Category: Of Random Interest

What Is The Internet?

A friend recently asked me what the internet was. Evidently there are some strange theories floating around out there, such as the one Jon Stewart mocks in this clip:

So I gave her an explanation and she said she thought some other non-technical friends might appreciate it, so here it is.

Your computer has a few key components — a CPU, a hard drive, RAM, and an Operating System. Everything on your computer is completely obedient to your Operating System.

If you have two or more computers in your house, you can set up a network between them. When you set up a network, you’re basically adding additional components to your computer. But these additional components are obedient to different Operating Systems than your own.

So your Operating System has to ask the other computer’s Operating System for permission before it does anything like read a file from the other computer’s hard drive.

To set up a network, you need to tell the computers two ground rules: what “language” to speak with one another and how to find other computers on the network.

The Internet is the largest network of computers ever created. There is a standard language (TCP/IP) and a standard way to find other computers (the unique IP address that every computer on the internet is assigned). 

Whenever you log in to a wireless network, for example, you are assigned a temporary IP address that any computer on the internet could use to talk to you. Permanently-connected computers such as webservers get permanent IP addresses.

So when we talk about the internet, we’re really talking about every computer in the world that has a legimitate IP address and knows how to talk to other computers using TCP/IP.

As a language, TCP/IP is too generic to be useful for most of the tasks we are interested in. So there are additional dialacts called “protocols” which computers can use to do things like view web pages. 

To view web pages, computers talk using HTTP — Hyper Text Transfer Protocol. That’s what the http:// in front of a web address is all about. To upload or download files computers use FTP — File Transfer Protocol.

There are a lot of different protocols.

So when you type http://news.google.com/index.html into your browser address bar, what’s really happening is that your Operating System connects to the Internet using TCP/IP and asks a more significant computer what the IP address of news.google.com is. 

Then it uses HTTP to talk to the Operating System of the computer at that IP address and asks for permission to read the file index.html. The remote Operating System uses HTTP to answer “Sure” and then passes the file along. Your computer then displays the file in your browser.

And that’s essentially what the internet is and how it works.

Chi Alpha Worldwide on the Facebook

A clever Chi Alphan noticed that the Facebook now supports global groups. So they set up one titled: XA- CHI ALPHA WORLDWIDE ‑XA (I don’t know if that link will work or not — I took out the school prefix)

So Chi Alphans worldwide, unite!

Things Which Interested Glen Last Week

Things I bookmarked last week on del.icio.us.

Disclaimer: these links are posted automatically using the excellent yawd hack and are merely things that were interesting enough to bookmark for future reference–I may or may not agree with the views expressed by the linked pages. In fact, I may not have even read them yet.

Some Thoughts On Jesus and History

An article in the Stanford Daily today caught my attention: Jesus Never Lived, Speaker Says.

My first thought was a bit carnal — how come our events don’t get the same coverage in the Daily? We almost certainly draw more people (as when Dr. Bill Craig lectured on the existence of God to a crowd of hundreds) and our views are certainly controversial (God exists, Jesus is God, sin is real, salvation is possible, etc).

My second thought was more focused: I should respond to this. I hear more and more students talking about the existence of Jesus as though there is some real controversy, so I shouldn’t let this pass without comment.

Now I wasn’t at the talk, so I don’t know exactly what the speaker said. All I know is what the article claims the speaker said. He could have been considerably more effective at making his point than the article seems to indicate. This isn’t, strictly speaking, a critique of the speaker so much as a reflection on the whole notion of Jesus being a make-believe person.

According to the article, there are two clues that Jesus never existed:
1) Paul didn’t talk about the details of Jesus’ life
2) The stories about Jesus sound pretty amazing.

So Paul didn’t talk about the details of Jesus’ life in his letters. I find this unsurprising given that I, an ordained Pentecostal missionary, rarely do so in my own letters. Even when writing letters devoted to theology I rarely talk about Jesus’ life the way that the speaker seemed to assume that Paul should have: 

“Paul never discusses Jesus’ family, his deeds, where he went or where he came from,” Carrier said. “He never discusses any of his confrontations with the authorities, nor any disputes about what he taught. He says Jesus became flesh, was crucified and buried, but he never says when or where or positions these events in any historical context.”

I rarely bring up these details because they are assumed to be the background for the conversation, in much the same way that I rarely mention the details of George Bush’s life when discussing his politics. That doesn’t mean I don’t believe in or am unaware of the fact that he has daughters — it just means that I don’t always consider them germane. 

To insist that Paul should have mentioned such details as evidence that he believed Jesus was a real person seems quite arbitrary to me, especially given that he mentions Jesus by name 198 times with absolutely no indication that he’s referring to a made-up individual. No one would argue that I don’t believe in George Bush on such grounds, and so I don’t see why we should think that this is evidence that Paul didn’t believe in Jesus.

