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This is a won­der­ful inter­view. There are so many great lines. My favorite may be:

Q: How are the sharks cog­nizant enough to keep bit­ing peo­ple while they’re fly­ing through the air?

A: If you were a shark and you found your­self fly­ing through the air, wouldn’t you keep bit­ing? I think you’d be pret­ty pissed about being plucked out of your nice famil­iar ocean where you’re king of the preda­tors, and you’d prob­a­bly take it out on who­ev­er got in your way. Hon­est­ly, I don’t under­stand why peo­ple are so per­plexed by this con­cept. The log­ic is unde­ni­able.

Google for the trail­er.

We asked the writer of Shark­na­do some very seri­ous ques­tions

Tonight, Syfy debuts the great­est shark dis­as­ter epic since Shark­to­pus. It’s called Shark­na­do. And yeah, it’s about a tor­na­do — full of sharks. Thun­der Levin wrote the script, and we caught up with him to ask some philo­soph­i­cal ques­tions about this impor­tant film that forces us to ques­tion the very nature of real­i­ty itself.
io9: Is there any sci­en­tif­ic basis, how­ev­er ten­u­ous, for shark­na­do?
Thun­der Levin: Yes. There are numer­ous con­firmed repor…

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I gen­er­al­ly like this sort of approach, although I don’t think it works as well when com­par­ing poet­ry to prose. I think the Psalms still have pride of place when mea­sured in terms of thoughts.

What Is the Longest Book in the Bible?

Hint: it’s not the Psalms.

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For my fel­low min­is­ters — words to con­sid­er by Assem­blies of God super­in­ten­dent George Wood.

The Con­gre­ga­tion­al Tithe

When I served as pas­tor at New­port-Mesa, God direct­ed us to pri­or­i­tize mis­sions giv­ing. Sev­er­al years after my $30,000 goal, I began feel­ing that the church ought to do cor­po­rate­ly what we ask peop…

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Great thoughts by my friend Ben. My favorite bit, “Rain­bows aren’t tech­ni­cal­ly illu­sions. They are exact­ly what they appear to be, its just that you’re see­ing dif­fer­ent images from many micro­scop­ic objects to form the com­plete pic­ture.  That’s why rain­bows are so amaz­ing!  They have noth­ing to hide because they are them­selves a rev­e­la­tion!  They are proof that every beam of sun­light is made up of all the col­ors you can imag­ine, but its only when refract­ed through a cloud of tiny water drops that those col­ors split out so you can see them.”

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Very encour­ag­ing.

For­get About Evo­lu­tion and Inerran­cy (for a Minute)

“What about evo­lu­tion?” This was her ques­tion. It was a ques­tion that before this day I was pre­pared to answer. I had read Ken Ham, been through the Mor­ris train­ing, and watched all of the Hov­ind v.…..

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How quick­ly aca­d­e­mics turn on their fel­lows when they betray the pre­vail­ing ortho­doxy. Thomas Nagel has the audac­i­ty to hold views such as this: “If the mate­ri­al­ist, neo-Dar­win­ian ortho­doxy con­tra­dicts com­mon sense, then this is a mark against the ortho­doxy, not against com­mon sense. When a chain of rea­son­ing leads us to deny the obvi­ous, we should dou­ble-check the chain of rea­son­ing before we give up on the obvi­ous.”  This, of course, gen­er­at­ed huge push­back. “In a daz­zling six-part tour de force rebut­ting Nagel’s crit­ics, the philoso­pher Edward Fes­er pro­vid­ed a good anal­o­gy to describe the basic mate­ri­al­ist error—the attempt to stretch mate­ri­al­ism from a work­ing assump­tion into a com­pre­hen­sive expla­na­tion of the world. Fes­er sug­gests a par­o­dy of mate­ri­al­ist rea­son­ing: “1. Met­al detec­tors have had far greater suc­cess in find­ing coins and oth­er metal­lic objects in more places than any oth­er method has. 2. There­fore we have good rea­son to think that met­al detec­tors can reveal to us every­thing that can be revealed” about metal­lic objects. But of course a met­al detec­tor only detects the metal­lic con­tent of an object; it tells us noth­ing about its col­or, size, weight, or shape. In the same way, Fes­er writes, the meth­ods of “mech­a­nis­tic sci­ence are as suc­cess­ful as they are in pre­dict­ing and con­trol­ling nat­ur­al phe­nom­e­na pre­cise­ly because they focus on only those aspects of nature sus­cep­ti­ble to pre­dic­tion and con­trol.” Mean­while, they ignore every­thing else. But this is a fatal weak­ness for a the­o­ry that aspires to be a com­pre­hen­sive pic­ture of the world.”

Inter­est­ing through­out. 

The Heretic

Last fall, a few days before Hal­loween and about a month after the pub­li­ca­tion of Mind and Cos­mos, the con­tro­ver­sial new book by the philoso­pher Thomas Nagel, sev­er­al of the world’s lead­ing philosoph…

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This was a very inter­est­ing read. “Unfor­tu­nate­ly, a few years lat­er my mar­riage ended—a pain known too eas­i­ly by too many. At this point, the divorce allowed me to explore my homo­sex­u­al­i­ty for the first time in my life. At first, I felt lib­er­at­ed. I dat­ed some great guys, and was in a cou­ple of long-term rela­tion­ships. Over sev­er­al years, intel­lec­tu­al hon­esty led me to some unex­pect­ed con­clu­sions: (1) Cre­at­ing a fam­i­ly with anoth­er man is not com­plete­ly equal to cre­at­ing a fam­i­ly with a woman, and (2) deny­ing chil­dren par­ents of both gen­ders at home is an objec­tive evil. Kids need and yearn for both.”

I’m Gay and I Oppose Same-Sex Mar­riage

While reli­gion and tra­di­tion have led many to their posi­tions on same-sex mar­riage, it’s also pos­si­ble to oppose same-sex mar­riage based on rea­son and expe­ri­ence.