Facebook, Thuggery and Repression of Speech

Michelle Malkin posts images and documents regarding an anti-war activist who was so motivated to advocate for peace that he stalked and assaulted a college Republican. You won't believe your eyes.

Joyeux Noel (2005)

I saw this film a few weeks ago at a retreat and was moved to tears. It dramatizes actual events from Christmas Eve 1914 on the front lines of war to end all wars. German, French and Scottish soldiers laid down their arms and declared a temporary cease fire to celebrate Christmas. A mass was led by a Scottish priest serving as a medic.

It is inspiring and tragic, much like war and life. It is wonderfully made and the casting is perhaps perfect. There are Christians to revile and emulate in this film. It is provocative but not hamfisted.

It is perhaps intended to be a blanket anti-war statement. This is due to the never stated reasons for WWI. Set the events in WWII and the moral ambiguity begins to lift (cf. Spielberg). Perhaps it is intended as a criticism of The Great War only

I hope to own this film and watch it every Christmas (along with A Christmas Story, A Christmas Carol, The Polar Express, The Grinch, The Snowman and the first Andy Griffith Christmas episode) because it truly captures the spirit of Christmas with its portrayal of Christ-like sacrifice.

Merry Christmas Uncle, God save you!

My Rating: Own it

A Liberal Christian on Liberals

Jim Wallis:

"However, we both know that there are powerful voices on the Left that have no tolerance for faith. As I said, I won't name names, but here are just a very
few specifics: I've been attacked publicly by leaders of major progressive
organizations who've said that the Left has no need for religion. They've said
that religion, "whether conservative or progressive" should have no place in
politics. "It's still religion," they say. I remember one particularly lovely
comment from after I'd done a talk at a progressive political gathering (with me
still in the room), saying that the kind of religion I subscribe to "puts signs
out in front of churches that say 'Jews and gays need not apply – just white
Aryan men!'" That kind of diatribe says much more about that person's own
experience and view of religion than it does about my track record over three
decades.

Friends on the boards of major progressive publications tell me
they have fought this kind of intolerance of religion for years. A few brave
writers in those magazines, who aren't even religious themselves, have labeled
this "shooting ourselves in the foot," which is where I got the title for my
response to your piece. Friends who've tried to help the Democratic candidates
understand religion have been marginalized and disregarded – until after
embarrassing losses. I've had Democratic members of Congress who are people of
faith tell me for years that they felt marginalized within their party as people
of faith; that they were not really allowed to speak as who they were as people
of faith. And for those who don't think the Democrats have appeared hostile to
religion, read the polls. That can't just all be blamed on Fox News. "

Stinky Blogger

The New Blogger works like this. When you write a new post and click the publish button, it posts it immediately. Except when it instantly loses the post forever without a trace.

Teen!

Today my daughter turns 13. I'm not afraid.

Tifah

Denver - Music - Tifah - westword.com:

"'We, by no means, want to contribute to any sort of tension between the
idea of Christian music and non-Christian music,' Al-Attas emphasizes. 'We play
in a lot of churches and Christian venues, but we also play in a lot of bars and
clubs that aren't religiously affiliated at all. It's really important to us to
be able to play in both of those places. "

Semantic Theory meets the Web

I miss Philosophy of Religion

Steve Hays:

What examples of evil in the world would count as *gratuitous* evil *according to Christian theology*?

That’s the question?

Boston Missacre

I spent all day with my family in the Boston airport waiting for ice pellets to turn to rain or snow. Nope.

So I'm up late checking flights for tomorrow. But not too late to blog!

Rational Response to Rational Response Squad

Triablogue:
Brian Insapient of the Irrational Response Squad Refuses to Put His Money Where
His Mouth Is

Isn't Rational Response Squad the secular equivalent of Campus Crusade for Christ? Only with better use of New Media? I'm just, ya know, wondering.

