delaware water gap

We went camping in Delaware Water Gap, Pa., for Memorial Day weekend with family. Had a great time too, despite the difficulty of sleeping on rock-hard ground in temperatures that were dipping into the 40s at night.

Saturday night in fact I awoke at 1:30 a.m. and ended up sitting by the fire the rest of the night with my older brother Herb, who also had woken up and was unable to get back to sleep. Nice bonding time between us, which is nice, since the two of us normally don't get much time together and have fairly different views on life. (He got a real kick out of it when he made us fried eggs and I got yolk in my hair.)

One of the highlights of the trip occurred Saturday afternoon. Herb, who is an avid fisherman, had brought about four or five fishing rods for himself, his two children and the other kids to take down to the pond and have a go at fishing with.

Herb spent a while getting the rods prepped, cast them out into the water and then let the kids have a go "fishing with them." Not surprisingly, within about 10 minutes, all the kids had lost interest and went off exploring with one relative or another, or were just finding other ways to entertain themselves.

All the kids except one.

Yes, Rachel had decided it was a lot of fun to pick up one of the fishing poles and move it back and forth gently. About 20 minutes into the trip, something started pulling on her line. Herb grabbed the pole and brought it in, and wouldn't you know, Rachel -- 1½-year-old Rachel -- had caught a bluegill. None of the other kids caught anything, even though their interest was suddenly renewed a thousandfold.

Incredible, isn't it? Here I am, 33, and my 19-month-old daughter has caught more fish than me.

scumbag, i never knew you

I just discovered that "scumbag" is a slang word for a used condom. I had no idea.

It makes sense, though, once you're aware of it. I mean, it never occurred to me, but it seems kind of obvious.

le petite francaise

My daughter not only in teaching herself to read and write, she is now teaching herself French.

Several months ago, I was playing games with her and changed the langauge options on one of her favorite Disney films. She found that fascinating, and started asking me how to say one thing or another in French. (I had to substitute Creole, since I don't parlez Francaise myself.)

Wouldn't you know that for the past two days, she's asked me to play "Beauty in the Beast" in French for her? She even calls it "La Belle et Le Bete," and I swear I heard her singing along with some of the songs -- in French.

Mon Dieu! Elle est une prodigie, ne c'est pas?

school memories

When I was in first grade, they started me out in the advanced reading group, probably because my older brothers had tested as gifted. Two weeks or so into the year, without being told, I was bumped down into a slower group, and apparently the teacher actually told my mother that she would have to accept that I would never be as smart as my older brothers. She and one of the other teachers/vice principals or something actually tried to tell my mother that I was at least semi-retarded. (It actually turns out that I had the highest IQ of the four of us.)

In all honesty, I can say that the only thing I'm grateful to Mrs. Hlavsa for is that she did teach me how to read. The rest of first grade was a nightmare where I would do anything to get out of class. I peed my pants so regularly that it was almost a drill; I lied and pretended to be sick on at least one occasion so I could leave school.

I guess I have to say I'm disappointed my parents never pushed to get me out of that woman's class, but to their credit they did make it absolutely clear that my younger brother was not to be put in her class under any circumstances two years later, even though that would have been the district's normal policy. (I think it had something to do with where children lived.) The only nice thing I can say about Mrs. Hlavsa is that she did teach me to read. She made me a nervous wreck and insisted I write with my left hand -- I'm right-handed -- so that to this day I still have a bad stammer when I get nervous or excited, but at least she taught me to read.

My big break came in second grade, when I got a decent teacher, and then was IQ tested, and then in third grade when Mrs. Cromer let us go at our own pace, as I mentioned earlier.

Something good about schools, to lighten the tone: In fourth grade, our teachers made an arrangement that involved rotating us to different classrooms for math, science and English. My math teacher was Mr. Ernett, a man who was generally good with students and didn't tolerate attitude or misbehavior.

One day as recess ended, Mr. Ernett saw me punching the boy in line in front of me, and pulled us both out. Darren Shumaker, who I had been hitting, claimed to have no idea why I punched him. When I explained that Darren had been picking on me nonstop all year, Mr. Ernett proceeded to chew him out for what seemed to me to be ages. His entire lecture to me was, "Don't ever do that again," followed by a stern warning to Darren that if he ever picked me again, Mr. Ernett was going to make him wish he had never been born.

That guy remains my favorite teacher to this day.

the antichrist

Let me pose this question: Must there in fact be an Antichrist? Many Bible scholars believe the term refers simply to anyone who raises himself to the level of a god, and that the beast mentioned in Revelation is simply Nero himself, that John was prophesying the fall of Nero and the end of the Neronian persecution.

That depends at least in part on the date Revelation was written. If it was written prior to A.D. 70, that interpretation is a possibility. Written after A.D. 90, as it traditionally is held, it can't be referring to Nero unless it's a "reverse prophecy"; i.e., the Johannine author made up the prophecy after the fact.

The European Union is the current bogeyman because the book of Revelation appears to be describing Rome, and the Roman Empire hasn't been a player in over a thousand years. Ever since the Protestant Reformation under Luther and others, the Roman Catholic Church has been a popular contender for the role now being assigned by lay scholars to the European Union. During the Cold War, the Soviet Union was "prophesied" to usher the Antichrist in to power, remember? That was one of the reasons Gorbachev was seen as the Antichrist, because he was offering real peace between the Soviet bloc and the West for the first time in decades.

The Antichrist is also interesting because he's changed over the years too. Luther and other reformers were called the Antichrist because they were breaking the Church; before them, I'm sure Mohammed was called the Antichrist since many early Muslims had been Catholics. The papacy has been the leading contender for Antichrist under many generations of fundamentalism, although I've heard some groups insist the Antichrist will be Jewish. These days, with East and West seemingly headed toward collision, I'm sure there are groups claiming the Antichrist will be an Arab. (I've also heard some say that the destruction of the Twin Towers on 9-11 was the fall of Babylon talked about in Revelation, since New York is the cultural capital of America's global empire.)

We usually make the Antichrist whoever our demon of the moment is, whether it makes sense or no. It's a shame, really, since that also means that we blind ourselves to what the Bible really says about the ultimate fate of those who aggrandize themselves and defy the will of the Almighty, and miss how we can apply those Scriptures to our present lives and situations.

presidential requirements

There's been some mindless banter recently about amending the Constitution to allow naturalized citizens to run for the U.S. presidency. I doubt anything will come of that, so let me add this suggestion to the fire, since nothing will come of it either:

In addition to the current requirements -- born in the United States or to American parents overseas, at least 35 years old at the time the term would begin, current citizen who has lived at least 14 years in the country -- let's add one more requirement. Anyone who would be president of the United States also must have lived in another country for at least two years. Maybe we also should require fluency in English and a second language.

Think of what that would do for the country. We'd be led by someone who actually understands how other nations view the United States, who could see the ramifications of U.S. policy on those other places, and who probably would have a lengthy personal history with citizens of that other country.

And if the president can speak a second language fluently, so much the better for understanding the rest of the world.

Let it be so ordered upon my ascendance to the rank of world ruler.

Or maybe we should amend the U.S. Constitution to require that the president drink beer.

going deeper

This is going to be rather lengthy, so I hope you'll bear with my mental and verbal meanderings a bit.

Where should I begin? I suppose I should start by saying what a number of you already know about me. I've been disaffected with American Christianity for years for a number of reasons, but mainly because of its unbiblical preoccupation with the self. I've commented to several people that the big lie of evangelicalism is "God loves you, and has a wonderful plan for your life," because it has entirely the wrong focus. It's not about what God wants to do for us and how he wants to shower us with blessings, make us happy and fill our lives with cute frolicking puppies.

It's about how God wants us to be like him, the better to proclaim his glory before the nations.
A lot of noodleheads talk about all the neat stuff Jesus has done for them and how he wants to do neat things for us. While there is some truth to that — there always is — the big truths that Jesus reveals in the gospel aren't about making us happy. When he was grilled on which part of the Torah was most important, his response was this: "Hear O Israel, the Lord, the Lord our God is one. And you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, all your soul and all your strength." From there he went on to say that the second greatest commandment is like the first: "Love your neighbor as yourself," which I've always understood as meaning you can't keep the first commandment unless you're keeping the second.

That also happens to be the message of the Parable of the Sheep and the Goats. That parable should be troubling to most evangelical thinking, because the distinction made between the sheep and the goats is what they did to do, and what they failed to do — not what they believed. The goats were believers, like the sheep, but they had failed to feed the hungry, visit those in prison, clothe the naked and so on. The message Jesus has for them is, "Whatever you did not do to the least of these, you did not do to me." Elsewhere in the book of James, that writer says point-blank that faith without works is a dead and useless faith.

What I'm getting to is that I don't believe Jesus wants people who worship him on Sundays and relate to him only in a vague and generally approving way. He calls us to a radical change in lifestyle that flies in the face of everything the world holds dear, that goes against every self-preservation instinct we have and involves a commitment to putting the needs of others before ourselves. He never promises us money. He tells the rich young ruler, "One thing you lack: Go sell everything you have, and give it to the poor. Then you can be my disciple." He never promises us happiness. He tells his disciples that they'll be persecuted, ridiculed and thrown into jail for his sake and the gospel's. What he does promise is pain and suffering, and he demands that we take him up on it. "Unless you take up your cross daily and follow me, you cannot be my disciple." Essentially, what he says is, "Follow me, and die, and I'll give you a life and a joy you never dreamed was possible."

I'm reminded once again of Ole Anthony, the founder of the Trinity Foundation in Dallas, Texas. A speaker once asked him to share what God had done for him lately, and Anthony pretty much ruined the service by saying, "God has screwed up my life today, the same way he has screwed it up every day that I've followed him, because he isn't interested in me as much as he is in seeing his son reflected in me."

Bingo. That's what it's about. Either I can screw up my life by going my own way and letting sin ruin everything around me, or I can give my life over to the Lord and let him screw it up for his glory. Of the two of us, I know who has a better idea what he's doing.

Of course you know all this. I've talked about it with several of you ad nauseum, even as I've tried to figure out what it is I'm supposed to be doing. You've watched, prayed and cried with me as I wrestled to save my foster son from the tremendous neglect he experienced his first two years, and you saw how it absolutely ripped me open when he went back to his parents and walked out of our lives.

Some of you know about the volunteer work I did at the Northampton County Jail when I was living in Easton, Pa., and I'm sure all of you know that I lived for two years in the Port-au-Prince area in Haiti, and how I first really started to deal with issues of poverty and human suffering and the church's willingness to pretend it's not there.

Where is all this leading? Well, after a long sleep, I think the caterpillar is finally getting ready to leave the cocoon, its chrysalis complete. (Sounds flowery, doesn't it? I'll have to remember it if I ever make a speech on this subject.)

It's been about two years since our old church fell to pieces. In that time Natasha and I have been to more churches that we have toes, put together, and while we've finally found a church that we're settling for, I don't think we've found a church we want to settle into.

No, I am not interested in starting a church. Nice guess, though.

What I am interested in starting is a community of believers, here in Nova Bastille. Think: Trinity Foundation. Think: Jesus People USA. Think: a group of people who are living in the same general geographic area, sharing all things in common (or pretty damn close to it, anyway) and doing what they can not only to help one another but to help the people around them.

Nova Bastille is a spiritually dark place. The high school dropout rate is about 50 percent. There are gangs that operate pretty freely, even in the schools; a police force where some of the cops were convicted two years ago of running a brothel; race problems among the city's black, Hispanic and white populations; and all the other various problems that plague inner cities. On top of that, our city administration is tearing down the affordable housing and replacing it with luxury apartments. It's abusing its eminent domain authority to shut down viable, homegrown businesses that people have owned and operated for years, just so it can redevelop the area and make it all pretty. I don't know about you, but I consider the gentrification of an area to be a spiritual issue — it’s the oppression of the poor to line the pockets of some guy who's already rich.

This is a city that needs hope. This is a city that needs Jesus Christ.

There are some ministries in Nova Bastille already that do good stuff. Elijah's Promise, for example, is a soup kitchen that feeds the hungry twice a day. That's good, and I intend to go down there Saturday to volunteer.

There's more to it than that, though. The sort of deliverance this city needs is going to come from a committed group of believers who are willing to put everything into the kingdom of Christ and live by faith. I can see a few things such a community could do: providing a newspaper to give the common people a voice and instill a sense of pride in what is good about Nova Bastille, providing English lessons or other tutoring to students and adults alike, repairing cars for just the cost of parts so that people don't lose their jobs because they can't afford to fix their cars, running a community garden to help build a sense of community, cleaning up litter and washing up graffiti, helping to build housing through the projects of Habitat for Humanity, and providing homes to foster children. (You knew that one was going to be in there, didn't you?) And of course, this is all done in the context of the gospel. There could be Bible studies, group worship, various forms of outreach and evangelism, and so on.

I've already spoken to a few friends of mine from my old church, and they were excited to hear what I'm thinking. I'll be honest: I have no idea if what I'm considering is coming from God. I know myself pretty well, and I know that I'm prone to running off on flights of fancy where I get an idea in my head, and then dropping it two weeks later when things don't work out quickly and easily. It might be that this is just such another mindless fancy, although I hope not. What I'm envisioning is something biblical, and I don't doubt it's the sort of thing that God would delight in — if it's his time.

I'd appreciate your prayer for Natasha and for me as we discuss this and reach out to other people to see if they're interested. I don't know how exactly this would take shape, whether it would involve people moving into Nova Bastille or us moving within Nova Bastille, or something else. It might also turn out to be some idle fantasy of mine that will blow over in a few weeks. I will say this, though: I'm tired of being where I am. I've been settling for mediocrity spiritually, and I'm watching as the world finds its place in me as more and more junk accumulates in my life, from a DVD player with a huge collection to a stack of comic books that could kill a mule to just about everything else in this room.

Jesus Christ has got to be the most radical, liberal man I've ever met. It’s time I started acting more like him.

being labeled gifted

My teachers in elementary school rarely had any idea how to handle students who were advanced. My third grade teacher actually let us advance at our own pace. By the end of the year, I was on a college reading level.

Then, I hit fourth grade and was required to stay on reading level. As a result I got so bored that my grades in reading started to slip and I was placed in an intermediate-level reading class. It wasn't until seventh grade that I had a teacher who realized that I was bored silly from being held to below my reading level, and I was moved up again.

I dunno. I've never been wild about most forms of entertainment that my peers embrace. I'm generally clueless about what's hot in terms of TV, and don't get much out of the popular stars and movies. I'm much happier reading books -- including well-written comic books -- than I am watching TV. Socially I'm a lot better adjusted than I was as a child, which is good, but I still feel out of place with most groups of people.

You know, this sort of reminiscence is convincing me more than ever that I want to keep Evangeline out of public school. She's only 4 years old, but she's already academically ready for first grade. She can write her own name and Rachel's, she's incredibly artistic, and if we applied her to it, she could probably learn to read by the end of the year.

Naturally the public school won't even let her attend kindergarten this fall, since her birthday is Oct. 30, two weeks after their cut-off date.

School easily can end up being a disaster for her

landover baptist

Satire is one of thos tricky areas, where you have to balance between pointed humor and just plain old-fashioned mean-spiritedness. Landover Baptist Church is a web site where I think the owners take their satire across the line quite a lot. It's especially bad when they get onto the issue of sex.

The church has had a lot of unnecessary histironics on sex, and it deserves to be lampooned for that, but I think the Landover people go too far. It just gets too vituperative to be effective. It's hard to quit, though, because the lowest common denominator is always going to appeal to a large group of people, as they found with their Jar Jar Binks sex toy article, and there is a perverse pleasure in raising the ire of your critics.

Smirkov and I had a debate on this subject with the Brothers Grinn one time. We were doing something with Jesse Helms, and I was going the same route the Landover people do -- take someone who's already a little loud and pushy, and turn him into a real fire-breather. As Smirkov pointed out, that's the easy road, and it's not particularly funny. Everyone does that with Helms, and it just gets mean after a while.

What I did in the end was to make Jesse Helms into a deeply sensitive man who always wanted to be an actors. It's his publicist who is so vicious, and scripts everything for him so that he has earned a reputation as a bit of a bulldog. As luck would have it, the interview with the Brothers Grinn was something he was able to arrange without his publicist's involvement, and our readers were treated to the rarely seen real Helms, including his soft tears over the people he's had to hurt because his publicist made him.

Much funnier, I thought. It'd be nice if the Landover people tried that too.

cultural illiteracy

Americans have a despicable lack of awareness of their own culture. I knew one guy who was amazed to discover that the Good Samaritan comes out of the Bible, and I talked with a reporter once who thought that Pharoah sent the Ten Plagues on Israel because they wanted to be let go. (She swore up and down that that was what the rabbi had told her for her Passover story.)

I essentially grew up in a very different culture from my peers because I severely lacked the social skills to interact with them and survive. It wasn't really until I was an exchange student in 11th grade that I became comfortable enough with other people to reach out and make friends, and even then I greatly preferred the company of books, which don't delight in making you feel miserable. (Well, Dostoevsky's books do, but that's a different sort of miserable.)

You can learn critical thinking skills by studying quality TV as well as by studying Shakespeare, but when we ignore our cultural heritage and forget our own history, we also forget ourselves and forfeit our future.

Personally, I blame Reagan.

tigons and ligers and bears, oh my!

And from what I was able to tell from the sites I read, all the great cats are interbreedable, although it's usually only the females that are fertile. Actually, even Felis domesticus, the common house cat, is interbreedable with the great cats, except primarily for difficulties involving size.

I find this terribly fascinating. It suggests to me that all the cats had a common ancestor, whether on the Ark on evolutionarily. If on the Ark, then speciation apparently can be a rather rapid process. Going with the young earth model, we're talking from one cat species into many in only 5,000 years or so.

