Last week I wrote two posts about some problems I’ve observed. One was about neo-conservatism in U.S. politics, one was about Christians in general. Some people liked one post a lot more than they liked the other, which is curious to me, because I felt I was writing about the same thing: a general self-righteous uselessness among those who claim the name of Christ.
Yesterday I posted a speech by the President-elect about religion. In it, he talked about his own, and about how he perceived was the best way to reconcile his belief system against his role in politics. And what it boils down to is fairly simple:
You can have faith without reason — but you cannot lead without it.
For a disappointing majority of Christians, their faith is not a rational one. Many of us believe what we do because of routine, because of emotional experiences or because we were raised that way. When pressed to defend our faith, we have no more useful answers than someone defending their favorite sports team — people don’t like the Leafs or the Habs, the Giants or the Packers for intellectual reasons. They may say they have some, but when it comes down to it, its just a stubborn belief that they are right.
For a disappointing majority of Christians, a stubborn belief that they are right about their faith is sufficient to get them through life. Sure they may occasionally get into a debate with someone about it, but they aren’t likely to persuade or be persuaded. At best, it’ll escalate to an emotional yelling match between two uninformed, irrational believers.
But that’s OK, because afterward they’ll go home, and continue to live their routine out until they die, having had little-to-no impact on the world around them.
However, should a Christian decide to go out into the world around them (Matthew 28:19-20), and try to lead or try to reach, they’ll find fairly quickly that an unquestioned, irrational faith is useless to anyone who doesn’t share it. They can shout what they believe at the top of their lungs, but without reason behind it, they’re no more useful to the world than a crazy person standing on a street corner predicting the apocalypse. In fact, you need look no further than a few influential sites on the Internet to discover that Christians are generally seen as ignorant and backward.
We have allowed the passionately stupid to rise as leaders within our ranks, simply because the volume of their ranting seems to hold conviction.
An irrational, thoughtless faith may be useful within our community, but if we want to lead the world with it, we’re going to have to answer with more than “do this or you’ll go to hell!” We’re going to have to provide some reason behind the principles we believe in.
This may seem a little scary — and that’s OK, because it is. The reality of life is that not everyone will choose Christ (Matthew 22:14). We have to accept the fact that not everyone will decide to believe what we do. But if we desire to be in leadership — if we want our countries to behave as Christian nations — we have to be able to lead those who don’t share our beliefs. If we can assume that the Bible contains principles useful for instruction and useful for government and leadership (and it does) then we need to discover the universally applicable reasons behind those principles.
We cannot lead our countries (our employees, our families) without reasons behind our convictions. It is not enough to say “the Bible says so!”
The good news is, I can’t think of an example of a Biblical mandate that doesn’t have a rational explanation behind it:
The Bible says not to steal… because stealing is corrosive to a community.
The Bible says not to commit adultery… because adultery destroys families.
The Bible says not to murder… because murder kills people, duh!
But it goes beyond the obvious. In the Old Testament, God’s people were apparently inexplicably commanded not to eat pork (Deuteronomy 14:8). Maybe this seemed like an irrational commandment, until you realize that pork is the hardest kind of meat to make sanitary. Is it possible that God gave that instruction to His children to protect them from disease and infection? In the Old Testament, God commands his armies that to defecate in their camps would make those camps ceremonially unclean. Is it possible that God told His kids that so they wouldn’t poop where they slept and ate?
In fact, I challenge you to find a single instruction in the Bible for which you cannot find a principle with sound reasoning for society at large – Christian or non.
See, God doesn’t expect us to follow stupidly, or blindly. He, in His grace, has arranged a path to salvation that can be achieved without any kind of intellectual challenge. But with equal grace has given us a Way that withstands the examination of all our intellect.
Would it be ideal if, instead of leading non-Christians, we could convert them all to our belief system, so that they’d do exactly what we tell them without question? Maybe, maybe not. But the Bible says that won’t happen anyway. So if we desire leadership — if we desire for Christian principles to be applied to the government of our countries — we’re going to have understand why those principles are valuable, and be able to communicate the reasoning behind them.
Reason transcends religion and irreligion. Fortunately, our God is a logical one, and our faith a reasonable one. (Acts 17:2-3)
This means, you’re going to have to question your faith — other people certainly will! You are going to have to work out your own salvation with fear and trembling! Its not enough to believe irrationally! If you want to teach, you have to understand!
This means that if you’re opposed to gay marriage, you’re not only going to have to find a part of the Bible that teaches against it, but you’re going to have to understand why it does.
This means that if you think we’re supposed to be at war with Iraq, you’re going to have to find a Biblical reason for it AND you’re going to have to be able to explain the logic behind that mandate.
If you’re for the death penalty, you can’t just say “an eye for an eye,” you’ll have to explain why that works — and why it works better than the alternatives.
And if its a matter of religion for you that every American is entitled to have a gun in their house, not only should you find a verse that says something along those lines, but you’re going to have to understand that verse well enough that you can communicate the principle apart from the religion.
And if you find those things challenging, then you begin to understand how your faith might be useless to the world around you. How being a conservative does not guarantee that you are the right person to be in government. How saying you’re on a mission from God might not hold any water for the people outside your church body — in fact, it might make you look a little crazy if you follow a God that cannot withstand even a little intellectual cross-examination.
Fortunately, that’s not the God we follow. That may be the God we’ve communicated for the past few decades, but that’s not who He is. Its my firm belief that when God said He created us in his image, that doesn’t mean we necessarily physically look like Him. It means that He gave us, above all other creatures on the planet, an ability to think, to communicate, to investigate and to understand. We are more than just the sum of our parts because God wanted people He could walk with, talk to, and reason with.
If you choose not to reason, and prefer to follow blindly, that’s OK. He’ll accept your child-like devotion, as perhaps being the best you can offer. But if you want other people to follow what you believe, you’re going to have to communicate a God who is relevant to their lives — who’s teaching is useful and practical, that stands up to examination, and in that investigation, reveals itself to be divine.
I am discovering that this is a difficult challenge. It actually means that we, as Christians, have to question the things we shout at people. It means that no part of our faith should be taught to others until it has been understood in our own lives. It may mean that some of the principles that we have come to accept as religious (or near-religious) guidance are not actually in the Bible at all (I’m looking at you, capitalism!)
It definitely means that we are not going to be really effective in leading in our communities, countries and in our world, until we have sought God’s heart — not just His Word. It may even mean that our faith isn’t useful to others until its been tested.
It also means that we’ll never, ever make it. That God’s work will always be completed by God, and not us. No matter how effective we are at communicating what we believe, it will never be us who causes life change. But we are responsible for planting seeds, for demonstrating His love and leadership. If we sow seeds of discord, of fear, of hatred or intolerance, than that is the God we are communicating to our world. And we fail as His ambassadors.

