The Happy Moron

Depressing news here.
I can’t help but wonder if Jesus’ teaching on divorce applies here. He cites hardness of heart as the basis for a concession.
When human limitation reduces what would otherwise be a good and right situation to one that is abusive and untenable, it’s time for a step back.
Maybe a vow of celibacy is [...]

“But store up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where moth and rust do not destroy and where thieves do not break in and steal. For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.” — Matthew 6:20 (NIV)
A long time ago I played a ‘Christian’ version of that old board game, the “Game of [...]

Think of all the things that we forget over the course of 1000 years.
Then think of the fidelity and consistency of orthodox Christian doctrine over that same period of time.
It’s quite remarkable.
At the very least, it is most obviously not a cultural phenomenon. Because those get discarded quite quickly.
God is not a Ninja Turtle.

They both exist in measurable quantities.
They also both exist with varying qualities.
Energy has a quality. It can be organized or disorganized, and it can degrade from organization to disorganization without requiring more energy. But it canot increase its quality without the input of external energy. We call this tendancy to degrade “entropy”.
Does money also have [...]

Whenever I’m on the phone with a telemarketer or a customer service representative, I’m torn.
I’m on the phone with a person, but I’m interacting with a corporation.
I don’t know who had the bright idea to create an entity devoid of emotion and buffered from liability. It’s awful.
It’s awful because it brings me into conflict over [...]

“We can change. There has to be hope.”
UPDATE -  I think perhahps the thing that bothers me is that what he is looking for *is* knowable, but it is not knowable in the way that establishing a field of study will change.
Or maybe it’s the implicit ‘ourselves’ in this statement.
“We can change [ourselves]. There has [...]

Freakonomics posed this as “The greatest question ever asked”
The economics hook is, of course, that people act according to incentives and it’s fun to try and examine a ’selfless’ act.
It’s a polarizing topic; the post gets 200 comments where a more normal number would be around 30. But what kind of comments? I looked at [...]

What does it mean for a country to be Christian? Can you even call a country, ‘Christian’?
Well, a country doesn’t exist. It’s not a real thing; it’s just a thought we made up. So I guess a country could be Christian if we believed it was (depending on who we are).
That being said, a church [...]

From Luther’s Commentary on the Galatians:
Train your conscience to believe that God approves of you. Fight it out with doubt. Gain assurance through the Word of God. Say: “I am all right with God. I have the Holy Ghost. Christ, in whom I do believe, makes me worthy. I gladly hear, read, sing, and write [...]

It’s sad. They didn’t take their daughter to the doctor, let her die… because they thought it would be unfaithful to God.
The judge told the Neumanns this would give them time to “think about Kara and what God wants you to learn from this”.
He added that they were “very good people, raising their family, who [...]