Chris' Blog

As I drove down the interstate today, I put on a CD that I had purchased over three years ago but had not listened to. At the time, I had believed in the dispensational belief of a pre-tribulation rapture and that was the topic of the speaker. As I listened, I was reminded of a blog post that I had read a few days ago called "5 Classic Bible Twists."

The author of that blog post wrote about the misuse of Jeremiah 29:11, John 10:10, Revelation 3:20, Matthew 22:36-40 and Proverbs 29:18. He makes excellent points. Anyone who has been around me much in discussions of courtship has heard me laugh at Joshua Harris for using Jeremiah 29:11 as a reason to "wait to date" (see verse 6). John 10:10 was quoted in my blog entry the other day.

Because of the speaker's focus on the "end times," he started in Matthew 24 with the disciples' discussion about the splendor of the temple. Jesus' statement that the temple would not last much longer shocked them. Then the speaker read verse 4:

There seems to be a lot of confusion about why Jesus came into this world. Here are some of the statements in Scripture, for your perusal:

But go ye and learn what that meaneth, I will have mercy, and not sacrifice: for I am not come to call the righteous, but sinners to repentance.

—Jesus, Matthew 9:13

When Jesus heard it, he saith unto them, They that are whole have no need of the physician, but they that are sick: I came not to call the righteous, but sinners to repentance.

— Jesus, Mark 2:17

John answered, saying unto them all, I indeed baptize you with water; but one mightier than I cometh, the latchet of whose shoes I am not worthy to unloose: he shall baptize you with the Holy Ghost and with fire: Whose fan [a winnowing fork] is in his hand, and he will throughly purge his floor, and will gather the wheat into his garner; but the chaff he will burn with fire unquenchable.

— John the baptist, Luke 3:16,17

USA Today reported... er... Yesterday that:

FEMA's National Flood Insurance Program is the nation's main flood insurer, created by law in 1968 as private companies stopped covering flood damage. The program insures 5.6 million properties nationwide and aims to be self-sustaining by paying claims from premiums it collects.

Instead it's running deeply in the red. A major reason, a USA TODAY review finds, is that the program has paid people to rebuild over and over in the nation's worst flood zones while also discounting insurance rates by up to $1 billion a year for flood-prone properties.

What do they mean that FEMA has paid people to rebuild over and over? I'm so glad you asked.

In Fairhope, Ala., the owner of a $153,000 house has received $2.3 million in claims. A $116,000 Houston home has received $1.6 million. The payments are for damage to homes and what's inside.

The discount applies on second homes and properties that are rented out to others:

While I can be a glutton for punishment, verifying Javascript arrays can be more than I want to deal with. If you print an array:

<script type="text/javascript">
var testarray = new Array(
    new Array(1, 2, 3, new Array(4, 5)),
    new Array(6, 7, 8, new Array(9, 10)),
    new Array(1, 2)
);

alert(testarray);
</script>

This creates a popup that says "1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10,1,2." In order to test for items in the sub-arrays, the quick and dirty method would involve typing commands into the browser's address bar:

javascript:alert(testarray[0])

This would pop up with "1,2,3,4,5." Firebug can help significantly with its DOM tab and JavaScript console. Still, I have found myself wanting a function similar to PHP's print_r() while changing global arrays in functions. Here is my little hack:

So you need to know what country a user is from because you deal with PayPal. How do you make sure you have the right information to pass on? PayPal offers:

• Country codes
• State/province codes
• A COUNTRYCODE parameter
• A STATE parameter

The country and state codes are in HTML tables, which means you can copy and paste directly to your favorite spreadsheet software (OpenOffice.org Calc, right?). The two problems with this are that:

Suppose that you clone a harddrive to a file on another harddrive (dd if=/dev/sda of=/home/user/dump.img). All of the partitions on the drive are in the dump file. How do you access a file on one of the partitions?

I've had to do this several times in the last two months. Today, my image is 50GB (not an exact harddrive image because I took a round-about way to pull the data):

# ls -lh recovered.img
-rw-r--r-- 1 chris root 50G Jul  9 15:48 recovered.img

sfdisk (probably as root) will show where the partitions are at:

From Pushed by Jenifer Block (chapter 1, paperback pages 24-25):

Forceps are nearly museum relics, but the second stage of labor - the pushing part - is still actively managed by what's called directed pushing, or "purple pushing." For decades, women who weren't completely numb have been told to hold their breath and Push! for ten full seconds, usually while a nurse counts out loud, a process that is repeated until the baby is out. In 1957, Constance L. Beynon, a British obstetrician, began doubting the ritual after observing a woman who birthed without incantation. It was accidental; she was attending a first-time mother for a colleague and tried to stall the delivery so he would arrive in time. "We ignored the patient's early straining efforts and when finally the head reached the pelvic floor, just allowed it to emerge slowly on minimal pushing, hoping every minute that her doctor would walk in," wrote Beynon. "The baby (8 pounds, 3 ounces) was born before the doctor arrived but with practically no effort on the part of the patient and an intanct vagina and perineum. The peacefulness and obvious ease of the birth were most impressive."