As to Jesus’ life sounding pretty amazing — ya think? That sort of seems to be the point. The claim that Jesus was God in human form almost requires that certain amazing events occur throughout his life. So I sort of scratch my head when the guest lecturer says:

“Jesus conforms so closely to the criterion of a mythic hero the probability that he was a mythic hero increases substantially,” he said. “There are 22 features that have been identified by scholars that are commonly shared by many mythic heroes. They can be ranked with a score according to how many features they have. Jesus clearly scores at least 19 out of 22.”

…

Jesus scores higher on this scale than almost all other heroes, including Hercules and Romulus, Carrier said. Only Oedipus scores higher.

“Jesus competes for second place only with Theseus and Moses,” he said. “Everyone who scores more than 11 on this scale is most likely mythical. No historical figures who accumulated some of these features by chance or legend, such as Alexander the Great or Augustus Caesar, scores even as high as 11.” 

Well of course he scores quite high. That’s like pointing out that NBA players are tall and athletic. How do you think they score all those points? Jesus being extraordinary is simply evidence that he was extraordinary. Whether he was extraordinary by not existing or extraordinary by being God is the question the guest speaker wished to address — but his argument does nothing to tip the balance.

Against these feeble arguments stands the scholarly consensus that there was actually a man named Jesus. Why is there such a consensus? Because in addition to the Bible, there is plenty of external evidence that Jesus lived. For example:

There’s a very helpful (although incomplete) article summarizing these and other extrabiblical sources about Jesus which includes a discussion of the reliability of the Josephus text.

I think the reporter was wise to include this disclaimer the guest speaker offered:

Despite this evidence, Carrier was quick to point out that this is just a theory.

“We need to go out and interact with the community and see if it stands up to the evidence,” he said. “I’m not here declaring that this is absolutely true and it would be foolish to deny it. We’re not at that stage yet.

“The normal procedure is to assume that a person who is claimed to be historical is historical,” he continued, “unless there is a reason to doubt it. I believe this is an appropriate principle. For example, merely lacking evidence is not enough of an argument for someone not existing historically. You need actual evidence for them being mythified.” 

I am still awaiting such evidence.

My Favorite Line From My Sermon This Week

“Of course, then the witches showed up and so we didn’t get to finish our conversation.”

Richard Mouw rocks

I just finished reading Calvinism in the Las Vegas Airport by Richard Mouw (president of Fuller Theological Seminary). It was great. I’ve read one other book of his, Consulting the Faithful: What Christian Intellectuals Can Learn from Popular Religion, and I loved it as well. I’d have to say he’s one of my favorite low-volume authors.

Dog the Bounty Hunter

Dog the Bounty Hunter has to be one of the most fascinating individuals I’ve ever seen on television. If you ever get a chance to watch the show, I highly recommend it.

Dana Has Named Our Yellow Guppy

His name is “Fishstick.” 🙂

Rejected Texts For a Mother’s Day Sermon

Mother’s Day is an odd Sunday in most churches. Pastors get up and talk about Proverbs 31 or some other predictible text, and then give every lady a rose. 

I’m not actually preaching this weekend (Paula is, as it turns out), but if I was I’d be looking for a more unusual angle. For instance, here are some lesser-known verses which touch on the theme of motherhood.

  1. Psalm 109:14 — may the sin of his mother never be blotted out.
  2. Isaiah 50:1 — This is what the LORD says: “Where is your mother’s certificate of divorce with which I sent her away? 
  3. Jeremiah 22:26 — I will hurl you and the mother who gave you birth into another country, where neither of you was born, and there you both will die.
  4. Hosea 2:2 Rebuke your mother
  5. Hosea 4:5 I will destroy your mother
  6. Luke 12:53 They will be divided, father against son and son against father, mother against daughter and daughter against mother, mother-in-law against daughter-in-law and daughter-in-law against mother-in-law.
  7. Deuteronomy 22:7 You may take the young, but be sure to let the mother go
  8. Exodus 23:19 Do not cook a young goat in its mother’s milk.
  9. Job 17:14, CEV: say to the worms, “Hello, mother!” 
  10. Lev 18:7, MSG She is your mother. Don’t have sex with her.

Maybe Proverbs 31 isn’t such a bad choice after all… 😉

Please note that most of these verses have been horribly wrenched from their context to make them even less appropriate for a mother’s day sermon.

Does Anyone Else Smell Irony?

Am I the only one who finds it ironic that the multi-site church conferences are all single-location events? Just google for “multi-site church conferences” and you’ll see what I mean.

It just seems… odd.

As programmers are want to say, eat your own dog food.