Thursday, March 30, 2006

Great GMail Tips

Great reading for how to use Gmail the most effectively: Hack Attack: Become a Gmail master - Lifehacker.

Is Religion a Wedge Issue for Republicans?

A great article at Bloomberg.com looks at the tensions in the Repubican Party. Says one GOP pollster:
The real schism of the party is not abortion or gay rights. It's religiosity. It's whether or not you believe God's Law should be used to set public policy.
This tension seems to be brewing here in Missouri. (Thanks to Bill Tammeus for blogging the article).

Wednesday, March 29, 2006

Rejected UCC Commercial--Worth Watching

The United Church of Christ has put out some great television ads again. Apparently they are too "controversial" for network TV, but they are great and are worth a view.

Mainline churches should be silent while Religious Right political leaders get to speak their mind?Do you care?

Tuesday, March 28, 2006

Teaching the Bible in Georgia Public Schools

Georgia prepares to establish the Bible in its public school curriculum. The proposal is to allow elective classes to be taught in the history and literature of the Bible. I think the proposal is interesting and does have merit. No book has influenced Western culture as much as the Bible. However, I'm not sure the religious conservatives who are pushing this effort are ready for all the implications. There is a great amount of contemporary, mainline Biblical Scholarship that would directly contradict the message of most Fundamentalists, such as:
  • None of the Gospels were written by the names of those they are attributed to (Matthew, Mark, Luke or John), nor were any authors of the Gospels eyewitnesses to the life of Jesus. The gospels would have been written 40 - 70 years after the death of Christ.
  • The first five books of the Old Testament were not written by Moses, but instead is the editing together of a variety of different written traditions (some which descended from Oral traditions). Each of these different sources had different perspectives and agendas.
It would seem a nonsectarian, "objective" teaching of the Bible would need to take items like this seriously. I don't think this is what most religious conservatives mean when they call for a critical analysis of creation!

The Great Liberal Hijacking of America

Several weeks ago, Kansas City Star's Kit Wagar had a great story on social conversatives in the Missouri Legisalture. One of my favorite quotes came from Rep. Cynthia Davis (O’Fallon -R) who said:
It’s time to get back to the basics . . . Our country has been hijacked by liberals. We’ve had people with left-wing ideas pushing us away from what made America strong.
What is so telling about her quote is this attitude among so many in the Religous Right that they are the persecuted minority, inspite of the fact they are perhaps the most powerful political force in our nation.

Lets see, control of the Missouri House, Missouri Senate, Governor's Mansion as well as US House, Senate, Presidency and the Supreme Court. Yet Davis believes that liberals have "hijacked" our country.

Tom DeLay's CCW License Revoked

Apparently, Rep. Tom DeLay license to carry concealed a handgun has been revoked since he has been indicted. Not sure what to say, except with rights come responsibilities! ;-)

Up Again

Ok, my wonderful 14 month-old son has really put a dent in my blogging life. However, my friend, Grant, has inspired me to start my blog up again.

I also am going to play around with Blogger again. Unfortunately, my techie-side of me has thought in the past that I am too good to use a simple, "pedestrian" application like Blogger. Instead, I've been using a distribution of Drupal it is very powerful, but a real pain when the site crashes (as it has been known to do). The real question is, do I want to be a blogger or a web-code troubleshooter (the real answer is of course is that I want to do both, but I don't have time to do both!).

I have to say that I haven't used the Blogger application for several years and I'm very impressed with the advances they have made. I will have to start recovering my previous posts from the MySQL database (just to keep the techie in me happy! ;-).