Speciation would be fueled by adaptation and natural selection, as well as behavioral changes and various and sundry mutations and activations/deactivations of genetic sequences. Interesting, no? I've had to do some rethinking of my views on evolution as a result of this. Thank God my wife has a master's degree in it and can explain the different theories to me.

I find the whole thing interesting. For tigers, panthers, leopards, lions, cheetahs and so on to be interbreedable and capable of producing fertile offspring does suggest that they had a common ancestor. Evolutionarily that's what would be expected, but it's not exactly square with the standard creationist/young earth ideas, especially since it means that the species diverged that extensively in that short a time.

I'd also have to raise the question of whether this means the animals are evolving, or devolving. The Cat from which contemporary cat species are all descended presumably would have been one in which all the current genomes were present, which means the new species have lost a lot of their genetic diversity. It also means that the Cat was a versatile creature and spread to a number of very different habitats, and that many of its descendants or successors lack its adaptive ability. A panther can live in the rainforest, but a lion would have a hard time there, for example.

You can see a parallel in human development. We've settled into distinct racial or ethnic groups, but intermarriage is still possible among our many populations, probably because humanity has always been a free-ranging species and we're always going to other parts of the world and conquering the people already there. I mean, look at Europe: conquered by the Greeks, the Romans, the Germans, the Huns, the Moors, and that's still just the Middle Ages.

liberal media bias

I was only 6 when Carter became president, and only 10 when he lost re-election to Reagan, but I remember quite clearly that he was viewed as a dimwit for several reasons, including his mangling of the pronunciation of the word "nuclear." Other great failings on his part:

• Iran hostage crisis lasted over a year, had a badly botched rescue mission and American handling overall displayed a poor understanding of Shi'a Islam. 
• Inflation was out of control.
• Gas rationing, energy crisis.
• Went by Jimmy instead of James or Jim.
• His wife, Rosemary, had dandruff.
• His daughter, Amy, read a book at the table during a state dinner.
• Boycotted Olympics in Soviet Union to protest human rights abuses.

And the list goes on. Bush's problems with image and media treatment are hardly unique to him. Cast your memory back about six years and you might recall the media being accused of having it in for Bill Clinton in the way we covered the Monica Lewinsky affair. Clinton complained about a year into office that no other president had been picked on by the media as much as he had.

It's par for the course. Dring a president's term, he gets blamed for everything wrong and credit for little right. Most presidents come out all right in the long run once there has been time for the rabid partisans to move on to their next target or object of veneration. History's even been somewhat kind to Nixon.

There's a great scene in "The Paper" where a city bureaucrat is flipping out about the media treatment of his department as a total disaster. "I know it's a mess," he screams. "It was like that when I got the job. Why are you blaming me?" The reporter's answer? "Because it was your turn."

No, that's not really fair, but at least it's consistent.

apocalypse of the chaldeans

Taken from the Forum of Iniquity:
¹And as I looked, there arose from the sea a great dragon, and on the dragon were 22 heads. ²And the heads all lived in the basement of the dragon's mother.

³The blue head was made hip and with it, and it was given youth to taunt the older heads with their great senility, which flummoxed them to no end, because the older heads all believed they should be able to hold their own against a teenager.

⁴There arose against the dragon a host of trolls, and the trolls mightily assailed the dragon, but it cared not. ⁵And several of the heads tormented the trolls for their spelling mistakes and basic grammar errors, until the trolls fled in terror.

⁶And a voice from heaven said, "Woe! woe! woe! to the inhabiters of the earth. Behold! The heads of the dragon have eaten the fat of many nations, and still they are not sated!"

⁷And the people beheld it was true, as the twenty-two heads infiltrated the thirty-seven nations and there was defilement of the public forums therein ⁸and the stench did reach to the heavens.

⁹And a chartreuse angel came riding on a dappled horse, bearing with it a book containing the iniquity of the age. ¹⁰And the book was opened.

¹¹The dappled horse read from the book. ¹²With the voice of authority, from the book the dappled horse read.

¹³"Behold," spake the horse, "I tell you of the coming of Fred, that all nations may behold his power, and speak his name with reverence and fear."

¹⁴And on the foreheads and right hands of those who follow Fred and count his heads there was affixed a mark. ¹⁵And those who refused to take the mark could not buy or sell cabbages, newspapers, pet lemurs or escargot. ¹⁶The mark looked like a Nike swoosh, but upon those with blue-dyed hair, it was barely noticeable.

¹⁷Now this requires discernment, plus a moderately elevated blood alcohol level: You shall know the 22 heads of Fred by his number: 42.

¹⁸Blessed are they who do not take the mark, and blessed also are those who do not listen to ccm, for their promos shall be delivered from the hand of Gunter, and they shall know peace.

easter and pesach

A friend of mine and I today were talking about his visit home for Passover yesterday, and it hit me what a good thing the Jews have set up in the way they celebrate the seder.

The seder, as probably everyone knows, is a meal that is filled with structure, layered with meaning, and replete with teaching. The elements of seder, laid out in the book of Exodus and developed further in the Talmud and Midrash, remind children and adults every year about their Jewish heritage. Through the ritual, they remember the suffering of their ancestors in Egypt and the deliverance God brought them through Moses in exquisite detail. Each element of the meal from the horseradish down to the matzoh refers back to some element of the Exodus story. It's a fantastic way not only to educate children about the religion, but to keep the Jewish identity intact despite all the pressures to conform to a non-Jewish society.

By contrast, when we celebrate Easter this year, most of us are going to go to church like we do every other Sunday, although some of us might dress up a little more, and then we'll go home and eat an Easter ham with spend time with family.

That's nice, but I can't help but think what we're missing out on. When Jesus ate that final seder with his disciples on Maundy Thursday,1 he added new layers of meaning as reinterpreted each element of the meal to refer to himself, from the lamb to the glass of wine to the matzoh. I doubt the average Christian household would even know where to begin that process with our own Easter meals. Passover can tell the story of the Exodus and the Passion; my Easter dinner is mostly just a nice family time.

It doesn't have to be that way, though. When missionaries brought the gospel to our pagan ancestors, they used elements of the pagans' belief systems to explain the gospel. The renewal and new beginnings that the Anglo-Saxons looked forward to with the arrival of Easter met its fulfillment in Christ, and so the trappings of Easter celebration -- like eggs and rabbits, symbols of beginning and fertility -- were reinterpreted along those lines.

Last year, I turned the question of Easter eggs over and over in my mind and sought a way to use them to teach my children. I finally hit upon the egg as a type -- when we boil the egg, it changes from being runny to being hard. In the same way, Christ uses the trials of this life to change our inner being. And, just as dipping the egg into the dye changes its color, so we can be changed to look like Christ when we immerse ourselves in him.

The Easter basket I turned into a living parable. We search for Truth and when we find it we're glad and we treasure it, just as we search for the basket and are happy for what it gives us.

I'd like to do more with the Easter dinner, though. Some of the family traditions we have are nice. Eowyn likes to eat holiday meals by candlelight, just like I do; and there's the foods we "must" have or it's not Easter, like the ham and the mashed potatoes and what have you.

But I really want to see if we can do what the Jews do with Passover, and turn the day into more than just a family get-together and meal to feel good over. Easter is a different day for us too. It marks the day we were set free from slavery to sin and really experienced the joys of God's love and forgiveness. If Passover can be a meal to pass the faith down through the generations, so can Easter.

But I'm stuck for how to do it. Any suggestions?

1 I did point out to Josh, and he agreed, that Christians have much neater names for the individual days of Holy Week than Jews have for the days of Passover. Although we have the lame and predictable "Palm Sunday," we also have Maundy Thursday, Good Friday, Holy Saturday, Easter Sunday and Easter Monday.

Of course, as I also mentioned, Jewish holidays have much nicer-sounding names than Christian ones. Christmas, Easter, Pentecost and Advent just can't hold a candle namewise to Yom Kippur, Rosh Hashana, Hanukkah, Sukkoth and Pesach.

Plus, if Constantine had converted to Judaism, we'd get three weeks of vacation every year, since Passover, Hanukkah and the High Holy Days each run about that long. We really shot ourselves in the foot by making sure that Easter always lands on a weekend. What management stooge thought of that?

mars in the news

1) What was Mars like when it had water?
Wet.

2) What happened?

Somebody pulled the drain plug and let the water run out. There was a terrible glug-glug-glug noise that caused widespread panic across the planet, and Osayra was forced to unbody millions of hrossa, sorn and other creatures, including the funny frog ones with the P name and the humanoids from Edgar Rice Burrough's "John Carter" series.

No, seriously, the world tree drained all the water resources of Mars, and nearly did to Earth as well, but for the quick thinking of Hanville Svetz. If you don't believe me, read Larry Niven's historical novel, "Rainbow Mars," which provides an in-depth account.

A troll over at CHRefugee is entertaining us with some proofs that Mars used to be earthlike planet until a meteor changed its orbit, and that people used to have advanced flying technology.

It's all because of the aliens. Naturally.