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=at_f98qOGY0&hl=en&fs=1]

If the last design for the site was a monument to everything we worked to pull off this year, then this design should have equal weight. Sometimes its difficult to understand why God does or allows certain things in our lives. Even when the clarity of hindsight is available, I doubt we fully understand the intricacies of God’s plan. So sometimes its best just to shut-up and obey the best you can, and trust that He knows what He’s doing.
We’re still not totally sure what He’s doing — or what He wants from us right now. But the picture is starting to come together. Plus, I finally found a 3-column layout that didn’t look like poo!
This design can be found here, with a few modifications. And it allows a couple features I’ve been itching to try:

• The banner image in the top right corner is a rotater. Meaning, every visit to the site it will pick a different picture to show you. Right now there’s only 4 possibilities, but we’ll pop in some more of our favorite shots of the kids as we collect them.
• The double-column sidebar allows me to put a lot more in there. I’ve pretty much got it back up to where it was before, and I’m not sure what else I’ll be doing with it, but it sure is nice to have the room!
• The “sideblog” which is a bit of a hack by the designer, nonetheless is a nice feature, where I can keep a more thematic and semi-permanent ramble. I’ll change this on a weekly, monthly, or whenever-I-see-fit basis, and hopefully help set an over-all mood for what I’m blogging about at the time. When I change it, I’ll try to post it into a normal entry to allow it a historical presence.

