Civil Commotion

Jesus joins the NRA

Two thoughts:

• I’ll bet Gina Miller is really annoyed that she didn’t think-up and use that headline herself.

• The evangelical right is insane, dangerous, and an existential threat to the United States.

J.D. Hall is an unusually stringent Calvinist pastor from Montana with a gift for self-promotion; he constantly lambastes anybody who doesn’t align with his straitened view of reality.

One of his favorite targets is Karen Swallow Prior at Liberty University, whom he complains is a heretical liberal.

That’s right: Liberty University, a known bastion of liberalism.

Anyway, Hall tracks Prior’s tweets, and had himself a regular conniption fit when Prior presumed to ridicule — get ready — him.

Yeah, well — ho-hum. Here is what interests me about this latest dust-up: Evangelical intelligentsia? Really? I emphatically deny that there is any such thing.

When an engineer sits down to make calculations and prepare design recommendations, for instance, every single line of the analysis has a pedigree that can be traced back, literally, millennia; Pythagoras, for example, flourished ~ 550 BC. The record of observations, the mathematical analyses of those observations, and the discussion and sometimes fierce fights over their interpretation, are all public record. An engineer’s analysis of a set of facts is always solidly within the continuum of proved, established, documented knowledge.

But all pastors and theologians and churchgoers are necessarily, though not always explicitly or even knowingly, presuppositionalists.

Presuppositionalism is a school of Christian apologetics that believes the Christian faith is the only basis for rational thought. It presupposes that the Bible is divine revelation and attempts to expose flaws in other worldviews. It claims that apart from presuppositions, one could not make sense of any human experience, and there can be no set of neutral assumptions from which to reason with a non-Christian.

In other words … The Bible says it, I believe it, and that’s that. A lot of intellectually dishonesty is required to be a believer — and that is the antithesis of intellectualism.

Yesterday was the anniversary of Lottie Moon’s birth 175-years ago. Since the Southern Baptist Convention’s International Missions Board has lost tens of millions of dollars over just the past two years, and is selling-off property and recalling missionaries to make-up the shortfall, there is a huge push to make this year’s annual Lottie Moon collection for missions the best ever.

Don’t fall for it: Lottie Moon’s ruined, miserable life is the exemplar for what is sick in Baptist teaching and why nobody should have anything to do with them.

Moon was engaged to a Southern Seminary professor named Crawford Toy. Toy went to Germany on a yearlong sabbatical to learn about the new methods of historical criticism which were then emerging, and came back skeptical of the literal truth of Genesis. He was fired. Moon eventually broke-off the engagement, explaining “God had first claim on my life, and since the two conflicted, there could be no question about the result.”

Toy went to Harvard, converted to Unitarianism, married, and had a long and well-regarded career. Moon went to China, from which she sent home letters complaining about loneliness. Eventually she went mad and was recalled; she died alone aboardship in a Japanese Harbor.

Daniel Akin, the president of Southeastern Seminary celebrated Moon’s decision not to marry:

Moon lived a sacrificial life in giving everything, including her chance to marry and even her own life, to reach people with the Gospel, Akin said.

“There is one living sacrifice Lottie made that I especially wish to draw to your attention,” Akin said. “Miss Moon never married, though she did receive a proposal that she would turn down.”

Because, you know, marriage interferes with total devotion to the cult. Bah.

For the past few days I’ve been busy recovering from an upgrade to Windows 10.

Out of the box, my desktop computer came with Windows 7 installed. I hated it, and upgraded to Windows 8.1 as soon as it was available. That was stable, familiar, and very fast; if Microsoft had never touched Windows again, I would have been happy.

But, no. Along came Windows 10 (for some reason, Microsoft skipped Windows 9). Windows 10 looks a lot like Windows 8.1, but has a different memory architecture. Naturally, all my applications started upgrading to be compatible with Windows 10, and started running poorly.

So, I upgraded, laying Windows 10 on top of Windows 8.1 on top of Windows 7. BIG mistake. The computer became wildly unstable, gobbling memory and prone to hanging. I fixed things by backing-up all my data and resetting the computer to OEM out-of-the-box status (a clean machine with Windows 7), and then upgrading to Windows 10. The computer runs very smoothly now, is fast and, so far, quite stable.

There is one weird thing going on, and I haven’t been able to correct it: The computer won’t connect to the router wi-fi. All our phones and tablets continue connecting to the wi-fi just fine, but my desktop computer won’t connect to the wi-fi. Here is where self-indulgence pays off: We have a large-ish house on a large lot, and the router is at one end. I installed a wi-fi repeater at the other end of the house a while ago, because I like to sit on the back deck sometimes with my laptop and work while the dogs play in the back yard — and my desktop will connect to the repeater.

Go figure. My advice is to put off the upgrade as long as your can, and then upgrade a clean system.