Defunct Blog?

Just for Angie Davis' benefit.

Is there a reason for blogs in the Age of Facebook?

The internet seems to run in cycles. First, there were message boards, such as MyHoliness.com, or southerngospelnews.com. Very popular for a while. Not so much anymore.

Then, there were these blogs. Insanely popular for a time. Everybody wanted to be able to keep up with the lives of everyone else.

And, that is where Facebook came in. Not only can you keep up to date on all (7932) of your cloesest friends, but you can reconnect with the girl (or guy) you kissed in 6th grade. You can post your most mundane thought, and have 32 people make comments on what you said.

You can post your pics for all to see. 154 of my facebook friends, including some very well known, (Ernie Haase) have even posted their phone numbers for all to see.

And, then, then is the chat feature. Some of my friends have disabled theirs (you know who you are!), but for the rest of us, what a way to find out news, share news, and even argue, in some cases.

So, here's to facebook. And to what ever comes after Facebook. Because, as we all know, just like Myspace, FB will soon fade. As did blogging.

Wedding Rings

I have been giving this a lot of thought. A lot of thought.

I think what we need to do is go back to Scripture. My opinion, your opinion, is not what matters. What matters is what the Word says.

So, here is what it says:

1 Peter 3

1Likewise, ye wives, be in subjection to your own husbands; that, if any obey not the word, they also may without the word be won by the conversation of the wives;

2While they behold your chaste conversation coupled with fear.

3Whose adorning let it not be that outward adorning of plaiting the hair, and of wearing of gold, or of putting on of apparel;

4But let it be the hidden man of the heart, in that which is not corruptible, even the ornament of a meek and quiet spirit, which is in the sight of God of great price.

5For after this manner in the old time the holy women also, who trusted in God, adorned themselves...

Let's look at the two key verses here. Verse 3, and verse 4.

Think of it it this way, Paul was telling us that there are two options, verse three, OR verse 4.

In other words, not this: outward adorning of plaiting the hair, and of wearing of gold, or of putting on of apparel...

But rather, this: But let it be the hidden man of the heart, in that which is not corruptible, even the ornament of a meek and quiet spirit, which is in the sight of God of great price.

It is an either/or proposition. Not both, but one or the other.

The only way that this makes sense is to take it literally. If the Bible says that our adornment should not be the wearing of gold, how then do we make an exception for a wedding ring? Is it not made of gold?

Now, an argument could be made that God allowed the folks in the Old Testament to wear jewelry, and there was no negative connotation connected with it. And, that would be correct.

I do not see that as a contradiction to my view on 1 Peter 3 in any way. How? What I see in chapter 3 is God showing us a new, better way.

There were things that God allowed in the OT that we would consider sin today. We all have a good idea as to what those were. But, in the New Testament, we find those things forbidden.

So, God allowed some things in the OT, but forbids them in the NT, and this is not in any way contradictory, or hypocritical. Among these things are the wearing of jewelry.

This is not an argument of culture. It is not an argument of being looked at as weird by the society we live in. If that is the case, then we should all just assimilate now, look like, dress like, talk like, walk like everyone around us.


A ring is not an antidote to infidelity. Many people have cheated while wearing a wedding ring.

It is not an antidote to being hit on by the opposite gender. Just because you might be wearing a wedding ring will NOT keep some members of the opposite gender from seeing you as a conquest. Some actually see it as a challenge.

I do not need a ring to have an outward symbol of an inward commitment. That is foolishness. I show in many other ways that I am committed to Monica. Anyone observing us for even a few minutes, if they paid attention, would see this. And, for that matter, I have never seen anyone with a ring on and had the thought flit through my brain that, "well, they sure are committed to each other." The sad fact is that with the divorce rate as high as it is, the ring no longer means anything of the sort, if it ever did.

Now, even IF all of these were true, even if you could prevent infidelity by wearing a ring, even if you could prohibit someone hitting on you by the wearing of it, even if it makes us more acceptable in our culture, even if it would prove that we are committed to one another, that does not make it OK to violate scripture.

So, can you justify the wearing of a wedding ring using to any of these arguments? In a word, no.

Someone made an important observation to me today. In this country, as this so called "gay marriage" become more prominent, the wedding ring is going to become less and less an indicator of anything. Think that one through.

Facebook

It seems as if the newest, greatest, most exciting thing for everyone at the moment is Facebook. Every one, it seems, is now networking through FB.

I have really enjoyed it. I have reconnected with people that we met while singing that I may never have had the chance to meet again. Pretty cool.

I have been scrolling through hundreds of pictures. Litteraly. I love seeing what everyone's kids look like, who has lost weight, who has gained, who got married to who, and what everyone says in their status updates. Very interesting.

Now, to what bothers me.

It seems, if you can take the pics on FB as evidence, that there is a mass exodus from things conservative. I see people that have grown up in the CHM, people that I have gone to church with, people that I have seen at IHC, people that until VERY recently were a part of the CHM, who have very evidently left our ranks. I will not name names.

Why this? Why now? What is the catylist for this?

Why are we as a CHM losing some of our best and brightest?

Are there CHMers that still believe what we have always believed?

Here is what I have seen:

Wedding rings by the score.

Girls and guys that attend CHM churches in public in shorts.

Young and old alike in bathing suits and shorts on the beach.

More short hair for the ladies than I thought possible.

Tattoos.

People that profess, hoisting a glass.

And, there are hints of other activities that I could not, would not mentioon on this forum.

So, what is happening? Is the CHM through?

Is there anyone that believes that there are still biblical precepts that constrain us from doing these things?

Can we, should we, stem the tide?

I know that there are folks who read this blog who were once a part of the CHM, and they may take offense at what I have posted. Please believe me when I say that there is no offense intended. I am troubled by what I am seeing, and would like others input, yes, especially those from the CHM .

Santa Baby!

The cutest kid in the world, along with some guy in a funny suit.

We have never seen such freezing heat!

If you believe all this nonsense about "Global Warming," read this:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/opinion/main.jhtml?xml=/opinion/2008/11/16/do1610.xml&posted=true&_requestid=64500

A surreal scientific blunder last week raised a huge question mark about the temperature records that underpin the worldwide alarm over global warming. On Monday, Nasa's Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS), which is run by Al Gore's chief scientific ally, Dr James Hansen, and is one of four bodies responsible for monitoring global temperatures, announced that last month was the hottest October on record.

This was startling. Across the world there were reports of unseasonal snow and plummeting temperatures last month, from the American Great Plains to China, and from the Alps to New Zealand. China's official news agency reported that Tibet had suffered its "worst snowstorm ever". In the US, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration registered 63 local snowfall records and 115 lowest-ever temperatures for the month, and ranked it as only the 70th-warmest October in 114 years.

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So what explained the anomaly? GISS's computerised temperature maps seemed to show readings across a large part of Russia had been up to 10 degrees higher than normal. But when expert readers of the two leading warming-sceptic blogs, Watts Up With That and Climate Audit, began detailed analysis of the GISS data they made an astonishing discovery. The reason for the freak figures was that scores of temperature records from Russia and elsewhere were not based on October readings at all. Figures from the previous month had simply been carried over and repeated two months running.

The error was so glaring that when it was reported on the two blogs - run by the US meteorologist Anthony Watts and Steve McIntyre, the Canadian computer analyst who won fame for his expert debunking of the notorious "hockey stick" graph - GISS began hastily revising its figures. This only made the confusion worse because, to compensate for the lowered temperatures in Russia, GISS claimed to have discovered a new "hotspot" in the Arctic - in a month when satellite images were showing Arctic sea-ice recovering so fast from its summer melt that three weeks ago it was 30 per cent more extensive than at the same time last year.

A GISS spokesman lamely explained that the reason for the error in the Russian figures was that they were obtained from another body, and that GISS did not have resources to exercise proper quality control over the data it was supplied with. This is an astonishing admission: the figures published by Dr Hansen's institute are not only one of the four data sets that the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) relies on to promote its case for global warming, but they are the most widely quoted, since they consistently show higher temperatures than the others.

If there is one scientist more responsible than any other for the alarm over global warming it is Dr Hansen, who set the whole scare in train back in 1988 with his testimony to a US Senate committee chaired by Al Gore. Again and again, Dr Hansen has been to the fore in making extreme claims over the dangers of climate change. (He was recently in the news here for supporting the Greenpeace activists acquitted of criminally damaging a coal-fired power station in Kent, on the grounds that the harm done to the planet by a new power station would far outweigh any damage they had done themselves.)

Yet last week's latest episode is far from the first time Dr Hansen's methodology has been called in question. In 2007 he was forced by Mr Watts and Mr McIntyre to revise his published figures for US surface temperatures, to show that the hottest decade of the 20th century was not the 1990s, as he had claimed, but the 1930s.

Another of his close allies is Dr Rajendra Pachauri, chairman of the IPCC, who recently startled a university audience in Australia by claiming that global temperatures have recently been rising "very much faster" than ever, in front of a graph showing them rising sharply in the past decade. In fact, as many of his audience were aware, they have not been rising in recent years and since 2007 have dropped.

Dr Pachauri, a former railway engineer with no qualifications in climate science, may believe what Dr Hansen tells him. But whether, on the basis of such evidence, it is wise for the world's governments to embark on some of the most costly economic measures ever proposed, to remedy a problem which may actually not exist, is a question which should give us all pause for thought.

President Bob the Builder

The other day, Janae was watching Bob the Builder. As any parent of a 4 year old knows, the constant theme through the video's is this mantra of "yes we can!"

As the video played, I thought, "Wow, that sounds familiar."

I probed the deep recesses of my pea brain, and sure enough, I now know why that sounded strangely familiar.

"Yes we can" was the mantra chanted at so many Obama campaign stops. Even at his big bash in Chicago election night. "Yes we can!"

So, we elected Bob the Builder for President. A cartoon character.

"Yes we can('t)!"

My, how far we've come...

GVB Reunion Clip!

Oh yeah!