His argument cites the book of Ezekiel as one example of an ancient encounter with a UFO. UFOlogists love that book because Ezekiel details a vision of a wheel on fire in the sky. Clearly, a UFO sighting. Why? Because they want it to be. A pothead might look at that same passage and say that Ezekiel was smoking dope, just as someone else could look at the book of Revelation and say that St. John the Divine was eating psychadelic mushrooms. Each group is looking at the passage to see support for their own position, without stopping to weigh the passage on its own merits and evaluate the claims it makes about itself. This is the kind of logic that allowed Aristotle (?) to prove that women have fewer teeth than men and some Christian fundamentalists to prove that women have one fewer ribs than men.

That there have been flying machines long since before Jean Picard or the Wright brothers is pretty well documented, even if it's not something the average schmoe is aware of -- but that's a "machine" in the simplest sense of the word; i.e., a hang-glider. I'm aware of one myself from medieval Europem and I think Ray Bradbury wrote a story based on an old Chinese legend about a hangglider a few thousand years ago. The idea of a technologically advanced flying machine is an anachronism that is supported only by raping the text to see things not contained in it.

The UFO interpreation Ezekiel passage, for example, takes a pretty dim and condescending view of the ancients, that they would see something advanced and unfamiliar and automatically try to force it into a superstitious worldview. Come on, really. Are we honestly supposed to think people were so stupid that they couldn't tell an encounter with corporeal entities from one with incorporeal ones?

As for Mars being knocked out of orbit, well, I think what we're missing here is the notion of a cosmic billiards game. Picture it: God says, "Red planet in the corner pocket," and shoots a giant meteor through the solar system. It strikes Mars, knocking it into a highly eccentric orbit before ricocheting off the fifth planet. This planet it shatters, leaving a belt of asteroids, and then swings back and hits Mars again, giving it that second orbital thrust to stabilize the orbit again.

Unfortunately, God misunderstood the nature of a gravity well and failed to sink Mars into any such well but its own.

Game ends, God loses. A fight breaks out in the pool room, and we have a war in the heavens.

finding a good location

I would think geothermal activity would be something not to get too close to, given the potential for the planet wiping out the colony on short notice if it's having a bad day. And since we're talking about a young planet, geologically speaking, there's bound to be a fair amount of volcanic activity and even tectonic shifting. That's why I figure there's just one Pangaea type of continent.

I agree the minerals and ores would be important, which means of course that we would need some sort of prefab equipment for boring and for processing what we find. Again, such a camp probably should be located a safe distance from the colony because of the nature of the work.

If the materials are readily enough available, I would suggest building a number of habitats, so that ecosystems of savannah, tropical and other life can be established early on. That would be a structural engineering feat, though, since we would need a lot of space to get the ecosystem established properly, something close to a thousand square miles per ecosystem.

And no concrete bases, either. They found at Biosphere 2 that concrete takes decades to cure, and in a closed system it gradually causes the air to go anoxic. Perhaps we would grind the top 10 feet of soil into small rocks and rock dust -- more prefab equipment -- and secure the supports into the rock beneath somehow, then dome the entire enclosure. Probably should do the rock grinding anyway, just so we can start creating alien soil.

And of course that means we'll need compost or some earthly soil to help establish the soil on our alien world, which will be bereft of life. So we'll need to pack a ton of that -- several tons, actually. Maybe a cubic mile? That should allow us to create an inch or two of top soil over a lot of surface area, and two to three inches of top soil in our farming areas.

If concrete becomes necessary for the bases, we'll need a way to correct the oxygen problem, since the plants won't be able to support the ecosystem and cure the concrete at the same time. Maybe we could supply each ecosystem with a mechanical air converter, or with a supply of liquid oxygen that can be released when levels in the air start to get too low.

I think it really would be necessary to do more than wait for the algae to convert the atmosphere for us.

colonizing space amid alien life

Would you take part in colonizing another world? It's meant as a serious sci-fi question.

I myself would love to, and probably if it were to come when I was in my early 20s, I would jump at the chance. Now that I'm 33, married and have two children -- and all that that entails -- reality almost certainly would prevent me from leaving, since that would mean uprooting all of us from all our friends, family and loved ones. The separation would be too irrevocable, and I don't think I'd be able to content myself just with lightspeed communication, given the number of years that would pass between communiques.

And since superluminal travel is out of the question, well, like I said, I couldn't see myself doing such a thing at this point in my life, though I would always think wistfully of our distant kin.

My initial thought would be a world where there is no other life, but the question of intelligent life on other worlds is an interesting one.

Someone -- I think it was Beethoven Brucker -- mentioned a story where a Christian missionary tried to bring the gospel to an alien race, who had no understanding of the Christian concept of sin. The evangelism didn't go very well. The aliens were utterly freaked out, and ended up crucifying the missionary, thereby introducing their own fall.

Ray Bradbury has done two stories on the subject. In one, "The Man," he has a crew of astronauts landing on a world where Christ has just been and just departed. I don't remember much else about it. I think it was included in "The October Country." His second one was in "The Martian Chronicles," and showed a missionary trying and utterly failing to interest the Martians in his religion since it was something they had no use for.

Some time ago I toyed with the idea of a story around space travelers encountering intelligent life on other worlds, only to discover that the intelligent life in question is human, having been there since humanity was scattered after the Tower of Babel. Still might be a story worth developing at some time.

In any event, I think the question of bringing sin to other planets is a moot one. I don't think there is life elsewhere, and if we talk about a barren planet, I don't think the planet will suffer much for being awakened by life. If there is life elsewhere, I rather imagine it's fallen too. If not, true, we would bring our own sin to it, but think of what we could learn of grace by mingling with an unfallen people.

oxygenating atmosphere on acheron

The idea of using algae to assist in creating the appropriate atmosphere has occurred to me, but my concern there would be that it will take millions of years to reach the point that the atmosphere is breathable if algae are the only or even primary means of changing the atmosphere. You would need to seed the ocean and other major bodies of water, obviously, but it's going to take forever for them to reproduce enough to make a major difference, especially since a lot of the oxygen they produce is just going to be absorbed by the water anyway. It's only after the water reaches the saturation point with oxygen that it's really going to start entering the atmosphere.

Aquatic plants also would need to be down below the surface far enough to block out the ultraviolet light until an ozone layer had developed. Most likely the initial colonies of marine life will be in something like Sea World, with an eye toward eventually releasing the animals into the wild once the food chain has reached the point that it can support the larger animals. But with an ocean of the size we're talking about, I imagine we're talking about thousands of years without a major concerted effort.

I'm thinking some sort of apparatus would be needed that could be mounted on the continent's rocky surface, or rather embedded in the surface. I'm also imagining that if it's going to make any sort of progress in changing the atmosphere, it's going to move a tremendous volume of air in a very short period, kicking up whirlwinds everywhere, and probably igniting the gases in the current atmosphere as the oxygen is let loose.

Obviously not something our colonists will want to live right next to.

Probably they would be in a dome-covered hometown, maybe five square miles or so, so they can establish a farming ecology until they can open the dome or build other dome-covered habitats. But you're going to need a lot more than five square miles to establish a healthy, self-sustaining ecology.

As to the tigon question, my understanding is that tigons are one of the results of crossing tigers and lions. (The other being a liger.)

But am I correct in thinking that cheetahs, leopards and panthers also are capable of interbreeding with lions and tigers? I remember hearing a while ago that ecologists were distressed to discover that the Florida panther had gone extinct -- not by being hunted to death, but by interbreeding with other great cats so that the Florida panther genome no longer existed.

I remember talking the point with my high school biology teacher. If the basis for calling two animals different species is based solely on their appearance or the differing habitats they prefer, then they're not really separate species. They're just different breeds or populations of the same species, with perhaps different grooming or mating habits or a different social structure, but that's it. It's just sloppy taxonomy to insist on classifying them separately.

sci-fi and fantasy

Sci-fi can encourage a materialistic worldview whereas fantasy can encourage a greater awareness of the spiritual world because it's true. Yeah, some sci-fi horror stuff purports to deal with the supernatural, but it does it all through technobabble about other dimensions and superstring theory. In other words, it essentially says, "It can all be explained scientifically." Fantasy says, "There are supernatural worlds out there that we'll never understand by reason alone."

chthulhu sightings

In the Classic Trek episode "What are Little Girls Made Of?" the Enterprise visits a planet with Roc, an android who has been tending the machines for so long even he has forgotten how long.

Roc occasionally makes reference to the Old Ones, all supposedly dead. The design of the sets and costuming also was supposed to resemble some Lovecraft settings. Oh, and Roger Korby -- the antagonist of the episode -- has a plan to replace humanity with machines, basically killing all the humans in the process.

The rather forgettable Lawrence Fishburne sci-fi movie "Event Horizon" also has some obvious Lovecraft influences as well. The ship's hyperdrive -- it employs an artificially created black hole -- opens a portal to a dimension of infinite evil that drives everyone into a suicidal/homicidal madness.