Let me know if you like it/hate it/have any suggestions to improve!

http://services.brightcove.com/services/viewer/federated_f8/1185304443
This is why the guy is uniting people, not pushing them apart. Imagine if both the ardently religious and irreligious were able to be this respectful of each other. Imagine if Christian’s could again be effective enough that people would want our leadership.
This video is fantastic, and well worth the 40 minutes, or so. But if you can’t put that much time in, and you’re a Christian, watch the first 15 minutes so you can hear the man’s testimony.
My favorite quote: “People are tired of seeing faith used as a tool of attack.” Amen, brother!

One of the things we intend to do with our new house is to make it as self-reliant as possible. We’ve lived for a long time depending on the resources of a landlord or an organization to provide the functionality we need from a home. Although we’ll probably never be one of those people who can live “off the grid” — at least not in this country — there’s a lot of things we want to learn about ensuring the independence of our own home.
There’s a lot of basics I need to learn more about, for example. I’m relatively competent with basic wiring, but the other day I removed a lightswitch in Abigail’s room to put in a dimmer, and ran into a wiring setup I’d never seen before. I can network my home and set-up my home theater better, maybe, than the average geek. But I don’t know the first thing about plumbing or carpentry, and I’d like to have at least some cursory knowledge in those areas.
A happy, and natural, side-effect of this goal is that our home will become more ‘green’ the more we lower our outside dependencies. I’ve found that regardless of your political view point or opinions on Global Warming, lately ‘green’ has been a pretty universally accepted “Good Thing” — simply because it reduces costs. Everyone wants to save money these days.
We have some large goals in this area, and some smaller ones we’re working on. My dad-in-law built his own industrial-strength wood furnace at their place in the country. This summer he hooked it up to heat the pool. For the winter he’s setting it up to heat their hot water tank, warm their house, and even pre-heat the air for the dryer. I’m not sure we’ll be able to do anything like that, but I am very interested in solar power.
Some friends of ours, who usually live in Africa, wired their place there to run completely on solar power, when its available, with a fall-back to a generator if it gets too cloudy, and once the batteries are drained. They, of course, have no other options, so were pretty motivated to get it working. They also are able to be fairly picky about what appliances they run, and when. One of my goals is to get my entire home office running on solar power, falling back to grid power only when the batteries are nearly dead.
Here’s a couple of the smaller things we’re working on in the short term, that have already started saving us money:

• Timers: The home theater equipment, both upstairs and downstairs, is on timers. Most home theater devices are never really off unless you remove their power. If a device has a remote control, its drawing power even in its “off” state. LCD and Plasma TVs are fairly big offenders in this area. Your XBox 360, PS3 or Wii are also pretty bad.
  Upstairs we bought a powerbar with a timer built-in. It even has a little back-up battery so your program is never lost. Downstairs we have a more heavy-duty outdoor timer on the equipment. Late at night, a computer upstairs runs a script to cleanly shutdown itself and a remote script on the AppleTV to do the same. Shortly afterward the timer kills power to all the devices.
  Although I don’t have accurate numbers, our power bill has been below the previous “average” by $10 or more every month since we got the timers in place.
• Dimmers and motion sensors: We’re still rolling this plan out, but where ever possible we’ll be using these kinds of switches to provide only the light needed in a given room. In the kids rooms, in particular, we rarely want the lights on at full brightness anyway. In the garage and laundry room, a motion sensor makes lots of sense.
  These kinds of switches do mean you can’t use (cheap) CFL energy-efficient bulbs, but you can invest in dimmable CFLs, or use halogen high-efficiency bulbs which are almost as good, and don’t contain mercury.
• Gardening and composting: Both of these are Nicole’s pet projects. I’m not really sure how composting saves money, but its certainly ‘green’ and we feel better about reducing the amount of garbage we produce. Nic’s parents have grown their own vegetables in their garden for years. They taste better, save money, and are good for the environment.
• Cut the cable: OK, not as green, but this is a great money saver — do you really need your $40-or-more/month cable TV? No seriously, is there anything you watch on TV that you can’t get over the Internet for free or cheap? This may be the realm of the geek for another couple years, but the technology is getting better and easier to use. We don’t need cable — not even for even for events best watched live. We watched and followed the election coverage online the other day, and not once longed for commecial interuptions.
  We could do the same thing with the telephone if I didn’t work from home. Skype provides decent telephony for free-to-cheap that’s more than sufficient for personal use. Alas, despite our efforts, it doesn’t quite hack it for business use.
• Use your library, buy used: We learned this lesson early from a family who is frugal, wealthy, and not at all “green.” Your local library has a massive selection of great books, and probably has a decent array of movies that are free to borrow. Your children rarely need brand new clothes or toys — used stores rock, and the clearance shelf is a great place to shop!
• Walk more: I’m a hypocrite here. I have bad feet, so I’d be happy to drive half a block to the mailbox — if it weren’t for Benjamin, who loves going for “wwwwalks!” One of the nicest things about living in a small town, though, is that once you get past the lame excuses, there’s really nothing you can’t walk to get. Gas is finally getting cheaper, but we’re down to one car for the winter (maybe forever) and we’d prefer not to use it unless we have to. I understand walking is good for you too…

