Men

I am in a guys group that meets weekly. The topic that we have been discussing over the past couple of months is the topic of masculinity. I have come to find that this topic viz., the topic of gender is crucial to how we understand ourselves, our culture, and our individual roles/function. In our culture we have largely lost what it means to be distinctively male and female. The lines have been so blurred, that it would seem that they can be synonymous; the old adage, anything you can do I can do better. Due to this lack of distinguishing, who we are and how we ought to live out our gender, we find ourselves in a plight.

I counsel many men who have been or are abusive. I counsel many men who are incredibly passive. I counsel many men who are addicted. I counsel many men who are scarred. And I see a generation of men who are largely lost in a big world, grasping for direction and security in the face of their own insecurity. I interact with so many men who say, "I have no idea who I am."

I have compassion on this generation of men who seem to be bearingless, without proper functioning fathers to forge a path, I was one of them. However, we do not only need compassion, we need a good kick in the tail.

I came across this video. No matter what you may think of it or his delivery; I feel it is a strong prophetic voice speaking into what I see is a desolate landscape of American masculinity.

Cranmer

Here is a good article entitled, Thomas Cranmer: God Must Intervene for Salvation, by Justin Holcomb. Thomas Cranmer is one reformer who seems to be a bit overlooked. The article is informative in giving some information on Cranmer but also in its challenge to think about what drives us. Here is a great excerpt:

In an interview about Cranmer, Ashley Null summarizes powerfully humanity's problem:According to the Thomas Cranmer's anthropology, what the heart loves, the will chooses, and the mind justifies. The mind doesn't direct the will. The mind is actually captive to what the will wants, and the will itself, in turn, is captive to what the heart wants. The trouble with human nature is that we are born with a heart that loves ourselves over and above everything else in this world, including God. In short, we are born slaves to the lust for self-gratification. That's why, if left to ourselves, we will always love those things that make us feel good about ourselves, even as we depart more and more from God and his ways. Therefore, God must intervene in our lives in order to bring salvation. Working through Scripture, the Holy Spirit first brings a conviction of sin in a believer's heart, then he births a living faith by which the believer lays hold of the extrinsic righteousness of Christ.

It is a helpful excerpt underscoring a reality that many are not attune to, which is, that our will and heart drive us more than our thinking. It is our passions that get the best of us and it is our minds that attempt to expunge our guilt (justify). This is not to say that we don’t employ our minds, to the best of our abilities, saturating it in truth, the truth of Scripture, to combat our passions that can set our lives aflame. However, as Cranmer has suggested, it is primarily a supernatural act of the Spirit that works in us not only to justify but also to sanctify.

Collision

Collision comes out October 27th and should prove to be a good movie. The movie is a debate between journalist/ atheist Christopher Hitchens and Pastor Douglas Wilson.

John Piper interviews Doug Wilson about the upcoming Collision movie.

In addition, here is the new trailer:

"Collision: Hitchens vs. Wilson" - EXCLUSIVE 13 minute preview from LEVEL4 on Vimeo.

Armistice

Mute Math just released their second album Armistice. Armistice is defined as, "an agreement made by opposing sides in a war to stop fighting for a certain time; a truce." The Album title is a window into the bands life prior to making the album. Evidently the band was about to break up before writing this album because of disagreements. You can read the full story here: http://www.myspace.com/mutemath

I have to say after listening to the album a couple of times, I think it is quite good. I think they have definitely evolved as a band. They continue to be a great blend of organic and electronic. The melodies at times soar, the beats are driving, and at times the music is just beautiful; the song Lost Year; mainly piano and Paul Meany's dynamic voice is a good example. As far as a band that is still creating good Rock and looking to be innovative, Mute Math is definitely one of those bands.

I am thankful for bands who are taking their craft seriously and are looking to be progressive in the arts.

So all that to say I recommend this album!

Global warming is the new religion of First World urban elites

 

The Canadian oilsands industry has been getting a rough ride in recent months in the U.S., where many politicians have lined up to urge restrictions on imports of Canada's 'dirty oil.' California is moving to a low-carbon fuel standard, big-city mayors have targeted oilsands as a driver of global warming, a

Photograph by: Tim Fraser/Calgary Herald, Canwest News Service

Ian Plimer has outraged the ayatollahs of purist environmentalism, the Torquemadas of the doctrine of global warming, and he seems to relish the damnation they heap on him.

Plimer is a geologist, professor of mining geology at Adelaide University, and he may well be Australia's best-known and most notorious academic.

Plimer, you see, is an unremitting critic of "anthropogenic global warming" -- man-made climate change to you and me -- and the current environmental orthodoxy that if we change our polluting ways, global warming can be reversed.

It is, of course, not new to have a highly qualified scientist saying that global warming is an entirely natural phenomenon with many precedents in history. Many have made the argument, too, that it is rubbish to contend human behaviour is causing the current climate change. And it has often been well argued that it is totally ridiculous to suppose that changes in human behaviour -- cleaning up our act through expensive slight-of-hand taxation tricks -- can reverse the trend.

But most of these scientific and academic voices have fallen silent in the face of environmental Jacobinism. Purging humankind of its supposed sins of environmental degradation has become a religion with a fanatical and often intolerant priesthood, especially among the First World urban elites.

But Plimer shows no sign of giving way to this orthodoxy and has just published the latest of his six books and 60 academic papers on the subject of global warming. This book, Heaven and Earth -- Global Warming: The Missing Science, draws together much of his previous work. It springs especially from A Short History of Plant Earth, which was based on a decade of radio broadcasts in Australia.

