Category: Of Random Interest

Facebook Friend?

I just learned that one of my friends is being recruit­ed by the Face­book.

I real­ly hope this works out, because then I’d be the coolest per­son in cam­pus min­istry by dint of that asso­ci­a­tion.

Pic­ture me at the next Chi Alpha con­fer­ence: “Par­don me, I need to take this call — my caller ID says it’s from Facebook.com Head­quar­ters. I’ve been urg­ing them to rethink the way they han­dle groups and I think the con­ver­sa­tion we had at a BBQ last week is final­ly bear­ing fruit.”

Now all I need to do is get an alum­nus into Google…

Georgetown Evicts Evangelical Groups

George­town Uni­ver­si­ty just kicked six cam­pus min­istries off cam­pus.

Cam­pus Min­istry Removes Affil­i­ates — The Hoya (cam­pus paper)
George­town Rejects Evan­gel­i­cal Groups — Inside High­er Ed (col­lege news blog)

Chi Alpha was among the groups banned. Pray for God’s peace and wis­dom to attend the lead­ers of the group as they decide what to do next.

At Stan­ford we are for­tu­nate to have a very strong rela­tion­ship with the Deans for Reli­gious Life. How­ev­er, the news from George­town is a reminder that this isn’t the only pos­si­ble state of affairs.

Paul was very wise when he remind­ed Tim­o­thy to pray for his impe­r­i­al over­lords.

“I urge, then, first of all, that requests, prayers, inter­ces­sion and thanks­giv­ing be made for everyone—for kings and all those in author­i­ty, that we may live peace­ful and qui­et lives in all god­li­ness and holi­ness.”
1 Tim 2:1–2, NIV

I often tell stu­dents that this is the foun­da­tion of a sep­a­ra­tion of church and state. We want the gov­ern­ment (and any oth­er bureau­crat­ic bod­ies) to leave us free to wor­ship with­out oner­ous over­sight or reg­u­la­tion — because exter­nal involve­ment nev­er works out to our advan­tage in the long run.

In any event, my prayers are with those just boot­ed from George­town (and with the Chi Alpha folks in par­tic­u­lar as sev­er­al of them are close friends).

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.