shall have more to say in the next few weeks. It happens to contain the best-known lines in all of Shakespeare's works, so well known, in fact, that they have become clichéd:

To be, or not to be: that is the question:
Whether 'tis nobler in the mind to suffer
The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune,
Or to take arms against a sea of troubles,
And by opposing end them? (Hamlet III.1)

Hamlet, faced with the choice between enduring the "slings and arrows" or avoiding them by committing suicide, chooses life because he fears the "undiscovered country" on the other side of death more. Paul would have made the same choice, but ironically for a different reason. The "slings and arrows" were external and temporal. He did not lose heart because enduring them prepared his inner man for the eternal, and its rewards which far outweighed the sufferings of the present.

Friday in the wild

It's Friday, so once again I present a compendium of interesting posts from around the blogosphere that I have encountered in the last week.

bLogicus reports on a Boston-area abortionist who freely admits that what she is doing is taking life. "I have the utmost respect for life," says the doctor (name withheld). Just not these lives, she doesn't add. [Read Abortionist Confesses 'Yes, I End Life']

Adrian Warnock, who recently came right out and said Emergent Church personalities are neo-liberals , by which he means "the intentional adaptation of Christianity to post-modernity," has put together a news aggregator comprising blogs that discuss the Emergent movement from both sides.

Russ at the Coffeehouse at the End-Of-Days calls nonbelievers to read the Bible, wondering why we Christians would rather have them start off with Mere Christianity or something:

I confess to my own shame that I am sometimes hesitant to turn non-Christians loose on the Bible lest they reject it and the Lord. If that isn't perverse, what is? Do I seriously imagine that books of lesser spiritual value (that is, all other books) will do a better job of penetrating the human heart than the very book that God gave to do that very thing? Do I think of the Bible as something a person "works up to" after they have developed a taste for religious things?

[Read Calling Non-Christians To Read]

Whenever I get around to it, one of these days I want to write my own essay with the working title, "Why you should study doctrine." In the meantime, however, Michael's thoughts over at Christian Conservative capture a few of my own sentiments:

What is doctrine? It’s a body of unchanging and specific principles. The Bible is specific in identifying God, the fall, sin, the law, salvation, and Christ. The Bible isn’t a nebulous book that speaks in secret code leaving every truth up to individual interpretation, as much as those who pollute its message would say in their own defense. Therefore we should understand these specifics, specifically. And that’s exactly what I’ve been doing these last few years: getting to know my religion, the fruit of which is the excitement I now have for this truth as an older man.

[Read Doctrine Matters]

He's also distilled a few of the historic Protestant confessions into basic but readable PDF files.

My friend Rand found a local Baptist church missing the point:

On the Lord's Day, in place of an evening service where God's people could be praising and worshiping the Lord, this 'church' presented a violent, stupid Hollywood movie. And this promise of dialogue, assuming it is somekind of Gospel presentation, still doesn't legitimize this nonsense.

[Read This Kind of Thing Drives Me Nuts!!!]

And he's right. I like the idea of watching thought-provoking movies and following them up with critical discussion, but that's something I would do at home and by invitation. The church is for the worship of God and the training of the saints, and as I've said before, any church that ignores this duty is missing its mandate.

Kids these days. "Shrode" over at Thinklings Weblog posted an intriguing article about a pastor-stumper from one of the rug-rats:

I love children. And I love their questions. And last night one stumped me. In the children's Bible study, they were studying the second great commandment, 'Love your neighbor as yourself'. This child asked her teacher, 'Does that mean we have to love Satan too?' The teacher said, 'Let's ask the Pastor'. When they came to me with the question after Bible study, I had to admit that I didn't know, but that I'd work on it."

[Read Do We Have To Love Satan?]

Actually, I've been trying to think about how I would answer that question, too. Well, it's good fodder for a future post.

Looking through my referrer links, I got hit with an interesting Google query this week, on yeastless factuality. It's interesting not because it's bizarre, but because it wasn't one that would have occurred to me. Obviously someone was looking for information related to The Life of Pi, and hit my review. What surprised me, looking through the hits, was how many hits were related to sermons and homiletics, some of them making use of Martel's phrase pretty well, others not. Obviously this novel has resonated with a lot of clergy, though as its theme is the dividing line between faith and skepticism, I guess that shouldn't surprise me.

In other search news, as of today this site ranks #4 on Google for the basic search "crusty." We're movin' on up . . .

Postscript: One more. It was posted this week, so it counts. From Varifrank comes this hilarious-but-pointed story about some Eurotrash IT workers getting what-for:

Today, during an afternoon conference that wrapped up my project of the last 18 months, one of my Euro collegues tossed this little turd out to no one in particular:

"See, this is why George Bush is so dumb, theres a disaster in the world and he sends an Aircraft Carrier..."

After which he and many of my Euro collegues laughed out loud.

and then they looked at me. I wasn't laughing, and neither was my Hindi friend sitting next to me, who has lost family in the disaster.

I'm afraid I was "unprofessional", I let it loose . . .

Only you'll have to go view the rest for yourself. (Hat tip to Brutally Honest.)

OK, I've said it before and I'll say it again . . .

Now I've seen everything.