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.