That book, published in 2001, was a best-seller and won several prizes. But Plimer found it hard to find anyone willing to publish this latest book, so intimidating has the environmental lobby become.

But he did eventually find a small publishing house willing to take the gamble and the book has already sold about 30,000 copies in Australia. It seems also to be doing well in Britain and the United States in the first days of publication.

Plimer presents the proposition that anthropogenic global warming is little more than a con trick on the public perpetrated by fundamentalist environmentalists and callously adopted by politicians and government officials who love nothing more than an issue that causes public anxiety.

While environmentalists for the most part draw their conclusions based on climate information gathered in the last few hundred years, geologists, Plimer says, have a time frame stretching back many thousands of millions of years.

The dynamic and changing character of the Earth's climate has always been known by geologists. These changes are cyclical and random, he says. They are not caused or significantly affected by human behaviour.

Polar ice, for example, has been present on the Earth for less than 20 per cent of geological time, Plimer writes. Plus, animal extinctions are an entirely normal part of the Earth's evolution.

(Plimer, by the way, is also a vehement anti-creationist and has been hauled into court for disrupting meetings by religious leaders and evangelists who claim the Bible is literal truth.)

Plimer gets especially upset about carbon dioxide, its role in Earth's daily life and the supposed effects on climate of human manufacture of the gas. He says atmospheric carbon dioxide is now at the lowest levels it has been for 500 million years, and that atmospheric carbon dioxide is only 0.001 per cent of the total amount of the chemical held in the oceans, surface rocks, soils and various life forms. Indeed, Plimer says carbon dioxide is not a pollutant, but a plant food. Plants eat carbon dioxide and excrete oxygen. Human activity, he says, contributes only the tiniest fraction to even the atmospheric presence of carbon dioxide.

There is no problem with global warming, Plimer says repeatedly. He points out that for humans periods of global warming have been times of abundance when civilization made leaps forward. Ice ages, in contrast, have been times when human development slowed or even declined.

So global warming, says Plimer, is something humans should welcome and embrace as a harbinger of good times to come.

© Copyright (c) The Vancouver Sun

Peaches, Strings, and Straw

This weekend I went to an orchard with my small group. It was deemed our "summer day". During this time of year peaches are in season in addition to Tomatoes, Watermelon, Cantaloupe, Green Beans, Squash & Cucumbers, and this is what they had. If it was peach they had it. Peach salsa, peach ice cream, peach slushies, and it was all delicious. I got my peach slushy, sat down on a bale of hay, and listened to a bluegrass band, after eating three peaches. The Little Mountain Boys, as they called themselves, consisted of an upright bass, a mandolin, steel guitar, acoustic guitar, and a banjo. In this moment all was right with the world. There is something to be said about the hillbilliy way of life, not very complicated and not bogged down. It feels more connected to me. It felt less pretentious, stripped down, and obviously slower.

Enjoying and drinking in is something I don't do enough. Thinking of this striped down, country way of life where people of the past and people here, without digital entertainment, share earths good food and the pride of their work, their own crafted music, and conversation. If all things are road signs as it were, to heaven, this was a good pointer and opportunity to again get in touch with my own longing, not for the Appalachian mountains, but for the city of God.

Thank God for peaches, strings, and straw.

Missing Link?

Christine Dao writes:

Scientists and media outlets around the world are praising “Ida,” the primate fossil hailed as the long-sought-after “missing link” in the human evolutionary theory.

In a major public relations campaign, Ida was unveiled in New York City yesterday, May 19, 2009, and will make a stop in London May 26 before returning to its owners at the University of Oslo’s Natural History Museum. BBC1 will air a documentary based on the fossil the same day as its UK unveiling, and Little, Brown—publisher of the popular Twilight fiction series—put out a book about the find today. Even Internet search engine Google posted a special banner in Ida’s honor.

But despite the hype, a whirlwind of questions still surrounds the discovery. First, the environment in which the fossil was kept for 20 years is unclear. Ida, who bears the technical name Darwinius masillae in honor of this year’s 200^th anniversary of British naturalist Charles Darwin’s birth, was found in 1983 by an amateur fossil hunter at Germany’s Messel Pit. He kept it in unknown conditions before deciding to sell it through a dealer two years ago.

Second, the purchaser’s stated motivation for obtaining the fossil seemed to emphasize business over research. University of Oslo paleontologist Jørn Hurum nicknamed the fossil “Ida” after his own small daughter and told UK news outlet The Guardian, “You need an icon or two in a museum to drag people in…this is our Mona Lisa and it will be our Mona Lisa for the next 100 years.”¹Hurum purchased the fossil for an undisclosed sum from the dealer based on seeing only three photographs and not the actual fossil, a “huge gamble” that suggests pressure to make some kind of return on the university’s investment.

Third, the fossil was hailed as humanity’s missing evolutionary link before the technical details of the find were published. This strategy effectively prevented the scientific community from evaluating the data and possibly calling a halt to the campaign on account of the fact that Ida has no transitional features and is therefore irrelevant to the evolutionary hypothesis of human development. Paleontologists are speaking out, but their voices are thus far being drowned out by the hype. Richard Kay from Duke University told Science that “the data is cherry-picked.”²

Ida, though an amazingly well-preserved fossil, will prove to be another Lucy, Java Man,Archaeopteryx, Confuciusornis, Pakicetus, and Eosimias. It will undoubtedly join the growing collection of fossils that were once thought to be missing links, but that upon further study turned out to be extinct creatures with no transitional features.

Update: “Revolutionary” Fossil Fails to Dazzle Paleontologists