This is a big subject and it has caused a lot of disagreement in Christian circles. I will try to make this as clear and comprehensive as possible. If I fail, by all means, ask questions.

Three years ago, I sat in a church and heard the pastor list all the various ways that God speaks to us. The pastor and elders of the church topped the list (you might be able to determine the type of church this was), then came your parents and the Word of God. I think there was another one, but it would have merged into one of the other three categories.

In any case, with my pentecostal upbrining, there was one glaring omission. How does one recognize God's voice when He speaks directly to an individual?

John MacArthur preached a great sermon in 1991, entitled "Charismatic Chaos." He was (and continues to be) very concerned with the growing emphasis on "manifestations of the spirit," which include direct revelation and miracles, all around the world:

A surveillance video records the words exchanged by a would-be robber and a MetroPCS store clerk in Florida. This is the transcript of the clipped video that ABC has up:

Robber: Don't get scared.

Clerk: I'm not.

Robber: OK, Stay nice and calm.

Clerk: You can do whatever you what. I'm going to talk to you about the Jesus I have.

Robber: What?

Clerk: The Jesus I got, before you leave.

Robber: God bless you for that.

Clerk: I'm Christian and...

Robber: So am I. I absolutely hate doing this.

Clerk: I don't know if you have family.

Robber: That's why I'm doing this.

Clerk: You know what? I can try to help you find a job. I have a lot of friends at church...

Robber: I have a job.

Clerk: You do? Why are you doing this?

Robber: Because I'm going to be evicted if I don't come up with $300.

...

Robber: Then I wouldn't be hurting you. I'm sorry. I have to take every cent, I'm sorry.

I won't incriminate this project's coders, but they do sell their work that is based on vBulletin. One of their free projects contains a function that has three arguments passed to it. The first argument is immediately overwritten by a global. Here is a stripped down example:

 <?php
$hello = 'hello';
$world = 'world';

function test(&$hello) {
    global $hello;

    echo "$hello\n";
}

test($world);
echo "$hello $world\n";
?>

And the output of my function:

$ php test.php
hello
hello world

$world is passed by reference as $hello. It is promptly ignored in favor of the global $hello variable, without even overwriting $world. They should remove the required parameter $hello.

The Catholic church reminded us on Thursday that the ordination of women is a "most serious crime" (ignore most of the media reports, the reporters don't know what they are talking about). Some Presbyterians, such as Tim Bayly on Monday, have said such things as:

[It] came to me that churches that hide the Biblical doctrine of sexuality by putting women forward as officers over men ... [are] placing stumbling blocks before women, denying them the Gospel of Jesus Christ.

Most of my posts lately seem trite or computer-oriented. Work has been keeping me busy and what study I have been doing is on topics that I have written enough on already. There are plenty of spare thoughts but those are not formulated enough to write about.

I was asked by a Muslim today how we can claim the Bible is divinely inspired when Catholics have more books in their Bible than Protestants have in theirs. It is a good question and many people do not know how the books of their Bible came to be collected together. Here is a good, concise explanation from Charles Hodge (Systematic Theology, Volume I, Introduction, Chapter VI, "The Canon"):

Beneath the latest "weekly address" by California's Gov. Schwarzeneggar, I see a button that turns on a vuvuzela overlay:

Do you see that too? http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J_E5ofSb6mw

As much as I hate the vuvuzela, can we do this with all political speeches?

I posted a couple days ago about yoga and transcendental meditation in the church. A friend mentioned a podcast he had downloaded from last month, where the effects of drugs were deemed similar to the effects of yoga and meditation.

After some digging, I found the full audio of that hour:

http://www.publicbroadcasting.net/wosu/.artsmain/article/11/1172/1659306...

This segment contains interviews with several hallucinogen researchers and the bits with mysticism are not the complete focus. It is interesting to see the full force of what we are inviting into the church.

QOTD, after cutting off the family's land line:

I’d almost be willing to pay $15 per month just to avoid the terribly obnoxious middle-of-dinner debt consolidation sales calls. However, come to think of it, I’m going to kind of miss getting to answer their “How much debt do you have?” question. The response, “We don’t have debt” always completely threw them off-script and it was quite amusing to hear them fumble around trying to figure out what to say next. More often than not, there was silence and then a click on the other end.