I also recently found another Cthulhu tribute that I'm surprised I never noticed before. It's in Larry Niven's "World of Ptavvs," in which Kzanol is released from billions of years in stasis.

Why does this matter? Well, Kzanol is a thrint, a race of telepathic beings who ruled the galaxy billions of years ago. A race -- or group of races, more likely -- called the tnuctipun eventually found a way to throw off the thrints' telepathic dominion and started a huge war that led to the extinction of the thrintun race. Kzanol missed this entire war because he was in a stasis field at the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean.

During the billions of years he has been asleep, his entire race has gone extinct, taking with it all intelligent life in the galaxy. In the meantime, intelligent life has evolved from the yeast farms the thrintun had seeded on planets such as Earth and the Kzin homeworld.

The humans have discovered Kzanol's stasis field and find a way to open it. His psychic blast drives thousands of people insane. Others suffer tremendous nightmares. And the race begins among Kzanol, the Belters, the Earth and a human telepath who thinks he is Kzanol to recover a psychic amplifier that will allow Kzanol to rule the entire earth telepathically.

He's also a rather ugly creature with one eye, and with tentacles around his mouth. Since humans evolved from the food yeast the thrintun grew on the planet, he finds us quite tasty.

Hmm. A member of a very old race, asleep under the ocean for billions of years, his waking drives men mad and heralds the possible end of human civilization, and he's even got the appearance.

I can't believe I never noticed it before.

end the culture war

The best way to end a culture way is to stop shooting bullets.

Members of the media aren't the enemy of the pro-life mission. I'm pro-life, and always have been. I've attended the March for Life a few times, I've attended peaceful demonstrations, and I've written a number of articles and columns that present my pro-life views directly, tacitly or subtly. No one's ever protested that or tried to run me out of the business.

While I've known a few jackasses, most journalists aren't anything like that. We have our blind spots and our shortcomings, and yeah, sometimes we have our own agendas that help determine what stories we report and how we report them. We're human.

Talk to me levelly and fairly, treat me with respect, and chances are I'll be willing to admit to some of my failings, and I'll even try to correct them. A friend of mine did that with my views on the Second Amendment and how I report on firearms. I'm looking for a chance to do a story on guns as a sport, so I can present a side of the story that often gets overlooked because of the deaths that often stem from irresponsible gun owernship.

That sort of skill at dealing with people is something I think many of the most outspoken pro-lifers lack. Yeah, maybe it's not fair that a good many journalists are pro-choice. What can I say? Life stinks. I wish more of my colleagues valued life the way I do. They don't.

There is a pronounced tendency in the church, particularly among Christians who are outspoken politically, to deal with the media with a massive chip on our shoulders. Such attitudes do little to engender understanding or sympathy for any cause. There are groups I've dealt with that shoot themselves in the foot regularly because they view the media with distrust every time, and regularly use the media's forums to reinforce the negative relationship. Self-righteous condescension doesn't win many converts.

The way to get journalists to change their attitude toward abortion and toward pro-lifers isn't to scream about bias and deliberate efforts to discriminate or suppress the truth. If someone does that to me, I shut them out, even if I agree with them on the important issue. I don't have time or patience for vitriol. The message is in the delivery as much as the content.

PETA makes the news as often as it does because their actions are patently ridiculous, and they're usually stunned by the negative reactions they get. In that sense they're like many pro-lifers: as a group that mingles among itself, it just can't understand how anybody can possess the same facts and not leap to the same sense of moral outrage.

a shift in the tone

A friend of mine has pointed out that no one he knows from Pittsburgh understands how to ask questions. When we do ask something, the pitch of the last word, instead of being slightly elevated, comes out either flat or as part of a sing-son series of words, so that it sounds as though the Pittsburgher has left a sentence unfinished.

Illustrated with punctuation marks, this means the Pittsburgh native says things like, "Do you want to see the movie." Or "Haven't I seen you before."

Vince went on to make a remark about Pittsburghers' insistence on using the word "pop" to refer to soft drinks. (He also noted that Midwesterners usually pronounce it as "pawp.") At was at this point that Vince suddenly and unexpectedly was ejected from my vehicle.

As I later told him, any true Pittsburgher will defend to the death our use of the word "pop" since that is the correct common noun to use in reference to soft drinks.

kerry for aristide

John Kerry says in The New York Daily News that he would have dispatched the armed forces to keep Aristide in power.

It sounds like Kerry is just using this as an excuse to disagree with Bush, but I'll give him the benefit of the doubt and assume he wants to see Haiti's fledgling democratic government endure. I still disagree with him.

There were more questions about Aristide's election than about Bush's. Whether we believe the Supreme Court gave him the election or think Gore should have won because of popular vote is to some degree irrelevant. He won the general election through the processes our nation has set up, and probably with no more corruption in his camp than was in Gore's. You can't say the same about Ti Tid's election. The reports of fraud were so bad there that many governments refused to recognize him as the legitimate winner and pulled their aid for the nation. The questions surrounding his election were one of the stated reasons for the insurgency.

Committing to keeping Aristide in power would be a costly move in terms of manpower, and probably in lives as well. True, our forces are better equipped and better trained than the Haitian military (although many of them graduated from West Point). But that hasn't exactly helped in Iraq, has it?

By the time the Marines removed Ti Tid from the national palace, the insurgents already had captured most of the nation's big cities. Cap Haitien, Gonaives, Jeremie and so on were all under their control. Aristide had Port-au-Prince, but that's about it. His biggest supporters, the people from the slums of Cite Soleil and Carrefour and other such places, were and are in those places (except where they've been executed), and they've demonstrated a remarkable tenacity and determination to fight, even after his departure. Failing to remove Aristide would have put these two positions in a position where they would have been fighting in close quarters, and would have left our troops in the crossfire.

And to be honest, having encountered some pretty appalling racism in our Marines stationed in Haiti, I can't say I would expect them to handle that situation with a lot of finesse. I can see a lot of unnecessary casualties in Haiti coming from a prolonged occupation of the type that Kerry is describing, with a comeasurate increase in anti-American sentiment.

Besides, with the American military backing his presidency, do you really think Ti Tid would *lose* the next election?

It's a difficult problem no matter how you slice it, but I think Bush did the best thing in this situation.

haiti's unrest

Haiti's having an election.

Aristide's been claiming that he was abducted by the U.S. Marines. I've no idea what to make of that. I wouldn't put it past Bush to tell the troops to go in and get Ti Tid out of Port-au-Prince whether he wants to go or not, but the truth is that Haiti has about zero value to us politically, tradewise or in any other category that really matters to our presidents, Democratic or Republican.

If Bush did order the Marines to remove him, it probably was for chiefly two reasons. One, he didn't want the situation to become all-out civil war with people being massacred in the streets. That sort of intervention would appeal to him on a humanitarian level, and politically, since he probably would (deservedly) get beaten up by the Democrats and media commentators for allowing the situation to reach that point when he could have prevented it. Two, it just doesn't pay to have a situation as messy as Haiti was about to become right on doorstep, geopolitically speaking.

But in the long haul, the Bush administration probably is about as committed to Haiti as other U.S. administrations have been since Haiti won its independence in 1804. Haiti has no oil, nor gold, nor other natural resources that should make it matter to us. Its economy is dreadful, which makes it a lousy prospect for trade, and it's not being ruled by a communist dictator, so we've never had any substantial political interest in the island or human rights abuses there. (Carter was the exception. He was appalled by Duvalier's record, and refused to support his corrupt government with aid money that would just be stolen.)

Haiti has been the bastard stepchild of American politics since the beginning. There was an entire regiment of volunteer Haitians who fought for American independence from Britan, and some of those volunteers went on to fight for their own independence from France. When they won in 1804, we decided it would be a bad idea to recognize Haiti as an independent state because we had slaves of our own, and didn't want to give them any ideas. It wasn't until 1865, after the Civil War and after the Emancipation Proclamation that we recognized Haiti as an independent republic, and even so, we've never really done much for the country.

After Aristide was ousted by the first coup, in 1991, the previous Bush administration slapped the coutnry with a trade embargo that made a difficult life positively hell for the common Haitian. (You think the lack of success with trade sanctions on Iraq is something new? Economic sanctions never dissuade dictators from being tinpot bullies, and they never empower the people to rise up against their better equipped and wealthier rulers.)

Unfortunately, we've never really committed as a nation to helping the Haitian people. Boat people from Cuba are granted asylum automatically. Boat people from Haiti don't even get a hearing; they're repatriated automatically. Great solution. Bush had the military doing this even in the days right before we removed Ti Tid. If that's his brand of compassionate conservatism, I'm glad to be a bleeding heart liberal.

What's going on right now in Haiti is part of the cyclical Haitian way of life. When people have had enough of one government, they overthrow it. When they've decided that someone is keeping them down, they rise up and dechouke that person, whether he was keeping them down or not. I've heard it described this way: In America, if you have something I want, I try to go out and get one of my own. If I'm a criminal, I just steal yours. In Haiti, the more common solution is to destroy yours so that you don't have one either. So they regularly destroy their own infrastructure to keep everyone else from getting ahead. Hotels, homes, bakeries, you name it.

