It’s been a little quiet around here lately, and I figured it’d be a good idea to get things updated.
Number A: I’m on a new server hosted by Dreamhost. This way I don’t have to bug Spence every time something breaks, and I don’t steal his bandwidth with my image gallery. Letter 2: I haven’t moved everything yet — the gallery is 600+ megs of pictures, and so those will need moving later. If anything else looks broken, let me know and I’ll see about fixing it.
More updates later!
Rouslan, I’d agree with you on that assessment that the Christian God is a parent. If you read the New Testament, God is referred to as a “Heavenly Father.” It’s no longer just being a follower, as in the Old Testament, but about sonship: (”Beloved, now are we the sons of God”, I John 3:2). The goal is to foster a father-child relationship with God. We are first encouraged to be followers of Paul (”be ye followers of me”, I Corinthians 4:16), then of Christ (”be ye followers of me, as I also am of Christ”, I Corinthians 11:1), and ultimately of God directly (”Be ye therefore followers of God, as dear children”, Ephesians 5:1).
However, I don’t think that’s the sole reason for the happiness of a Christian person. There certainly is comfort in the idea that a God is always watching and taking care of you, but at the same time I know plenty of people that would rather they were independent of a parent who is constantly looking over your shoulder. At the same time, the Bible encourages maturity (”that we may present every man perfect [in the Greek, mature] in Christ Jesus”, Colossians 1:28; “that ye may be made perfect [mature] and entire, wanting nothing”, James 1:4) rather than blind followership.
I’d point to a few other things that would contribute to a Christian’s happiness: grace (”Being justified freely by his grace”, Romans 3:24), peace (”Therefore being justified by faith, we have peace with God”, Romans 5:1), love (”Behold, what manner of love the Father hath bestowed upon us”, I John 3:1), freedom from guilt (”There is therefore now no condemnation to them which are in Christ Jesus”, Romans 8:1), among others. You could certainly argue that some of these stem from God as a Father, but they certainly aren’t limited to that context.
It’s definitely an interesting point you bring up though: if the Christian God weren’t a father/parent figure, would this change the foundational happiness of a Christian? I’d have to think about that one.
Damn! Let me be the first to say (read: blog) congratulations, Kyle and Stacy!
On a similar note, I hereby threaten bodily harm (read: I’ll IM you alot) to anybody who doesn’t come to the COSI Reunion Extravaganza. I’m specifically hinting towards the illustrious clarkbw and the distinguished Mr. Steve, who have gone mostly sight unseen these past few months. Considering I could probably throw stones at Bryan’s office, and I interviewed in Steve’s department, a caravan of vehicles (a carpool, if you will) of sorts could be arranged to said reunion.
I’ve recently been working on the magic of Eclipse Perspectives. Interesting way to lay out a UI. Though it can be painful. Because it’s Eclipse.
I also recently installed Fedora Core 5 on my lappy. As shiny as the Ubuntu install was that I had, I missed being able to upgrade packages outside of their bugfix releases. The install crapped out the first time through (python errors!) but went fine the second time around. What impressed me the most was the fact that suspend worked right out of the box, as well as an install of Beagle. Major kudos to the guys who worked that out. I need to “dirtify” my install by putting an MP3 codec and DVD playing stuff on there… anybody have links to good info on where to find repositories for that kinda stuff? For that stuff, and Banshee.
Life otherwise is good… busy juggling work, ministry work, and my giant timesink. Though it’s all good times. For those of you that didn’t notice, my sisters visited here recently — so I have some semi-decent pictures up of it. Hopefully I’ll get around to updating captions for them soon.
From #cosi (censored for those feint of heart):
[16:47] * Quits: ziggy (F*CK EVERYBODY. I QUIT.)
[16:50] * Quits: johnsobm (Success)
Hide your wallets! johnsobm is coming!
If any of you have ever read Dinosaur Comics before, you know it’s pretty random. Well, it gets more random with their magic RANDOMIZER! You can basically create your own comics based off of three panels from other comics. It can be surprisingly deep, whilest very funny at the same time.
A few others that I thought were deserving:
