Keller’s Answer to a Very Common Objection to Christianity
An exceedingly common evolutionary argument runs like this: “You can’t trust your religious feelings; they were just mechanisms developed by evolution that helped your ancestors survive.”
Tim Keller gives a great answer: It proves too much. If that’s the case, then your logic itself—and your belief in evolution—is only a mechanism (or the fruit of one) that helped your ancestors survive. You can’t say it’s the truth, just a useful tool for spreading your gene pool.
Dale Ralph Davis on Micro-Salvation
Every time God lifts you out of the miry bog and sets your feet upon a rock is a sample of the coming of the kingdom of God, a down payment of the full deliverance, the macro-salvation that will be yours at last.
Google and Privacy
Every once in a while I give in to the temptation to write an assertive post despite believing firmly that there must be an alternative perspective of which I am unaware. I’m afraid I’m bowing to the rules of the blog genre: I’m posting this despite my ignorance. (I’m not quite following the rules of the genre, however, because I have waited a long time to post this.)
Here’s the issue: Internet privacy. I have never been able to figure out why some people object to Google or Facebook collecting data from their searches in order to customize their advertisements. I’m not ashamed of the things I search for, and if I have to see ads I’d rather see ads that are relevant to me. The more the relevance, hopefully, the better the deals.
And might not products go down in price if advertisers were able to be more efficient with their spending because they are more targeted in their reach?
And don’t ads fund the free services I have come to rely so heavily on?
As I said this very day to a pastor having severe trouble typing in the URL for my design site, the only explanation I can find for some people’s tech habits is a pre-1980 birth date. (Thankfully, the pastor laughed.)
Dempster on Samson
A perceptive observation from a book full of such insights into the Old Testament:
Stephen Dempster:
The structure of Judges shows that Israel gradually descends into a moral and political quagmire, and this is mirrored in the sequence of judges themselves, most of whom are questionable characters. But the last one is a particularly striking mirror-image of the nation. Samson, the supernaturally born Israelite, was set apart as a Nazirite with a distinctive vocation. He constantly breaks his religious vows, is enamoured of Philistine women, loses his identity and physical strength through these encounters, becomes a slave and has his eyes gouged out by the enemy. He represents his own people, who had a supernatural origin, were set apart from among the nations with a distinctive vocation, broke their vows and were enamoured of foreign idols, until finally they lost their identity and spiritual power and became the blind slaves of their oppressors in exile.
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