Democracy can't really take root there because democracy assumes certain values, mores, and education that just aren't there yet. Illiteracy estimates range from 60 percent to 80 percent; the nation officially is 10 percent Protestant and 90 percent Catholic, but if you add on "and 100 percent voodoo" you start to get a better sense of the spiritual yoke they're under.

The gospel is what that nation needs, but -- like everywhere else, I suppose -- there's a warped view of what the church is about. If you want to get rich, the answer is to become a minister. In many ways, because of the way missions is done from the United States, the Haitian church has fallen into a real serious enslavement to Mammon. I've talked to pastors who see nothing wrong with leaving their wives and children and going to the United States to serve God here. (And get lots of money, naturally.)

I don't have much faith in the current situation. Guy Philippe is connected with FRAPH, a group well-known in Haiti for political executions. A paramilitary group, it includes many former military memebers and, not surprisingly, a lot of former Tonton Macoutes. (The Tonton Macoutes took their name from the Haitian bogeyman, and were Duvalier's brute squad.) Not surprisingly, after saying all they wanted was for Aristide to leave, the insurgents now are refusing to disarm. How much do you want to bet Philippe is going to be a bid for power, either directly or covertly, as the new government takes shape?

Yet things go on. After the tense days and weeks before Aristide was removed -- and after the looting, killings and riots after he was removed -- things pretty much went back to normal, from what I'm told by friends who are still there. When you live at the subsistence level, you can't afford to stay inside for days on end. People go out and do their business, stay in at night, and life proceeds as it did before.

If you want, pray for Steve and Ruth Hershey. They're friends of mine who are down there right now, still teaching at Cradle of Life Christian School. They live in school housing with their two children. There's also Laura Busshey, who I never worked with personally but knew through STEM Ministries. She was attacked in her home by looters the day Aristide left. (Ruth, painfully, was on the phone with her at the time.) I don't how badly she was hurt, just that she was attacked. I suspect she might have been raped, but really don't know.

I also have other friends who are back in the States at the moment, named Phil and Lonnie Murphy. Phil was Stateside anyway to attend a missions conference, and Lonnie and their son David were coming to Florida to visit his sister Michelle at college. Their missions board convinced them to stay. Knowing Phil, the board probably had to work hard to do that. He and Lonnie have stayed in Haiti through at least four coups and one U.S. invasion. Both their children were born there, and they themselves probably will be there for another five to 10 years, si Bondie vlé.

Phil and Lonnie run an orphanage in the mountains north of Port-au-Prince. They used to live in downtown Port, but moved the orphanage about eight years ago so they could expand it to the next phase. In addition to raising about 20 Haitian children and teaching them valuable skills like budgeting, the value of hard work, and so on, the Murphys also are engaged in community building. They've been teaching not just the kids but their neighbors some useful agricultural techniques, from simple stuff like composting to more advanced stuff like permaculture. Their goal is to get the orphange to the point that the grown-up kids can take over for them and eventually run the place on their own.

Phil and Lonnie are really neat people. I can honestly say they had a bigger impact on me in Haiti than anyone else. They're the only American missionaries I know who are invited to participate in the lives of their Haitian neighbors, such as baptisms, weddings and funerals. You know, if anyone wants to support them, I offer the Murphys my unqualified endorsement and would be happy to share their support information.

mission: acheron

The scenario: You're preparing a ship that will travel at relativistic speeds to another star system with the express purpose of terraforming and colonizing another world. (We'll call it Acheron.) Figure it has lunar mass similar to ours to create a breathably thin atmosphere, gravity that is about 1.1 times Earth's gravity, and a single giant continent, with water covering about 65 percent of the world. Here's the catch: There is no life on this planet, which has a reducing (rather than oxydizing) atmosphere. Going on the old earth model, it's what our planet was two or three billion years ago. The land mass has cooled and solidified from the incessant rain, but the atmosphere at the moment is incapable of supporting terran life.

Obviously, that's your goal.

You have a crew of four dozen colonists, each trained in a scientific discipline that will be helpful to colonization or terraforming, and each possessing other abilities and interests that will allow useful diversions like entertainment. In cryogenic storage, you are taking the embryos of every known animal species¹ so you can establish and maintain balanced ecosystems, you are taking seeds from every known plant species,² as well as representatives of the Earth's other taxanomical kingdoms, as well as various other bits of equipment and machinery you will need.³

What equipment will you take? What sort of timetable do you project for each stage of the project? When will people be able to live on the planet? How do you see the colony developing?

One nice thing I see: very little in the way of transmittable disease. Since all the animals are being shipped as embryos, there will be no cases of avian flu or other such illnesses being passed up the food chain. The human colony also should be free of most extant human illnesses, since colonists presumably would be healthy when they depart. What illnesses do surface would be due more to genetics, nutrition and environmental contaminants, rather than viruses or bacteria. The first generation of animals probably will be somewhat retarded mentally, being as they'll be incubated and will lack the benefits of a placenta or the equivelant in their phylum, but even that will sort itself out in a generation or two.

¹ For purposes of simplification and to reduce costs, a species will be considered any two animals that can breed and produce offspring capable of breeding. Therefore, the "dogs" will be a genetic mix of all Earth's interbreedable dog species, including wolves, coyotes, dingoes, jackals and Canis familiaris. Similarly, tigons -- not lions and tigers -- are the great cat represented. (I think other great cats like leopards and cheetahs also may be interbreedable here, but I'm not sure.)^* The scientific assumption behind this is that habitat and natural selection are what led to the species divergence here on Earth, and that process will duplicate itself elsewhere. As for pedigree among domesticated animals, don't count on it. The wider the variety genetically, the healthier the herd.

² Again, some consolidation is likely. I'm not as familiar with the taxonomy of Plantae, but I imagine some of the same geographical biases in species designation have come into play there as well.

³ Machinery obviously will be more advanced than anything we now have at the dawn of the 21st century, but should be theoretically achievable. I'd accept giant machines capable of producing chemical changes in the air to produce oxygen, for example, but not warp drive, transporters or replicators. I'm talking sci-fi here, not science fantasy.

^* Does anyone know of any other such combinations? This is actually an interesting point for me, because I think it's relevant for discussions of Noah's ark. If tigers and lions are capable of interbreeding and producing fertile offspring -- as they are -- I would argue that they better are classified as breeds of the same species, rather than as separate species. Keeping that sort of thing in mind, it quickly becomes obvious that the task of getting the animals on the Ark wasn't quite as impossible as some skeptics claim.

'the sandman'

 Read it, loved it, and I quit too. FIrst thing I remember consciously agreeing with the Morningstar on.

I've had a few friends and colleagues with similar disdain for comic books, but I keep winning them over. I regularly buy my wife the "Strangers in Paradise" trades because she can't get enough of them,and a friend of mine from WCN Newspapers is now well and truly hooked on Sandman. I just lent him "Fables and Recollections" and "The Kindly Ones" to get him on the home stretch. Working at WCN, Brian doesn't have the money to buy them, but he loves a good horror story and figures he probably will buy them later on.

And of course, he was hooked enough that I was able to get him to read "V for Vendetta" and since has started looking up other comics on his own. So I claim him as another convert to appreciating comic books as a latter 20th-century art form.


"A Doll's House," since it's set at a "cereal convention," does suggest some fairly graphic stuff, although most of it is left to the reader's imagination (thereby making it worse). Still, it's important because of what happens with Rose Walker toward the end of the collection; it introduces the majorly significant Lyta Hall and her son, Daniel; it relates the story of Dream's relationship with Nada; it introduces Hob and sets up Shakespeare's indentureship under Dream; and also contains the first appearance of the Corinthian, Fiddler's Green and Matthew. Each of those ends up playing a vital role in later stories.

The dead return in "Seasons of Mist," which includes the story of Edwin Paine and how he continues his education. (At least I think that's his name -- my copy is on loan to another friend.) That volume had some disquieting parts, but nothing that gave me nightmares. Mostly I got a kick out of the idea of Morningstar quitting as the Adversary, and I loved the irony of Duma and Remiel being told by the Voice to take office at hell -- especially when Remiel complained it was unjust and how he would rebel, and then realized there was nowhere else for him to go but into hell if he chose to reject the Presence.

The collections generally stand well independently. They're self-contained and give you enough information to figure out what's going on -- something made necessary by the medium, since "Sandman" originally was published over something like a seven-year period in monthly 30-page installments. I can understand a reluctance to read it -- one of the stories in "The Kindly One" actually gave me nightmares -- but the English degree-holding part of me still has to underscore the significance of the volume for the overall series.

Because it is a single cohesive work, and not merely episodic like many superhero titles, it has a certain cadence that reaches a tremendous climax in "The Kindly Ones" before tapering off into the denoument of "The Wake." Without question, it's the finest comic to come out a mainstream publisher in ages. (It's also deservedly recognized as resurrecting horror comics and breathing new life into the comics medium as a whole.)

From what I heard, Gaiman kept expecting to get canceled each issue because of the content.