Amazing Grace (2007)

Tonight I saw Amazing Grace. It was a faithful and powerful history lesson reminding us that William Wilberforce is a name that should set beside those of Abraham Lincoln and the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. in our pantheon of civil rights leaders.

The faithful history depicted in the film leaves a story long on dialogue and short on action. If however you are like me and enjoy well written dialogue delivered by talented orators, this film will be very satisfying.

The story is so inspiring to me that it almost seems too good to be true. This has been the case with many films based on exceptional history like Seabiscuit, Miracle and Cinderella Man.

The superior aspect to this story is it's field of competition: not a track, rink or ring but a human race. The battle is waged with ideas so capturing it's rage is both difficult and important. The Wilberforce story is a treasure that has long been obscure in the popular mind. In sincerely hope this film embeds itself in our cultural literature.

The actors are superb. Albert Finney and Michael Gambon are both titans in powerful display. I was struck with the thought that had the men in the film lived in the day of Wilberforce and Penn they very likely would have been orators of Parliament. Such is their ready skill with the spoken word.

The film kept pulling me along, scene after scene, with compelling and revealing detail of the abolition of the slave trade. Some of it's scenes are the very paradigm case of the virtues they depict. Surely the film will be widely used by educators, moral, political and otherwise to illustrate how to plant and grow a movement that changes the world.

My Rating: Own It

An Inconvenient Truth Shines Through

I'm so glad the Internet is able to broadcast information like this. I probably won't see this in a documentary at Sundance anytime soon:

Nigel Calder: What does the Intergovernmental Panel do with such emphatic evidence for an alternation of warm and cold periods, linked to solar activity and going on long before human industry was a possible factor? Less than nothing. The 2007 Summary for Policymakers boasts of cutting in half a very small contribution by the sun to climate change conceded in a 2001 report.

Disdain for the sun goes with a failure by the self-appointed greenhouse experts to keep up with inconvenient discoveries about how the solar variations control the climate. The sun’s brightness may change too little to account for the big swings in the climate. But more than 10 years have passed since Henrik Svensmark in Copenhagen first pointed out a much more powerful mechanism.

He saw from compilations of weather satellite data that cloudiness varies according to how many atomic particles are coming in from exploded stars. More cosmic rays, more clouds. The sun’s magnetic field bats away many of the cosmic rays, and its intensification during the 20th century meant fewer cosmic rays, fewer clouds, and a warmer world. On the other hand the Little Ice Age was chilly because the lazy sun let in more cosmic rays, leaving the world cloudier and gloomier.

The only trouble with Svensmark’s idea — apart from its being politically incorrect — was that meteorologists denied that cosmic rays could be involved in cloud formation. After long delays in scraping together the funds for an experiment, Svensmark and his small team at the Danish National Space Center hit the jackpot in the summer of 2005.

In a box of air in the basement, they were able to show that electrons set free by cosmic rays coming through the ceiling stitched together droplets of sulphuric acid and water. These are the building blocks for cloud condensation. But journal after journal declined to publish their report; the discovery finally appeared in the Proceedings of the Royal Society late last year.

Thanks to having written The Manic Sun, a book about Svensmark’s initial discovery published in 1997, I have been privileged to be on the inside track for reporting his struggles and successes since then. The outcome is a second book, The Chilling Stars, co-authored by the two of us and published next week by Icon books. We are not exaggerating, we believe, when we subtitle it “A new theory of climate change”.

Obama Supports the Troops

Instapundit.com -: "WHAT OBAMA SAYS ABOUT THE WAR"

Click the link.

Going to see Amazing Grace

I'm going to see a sneak preview of Amazing Grace this afternoon. It should be really good.

There's great clips and such at http://amazinggracemovie.com/

World Trade Center (2006)

Tonight (or this morning) I stayed up late and watched World Trade Center. I was bummed that I didn't see it in the theatre.

It was outstanding. Most amazing was Dave Karnes. He's almost too good to be true.

