Deus Ex Blog

I saw this video linked off of the always fun Schlock Mercenary and it moved me. What would it be like if we all validated each other like this? Because YOU are AWESOME!

Why is it that so often it is non-Christians who know better than we do what Christians should be doing? Listen to this agnostic, liberal getting it exactly right:

If that wasn’t enough, let this sink in for you: There are people, human beings, picketing churches. I’m sure some self-righteous blow-hards will call it persecution and say we should be glad of it, or that they’re paying the price for “Standing up for righteousness!” However, you don’t have to go very far in the scripture to see that this attitude is flat out wrong. The verse everyone knows, the most famous verse in the Bible, the one they throw up at football games: John 3:16 “For God so loved the world (all people, including homosexuals) that he gave his only begotten son…” John 3:17 “For God did not send his son to condemn the world…” Quite frankly, God loves fags, despite what any website or sign might say.  It is not the homosexuals who are persecuting us, it is the homosexuals protesting our persecution of them.

Not convinced? Let me try this one: Let’s for the sake of argument say that what the fundies believe is true and that Homosexuality is a terrible, terrible sin and that gays are going to hell. Given that, what should the Christian response be? After all, the Bible teaches that all have sinned (save Christ) and fallen short of the glory of God. We have all broken the law and were destined for hellfire before God intervened and saved us. Our response to our fellow sinners should be one of compassion, mercy, humility, and love.

Even given that, I hear some saying that we should “love the sinner, hate the sin” and that just because we have compassion for homosexuals, it doesn’t mean we should open up marriage to them. Putting aside the impossibility of loving the sinner while hating their sin (and the fact it does not appear in the Bible anywhere. If it did, it would be more like “Love the sinner, forgive the sin, pray for those who persecute you or give you the creeps when they’re seen kissing on the nightly news,”) who are we to judge? God tells us point blank: DO NOT JUDGE. If a homosexual, who does not believe in Christ*, wants to get married in the face of all this opposition, who are we to tell them they can’t? The Bible does not tell us to force those who do not believe as we do to live by our standards. (Especially when we can’t seem to live by them very well.)

I’ve heard the arguments about “Oh, this will redefine marriage,” etc. Terry Pratchett defines evil as treating things as if they are more important than people. How much more evil it must be to treat a word as more important than people. Look through the dictionary sometime and see how many words have only one definition. Marriage already has 10 definitions according to dictionary.com. And if gay people getting married puts your marriage in jeopardy, you already have some problems.

Before I conclude this post, I have to come clean. I am a homophobe. Gay people creep me the hell out. Seeing them kissing on television makes me very uncomfortable. But seeing how my religion has treated these people, these fellow human beings, makes me far sicker. Treating your fellow human beings as the abominations you steadfastly perceive them to be makes me ill. (I don’t see Christians protesting outside seafood restaurants even though Leviticus 11:10 says shellfish are an abomination too.) And while the Bible says we should stand up for righteousness, it’s talking about in our own lives, and in the lives of our brothers and sisters (IE: people who share our belief in God that we have an actual relationship with) not people we don’t know that don’t believe the same things we do.

* Note: If a Christian having homosexual urges earnestly believes for himself that homosexuality is a sin, the community should do what they can to help him fight those urges. If a Christian homosexual believes that homosexuality is not a sin, we should let him be unless he is undermining the faith of the first guy. Or did you think that whole eating food offered to idols thing only applied to steak?

I had an idea today about how to teach children the value of money.  It came to me as I was pondering how I learned not to desire useless junk as a child and how certain of the other children around me never did.  Whenever we went on vacation, my parents would buy me a souvenir of some sort.  Whenever I got my souvenir, I was invariably disappointed when it would break or I would lose interest soon after I got it.  (The one that stands out the most was when I got a plastic bow and arrow at a tourist trap that broke after about ten minutes of playing with it.)  Over time I realized that those kinds of things just weren’t worth the investment, even if I wasn’t the one paying for it and I stopped begging my parents for things (or at least started begging them for fewer, more expensive things.)  Many of the kids around me never got that lesson and simply had to have as much useless junk as they could talk, whine, or cajole their parents into buying for them.  So here’s my idea:

For anything that we buy for our kids beyond basic necessities, we take how much we spent and divide it by our hourly wage.  If we are making $15/hour say and our kid desperately wants something that is $30, the kid will have to do two hours of “Work”.  Work will consist of chores (as soon as they are old enough to do them) or sitting in a designated area and doing productive things like reading a book, writing, doing extra homework, that sort of thing.  Once they have completed the proscribed duration of work, they can have their purchase.  We may get a raw deal as parents if our kids actually enjoy doing those things, but hopefully having to sit still for a while and work instead of playing will teach them that you have to work for stuff and that spending two hours working to pay for something that they lose interest in after half an hour isn’t a sound investment.

Of course, it’ll be a few years at least before we even start having kids, and then it’ll be a few more years before they’re able to comprehend these kinds of things, but it’s a thought.

Apparently Carrie did not much care for Disney’s “The Black Hole.”  In my defense, I had kind of forgotten the ending (which according to the included documentary was tacked on anyway.  Apparently they didn’t actually have an ending to the movie planned when they started filming.)  The cheesiness was still there in spades though!

I used to use VINCENT as my avatar when we played Quake II in the computer labs in college.  (The little guy was hard to hit!)  Oh, and the theme-music is too damn catchy!  Neither of us can get it out of our heads.

I am a failure as a geek.  I forgot the golden rule of computer repair when it came to my laptop.  I originally got the laptop back in college for a few reasons.  The company I worked at had horrible, old computers for us techs but also had a wireless network we could use.  My friends in college all had laptops and were hooking up to the school’s wireless to do the high-tech version of note passing and I wanted in on it.  (The professor of the class in question banned laptops the next year because of the synchronized laughter coming from various spots in the room.)  So I got a Dell Inspiron 1100 and was quite happy up until I A) graduated and B) got a job with a better equiped company that forbid us from using our own computers to connect to their network.

So after that I didn’t have much of a use for the old (still newish) laptop.  So it sat unused for a while until I was visiting my wife’s apartment a lot and wanted to have a computer over there.  However when I attempted to boot up the (then actually somewhat) old laptop, it didn’t do anything.  No power.  I charged the batery, and fiddled around for a while but couldn’t figure it out.  It was bricked.  A thousand dollar paper-weight.  And there it sat in my sister’s closet until this weekend.  Having emptied my sister’s closet over the 4th, the paperweight was once again in my possession.

One of my wife’s old friends has repaired laptops in the past and had run into a similar problem, and so at his suggestion we let the battery charge overnight.  Still nothing. Then my wife found a website suggesting we tap the case right below the mouse touchpad.  Problem solved!  I’m typing this post on the laptop.  The golden rule of computer repair: Try kicking it.