I've also discovered a certain odd thrill in discovering the depths of literature and comics that Gaiman plumbed for Sandman. Cain and Abel once were the hosts of two of D.C.'s other, long-canceled horror comics, called "House of Mysteries" and "House of Secrets" respectively. I even owned a copy of an issue of the former, at one point. No idea what's happened to it since then. Prez appeared in a miserably conceived comic about 30 years ago.

we are the branches

Which branch of Christianity do you belong to?

• Roman Catholic
• Orthodox
• Coptic
• Mainline Protestant
• Evangelical
• Pentecostal
• Fundamentalist
• Liberation theology
• Other
• I'm not a Christian

Vote
In terms of views of the Bible or even most major doctrines, I don't think there are substnative differences between the labels evangelical and fundamentalist. I think the difference comes in connotation.

The Associated Press notes that the term "fundamentalist" generally is considered derogatory and should not be applied to an organization or individual unless the organization or individual so referenced uses the term in that way already. My own interpretation of that term is that fundamentalist churches usually are withdrawn from society at large, which it holds in some disdain. Fundamentlist groups also are more likely to be less educated. That's the connotation I take away from the image, anyway.

Evangelicals, however, are more likely to be involved in things like politics as a means of saving the world from itself. There might be a condemnation of society but usually less so of individuals within it. In my experience, evangelical groups often are more educated, generally speaking.

Pentecostals can be of either school, but they are marked by practices such as speaking in tongues and prophecy, and it's also -- generally speaking again -- among Pentecostals that you're more like to find some of the excess that dogged the American Church in the 1980s and 1990s.

All that said of the stereotypes, it's true that you'll find goodhearted people and knuckleheads in every sect of Christianity.

2602.20 in reply to 2602.16
That's certainly the popular depiction of liberation theology in evangelical circles, but that's a pretty extreme view. Working that way, I might well classify evangelicalism as a belief system that holds that Jesus was a hard-working member of the upper-middle class who believed that people should rise or fall on their own merits, hated welfare cheats, and thought the economy would do better if only the wealthy got to keep more of their money.

Yeah, you'll find that Marxists have used liberation theology to hijack the church in some parts of Latin America, just as you'll find that some Republicans have hijacked evangelicalism to muster the votes they need to win. Neither case should be considered a fair representation of the beliefs.

As I understand it, liberation theology teaches that the poor have a special place in God's economy. When Jesus says, "Blessed are the poor, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven," he means that: The gospel has a special relevance for the poor, and that they stand to enter it ahead of the wealthy. That's why he says things like "The Lord has anointed me to proclaim good news to the poor" and "It's easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven." That's why Jesus grew up in a working-class home, worked a simple trade, and spent his adult life primarily with the outcasts of society -- because the people society has rejected, have a special value to God.

Salvation remains by grace, through faith, but the epistle of James loses none of its meaning: Remember that he says that faith that produces no works in keeping with righteousness is a sterile, dead faith. And James -- like the prophets in the Tanakh -- has some incredibly stern words for those who make themselves wealthy at the expense of others. "Woe to you who are rich," he writes. "The wages you have denied the workers cry out against you. You have hoarded wealth in the last days." Many evangelicals I've known have been ignorant of those words, or view them as less inspired than Paul's words, "You have been saved by grace, through faith, not by works, lest any man should boast."

It's not just about money, although that's one indicator of inequity that's easy to latch onto. Jesus in his Parable of the Sheep and the Goats runs through a whole laundry list of things we're to do, and at the end of it, he consigns to everlasting fire and torment a group of people who ask with puzzlement, "Lord, when did we ever see you in need and not minister to you?" These aren't non-Christians being sent away; they're people who believed they were following.

In "The Grapes of Wrath," Steinbeck observed that the church often tells the poor just to sit back and fold your hands, because you'll be eating ice cream off gold plates in heaven. Phooey to that, I say. John the Baptist says, "If you have two cloaks, give one to the man who has none." Jesus told people to set aside their prejudices and care for the wounded, even if the wounded man was an individual who would just as soon throw stones at you as give you the time of day.

To me, that's what liberation theology is about. It's about recognizing that Christ is in the need, and responding to him. It's about meeting the needs of others, and it's open making real and physical connections with other people. It's about correcting social inequities and problems by helping the people caught in them.

That's liberating, and that's good theology.

assemblies of god

I belonged to the Assemblies of God for about seven years after I became a Christian.

My biggest problem with the AoG is one that I think someone else already has mentioned, and one that I think is endemic in evangelical circles, not just in Pentecostal ones: self-righteousness. It's fairly customary in evangelicaldom to hear about how sinful the world is, and to castigate the world for failing to be godly, all the while telling other believers how much Jesus loves them.

I think that's a pretty backward approach, personally. The message we have is supposed to be life to a dying world, but we usually reserve our words of hope for other Christians, when the prophets usually had their harshest words for those who claimed to be following God. Back when Lawrence came out of the closet in Lynn Johnston's "For Better or for Worse," our pastor wrote a scathing letter to the editor of The Ashton Express-Times blating it for pushing sexual immorality. At the same time, there was a general feeling of sympathy for Jim Bakker, that he had been judged too harshly. (Swaggart didn't come up much, but I did know a few people who still regarded his teaching quite highly.)

Growing out of that is an increasing withdrawal from the world into safe little enclaves of Christianity. The AoG churches I was involved with operated Christian schools to keep the kids safe from the evils of public schools -- parents were generally discouraged from sending their kids to a public school or secular college, if not overtly than certainly by the attitudes regularly expressed toward such institutions -- and frequently they also provide all sorts of other approved alternatives to secular society. AoG runs its own version of the Boy Scouts and the Girl Scouts -- Royal Rangers and Missionettes -- and so on.

And of course, you have all the other weird stuff popular in the Christian subculture: our own music and radio stations, our own TV shows and movies, our own T-shirts and books, and our own language, filled with words we all bandy about without really understanding. And of course there was the tendency to overlay spiritual values onto political ones. I can't recall a single negative thing being said about Bush Senior, or a single positive thing about Clinton. Pretty ridiculous.

The AoG is widely known for the emphasis it places on ecstatic experiences, particularly speaking in tongues. I really don't want to get into a major discussion on glossolalia, but I do think some of the negative reputation is well deserved. I remember one guest preacher actually *pushing* me backward so I would be "slain in the Spirit." If he were to do that today, I probably would have made more of an issue of it; as it was, I just got back up and told somebody else later what the idjit had done.

I heard a number of messages delivered in tongues while I was at the AoG. Virtually all of them were the sort of "prophetic utterance" you can find from a street-corner wingnut on any given day, a roiling mishmash of thoughts and personal convictions, delivered in a confusing ramble of King James and contemporary English, and invariably irrelevant to anything the church was going through at the time, except in the most generic way.

The emphasis on tongues and ecstatic experience took the place of solid understanding of Scripture. I was amazed at what people who have been Christians for years didn't know. Sylvia, one grandmotherly woman who attended the church the same time as me, once explained that she recently had hurt her back when she had been "slain in the Spirit," and had been told by the pastor (!) not to tell anyone about it, since that could be a stumbling block. After all, if God is behind it, no one should be hurt, right?

So anyway, Sylvia wanted to know if it said in the Bible that you shouldn't be hurt when you fall over under the Spirit's anointing. As you're probably aware, the Bible never says that you're supposed to fall over in the first place, whether the Spirit is moving or if it's just Benny Hinn waving his coat around.

That's probably the greatest flaw with Pentecostalism, actually, whether in the AoG or in the Nazarenes or some other denomination. Allowing experience to be its own validation, rather than measuring it against the revelation of Scripture, severs us from any objective standard for Truth, and allows us to be taken in by hucksters like Hinn, to be wowed by millionaires like Pat Robertson, to fall for the razzle-dazzle of prosperity gospels and to think we actually can make this a better nation through legislation and power-brokering.

That probably contributed to the distrust of intellectualism I encountered in the church, although I think this was mostly a product of the area. (The two AoG churches I was most involved with were located in predominantly blue collar areas.) This actually ended up being the last straw behind my decision to leave the church and start attending an evangelical free church with Niki, whom I was engaged to at the time.

Shirley Webber, the pastor's wife, had been teaching a series on the baptism of the Holy Spirit. Much of it was marked by an enthusiastic endorsement of all sorts of behavior that clearly the Holy Spirit had to be behind. (One was a guy who supposedly ran around his church on the *backs of pews*. The proof that this was Spirit-driven? If it weren't, he would have fallen off.)

I have a lot of questions about the baptism of the Holy Spirit and how the gifts appear to manifest in Pentecostal and charismatic churches these days. Shirley finally told me that God had told her I needed to stop questioning and just have faith.

I finished out my commitment in children's church, and left.