"As for Dave Karnes, his role as one of two Marines to locate McLaughlin and
Jimeno by searching the pile when the professional rescuers had backed off is
based on reported accounts and fictionalization, since he didn't cooperate with
the film's producers. Rather than work on a picture in Hollywood, Karnes
re-enlisted in the Marines at age 45 "to go after the people who did this so it
never happens again," as he told me. (When his first tour of duty didn't take
him to Iraq, he re-upped for a second tour and made it to the combat zone,
serving 17 months there.) In the movie, Karnes leaves his Wilton, Conn., office,
dons his old Marine fatigues, stops to get a Marine Corps haircut, and visits
his pastor on his way to Ground Zero. While these events are mostly accurate,
the film seems to overplay his zeal without conveying his motivations and
reasoning. In reality Karnes wanted to dress the part of a Marine for access to
an all-but-sealed Lower Manhattan. In the movie, many of Karnes' lines are
cryptic religious references that make him seem like a robotic soldier of
Christ—a little wacky and simplistic. This may be why test audiences didn't
believe he existed, according a report in Newsweek. The man I interviewed, while
he embodied extraordinary inner conviction, was a real human being who took
risks that most of us didn't."

It's a great movie. It didn't make me angry the way United 93 did. Probably because it focused on the bravery of those who responded to aid victims in the attack. This film isn't easy to watch but it's worth your time.

My Rating: Big Screen

A Great Ministry Opportunity for the Church

The Suburban Christian: As I just said in the comments to my previous post, when I was researching my suburbs book, I came across the statistic that 46% of people living below the poverty line live in the suburbs. And that figure is a few years old, so it doesn't surprise me that it's higher now. (I looked around the Census Bureau's site to see if I could find the report or news release about suburban poverty now being higher than urban poverty, but I couldn't find it offhand.) As Bob Lupton said in his book Renewing the City, "Poverty is suburbanizing."

He makes a great suggestion of suburban churches developing ministry to needy people through caring for and providing cars. Makes sense.

Gisburne: Victim of Google Fascism?

"They can have my internet, when they pry it from my cold dead fingers."

Seriously, this is disturbing.

Atheist Nick Gisburne was fine on You Tube while he was skewering Christians, but when he turned his attention to Islam, it turned out the you in You Tube didn't include him after all.

Even though I'm not an atheist I am angry at Google's decision to curb speech because of it's content. Please don't call it You Tube any more. Call it Google Tube or something equally undemocratic.

Glenn Reynolds sums up the obvious whirlwind awaiting Google and all of us:
"Christians who want similar consideration from Google will presumably have to start blowing things up and beheading people. As I've noted before, it's quite unwise to create this kind of incentive structure. I thought the Google people were supposed to be smart."

Join me as I visit Matthias for clues on how to give You Tube a little free speech.

Video: Pat Dollard on Iraq, media bias, and George Clooney

Video: "Pat Dollard, interesting guy."

Click the link. It's a fresh perspective worth a few minutes.

PeaceMaker - A Video Game to Promote Peace

The Game :: PeaceMaker - A Video Game to Promote Peace: "Genre: PeaceMaker is a role-playing game with a high level view of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. It is not a first-person shooter."

See the demo here.

Update: I was just reading in An Army of Davids the other day about video games and how they actually can be educational. I'd like to try this one out. It looks fascinating.

Adult Sink

DRUDGE REPORT FLASH 2007®: "I am sure you are aware of recent events in which a component of an Adult Swim marketing campaign made Turner Broadcasting the unintended focus of controversy in Boston and around the world. I deeply regret the negative publicity and expense caused to our company as a result of this campaign. As general manager of Cartoon Network, I feel compelled to step down, effective immediately, in recognition of the gravity of the situation that occurred under my watch. It's my hope that my decision allows us to put this chapter behind us and get back to our mission of delivering unrivaled original animated entertainment for consumers of all ages."

Good for him.