Actual mileage is going to vary from one AoG church to another. Still, to be fair, I should point out that there was much that is good about the Assemblies of God. For starters, they have a cool name -- much better than "Presbyterian" or "Lutheran," to pick two other churches I've belonged to in my time. :-)

Secondly, the worship truly was phenomenal at Ashton Assembly of God. Mike Poppa, who pastored the church for its first 14 years, was a man who was well grounded in Scripture and who was determined to present the gospel in a way that would be accessible to today's culture. The worship I participated in there was some of the best I have ever known. Because the church was more spontaneous than many other churches, I'd say there also was a greater openness to being led by the Spirit than in churches dead set on following the strict order of things.

Thirdly, the devotion of many in the Assemblies of God is considerable. Although I think it's fair to say the church is withdrawn from society, I think the AoG churches I attended had a pretty good turnout for Sunday and Wednesday evening services. It wasn't just a one-hour-a-week thing. People took seriously the scriptural admonition to pray, and I knew several people who took the charge to evangelize seriously as well, and went out on the streets every week. I don't personally go for that style myself, but I do recognize its legitimacy among those who are so called and so gifted.

Fourthly, the things I'm talking about were overall trends, not indicators of every person in the church. I knew other church members who objected to the emphasis on tongues and had tough questions about the legitimacy of the way tongues was practiced as a gift; Pastor Mike Poppa was a phenomenal preacher who knew the Scriptures better than many preachers I've heard elsewhere; and while there were some nincompoops who believed in the standard bogeymen and toed the line, there were others who had no problem with believers who were trying to figure it out, no matter which way they ended up going.

I showed up at my old church about 18 months ago, out of the blue, after being gone for five years. I showed up with a full beard and a ponytail, having had neither when I left. I also had a black child with me in a lily-white church. I got not one cold shoulder, and everyone who figured out who I was was thrilled to see me again. Not a word of criticism about my appearance or anything else.

Lastly, many of the problems I encountered there are problems found throughout evangelicaldom. Good luck findng a church that is free of such ills. When you do, you will ruin it by gracing it with your presence, as I surely have done to some I have attended.

perfection

Our ideas of perfection are really pretty bland. We imagine a heaven that is rather like Nirvana, where we understand everything, and there's nothing to do except sit around and bask in the radiance of God and his wholeness. There's nothing to do, no conflict and nothing else that we find imperfect or frustrating down here.

That's nonsense, of course. Adam and Eve had work to do in the Garden of Eden, and had different levels of understanding and different perspectives on things. I imagine that it'll be much the same in heaven as in Eden. We won't always see eye to eye, but we'll be able to work through our disagreements without getting angry with one another, judging or committing a sin in our disagreement. We'll be able to look at God's judgments and understand them in all their terrible mercy and justice, and be able to rejoice in them all, even the ones that now make us blanche.

And we'll be able to look at art, our own or someone else's, and recognize the beauty and value of each, and also recognize that some art is better than other art. There's no shame or sin in that; it's simply recognizing that God has gifted each of us in different ways, and acknowledging the gift for what it is. To borrow from C.S. Lewis, it'll be when an architect can look at his building, and realize it is quite possibly the finest structure ever made, and yet take no more pride or delight in it than if somebody else had made it.

my job officially sucks

So here I am at work, and I've had enough of this ####ing #### to choke a camel to death. It's 3:35 a.m. and I only stopped myself from going completely postal earlier tonight (this morning?) by taking some time off to worship and to decompress before I complete the last stretch.

This job is just too much for too little. I'm gone from home two whole days out of the week, with the result that Natasha is unduly stressed-out on those days, and she handles it generally worse than I do, which is rough on the girls.

I can't stay here. I just can't. But, thanks to years of living hand-to-mouth, we don't have a cushion to handle a period of unemployment longer than 12 hours, and we certainly don't have any insurance if I quit this job. I need to quit anyway, which I cannot do unless I can find that safety net.

The PR sideline has not taken off yet, since I haven't had time to finish the web site and finish my promotional material for the different groups I'm trying to appeal to. The only contract I have so far is the barter for art lessons, which -- nice at is -- will not pay the bills.

If I had a church, I'd be calling the pastor to see if the church can offer us any support while we take a step out, particularly support I can work for. We have no church, though, nor any real network I can fall back upon. I'm thinking of calling the pastor of the church we've been attending for the last two months, although if the truth is to be told, I'm not wild about it by any stretch of the imagination. Pillar of Fire is an island church, where they inadvertantly -- at least I assume it's inadvertant -- foster a Christian subculture that is largely removed from and uninvolved with the world at large.

I wouldn't mind returning to the missions field, but my impression right now is that we're where we're supposed to be. I don't know how much of that is wisdom, how much of it is contentment and how much of it is the world finding its place in me, but there you have it.

Natasha and I have discussed relocating at various points, but we've always ended up settling on staying in Iowa. It must be that masochistic streak.

I'm at the breaking point, and something has to give.

'exceptions' to the first amendment

First go read this article from the San Francisco Chronicle.

Now ask yourself which is worse, that the Bush administration is keeping protesters out of sight, out of earshot and out of mind, or that it's prosecuting people who exercise their free speech rights on public property anyway?

This isn't a partisan thing. This practice stank when Clinton did it too. People are being arrested for protesing on public property, not private property; and it's the side that disagrees with the president that's being pushed away. I suppose people who are opposed to a policy are more likely to be outspoken than those who support it, perhaps even violently so, but this still strikes me as a bastardly way to get rid of unwanted criticism and to make everything into a nice photo opp.

A friend of mine had these observations to make on how President Bush is handling public criticism of his actions by voters, as compared to how other political figures have handled similar situations. I thought his comments were interesting:

"I think I had read somewhere that Hu Jintao (the Chinese guy) actually was much more highly commended during his speeches abroad than Bush attending the same events, because he was accessible while Bush was not.

"Bush took a big PR hit for stunts like this. Public opinion was much more favorable towards the Chinese gov (famous for repressing individual rights) instead of the American gov (supposed to be supporting open discourse and interest in the little guy).

"Personality analyses by folks on the inside suggest that Bush looks amiable and laid back /open in his demeanor (making him seem likeable during campaign time, for example), but internally is pretty closed-minded and even a bit tyrannical. In other words, he can portray himself as flexible and amiable, even while he is not very open to change in his opinions."

That fits what I've read of Bush, and it certainly fits some of his more foolish remarks during the presidential campaign. In 2000 there was one satirical campaign web site, the name of which I can't recall at this time, that outlined a faux platform in which Bush supported early release for drug offenders who had "learned their lesson" as he had, Later, when Bush heard about the satirical site and asked about his support for such early release, he complained that the site had poked fun at him, saying, "There ought to limits to freedom."(The site for its part lauded his boldness in addressing the issue of Americans having too much liberty.)

The Bush administration in recent weeks has been slapped hard by the federal courts for its unlawful and extended detainment of noncitizens under the Patriot Act, and also ordered a hold on an EPA measure that would have relaxed our environmental standards conected to power plants tremendously. Beyond that, we're seeing a pretty lax attitude toward trade that is spelling disaster to longstanding American manufacturing industries.

I'm not impressed.

I give Bush credit for doing a tough job in the wake of 9-11, but the stands his administration has taken on civil liberties, the environment, trade and free speech really have me hoping the Democratic Party can present a candidate who I can get behind in November. It's been slim pickings ever since I became a registered voter in '88.

health care

Check out this story on Common Dreams.

I'm kind of curious to hear people's thoughts on this subject. We have insurance through my employer, but it's not exactly great. It would cost me about $80 to get a prescription filled for the topical ointment I need to treat my psoriasis. Not surprisingly, my psoriasis has gone untreated for some time, even though it covers probably about 25 percent of my back at this point. I have insurance, but I can't afford to use it.

Having a child, incidentally, would cost us about $3,000 before the insurance kicks in. Nice, huh?

I don't think I would favor national health care, on the simple grounds that it likely would make health care a total nightmare. But I have to admit, the direction we're going now doesn't seem much better.

My child, the folk musician

I was singing some folk songs today while I was making lunch this afternoon, in the presence of Evangeline. As I fumbled around, trying to remember if there is a third verse to Dylan's "Blowing in the Wind," she generated her own lyrics:

How many octopuses can fit in a room
Before they fall through the floor?
Could it be one, or maybe two?
I think it's probably four.

I think from here on that will be my favorite verse.

dora tangent

We don't actually own any of the tapes, but we rented a few from Blockbuster back in the summer, including the one with Swiper the Fox and the mantra necessary to stop him: "Swiper, no swiping! Swiper, no swiping! Swiper, no-o-o swiping!" Well, after about five exciting iterations of that, I convinced Evangeline that we needed variations.

The most enduring one has been Chomper the Crocodile, where one of us chases the other snapping our arms together like a giant crocodile mouth, all the while saying "Chomp! Chomp! Chomp!" Of course, you stop Chomper by saying, "Chomper, no chomping! Chomper, no chomping! Chomper, no-o-o chomping!"

Mindless, I suppose, but it's fun coming up with new variations every time one of us engages in a repetitive behavior like sneezing, or eating or whatever.

(Naturally, being a 4-year-old, her favorite version is something like "Poopy, no pooping!")