Ultimately, it’d be awesome if the only service our home needed to pay an outside organization for was Internet. Its probably not feasible in North America, but the closer we can get to that goal, the more money we save.
It probably goes without saying that there are wide variety of bad habits that, if eliminated or avoided, can probably save lots of money too.
How about you? Does anyone else have any ideas for saving money, reducing your dependencies and improving the environment?

Not just because they elected a black President, or because they kicked the NeoCon junta out of office, but because of the grace with which they greeted this event.
Even those who vehemently rooted for McCain have, for the most part, said “Well he’s not the guy I voted for, but he’s our President and we’ll support him, pray for him, and hope for the best.” And those who rooted for Obama, have for the most part, now been able to acknowledge McCain’s strengths and honor his contributions.
I have to admit, its not the maturity I expected after having witnessed (and maybe for the first time really paid attention to) the kind of mudslinging and heated debates that go on during an election. But its good to see that our neighbours are capable of putting aside their differences and supporting their leader — even if they voted for the other guy.
Of course, not everyone is so mature. A Canadian I know, who used to be a youth pastor, implied on his Facebook status that Obama only won because he’s black. Its not the first time I’ve heard this sentiment, either. Somehow, despite the man’s Ivy League education, 10+ years of political experience, expertly run campaign, and clear and passionate speaking, there are people who believe Obama won on some kind of sympathy vote. That this is affirmative action extended to the Presidency.
I could not be more disgusted by this notion, and I guess a little afraid.
Afraid that somewhere in America’s less-progressive Southern underbelly is brewing a plot to assassinate him, simply because there are people who still can’t see a person’s value, despite his color. That these people undoubtedly call themselves Christians is abhorrent to me. It seems a strange thing to pray, but I will be praying for the safety of the new American President and for his family.
Regardless of his stance on certain issues, the man and his new position represent a new generation of America taking hold of its future. His election is historic as a symbol of change. Some of those changes will be good, some will be difficult and may force the nation to re-evaluate its values, and some of those changes will probably be bad too. But its progress, and its about time.
This, I think, ends my temporary foray into political blogging — at least until the Democrat’s power is in full swing, and I start getting ticked off at them for the things they’ll do wrong. If only there was some kind of “moderate” party we could get elected!
Anyway, we now return you to your regularly scheduled blogging! Coming up next: more pictures of the most adorable kids on the planet, more ponderings about the effectiveness of Christians in our world, and maybe a rant or too about “going green.” Plus there’s a Star Trek movie and a new James Bond coming out that are sure to evoke some kind of opinions from me…

Whether or not he’ll be good for the country (and the world) is yet to be seen, but let’s just get a few things out of the way:

• He will not suddenly reveal that he’s actually a terrorist from within
• He will not take all the money from the rich people and give it to all the poor people
• He will not make Islam the national religion
• He will not get friendly with terrorists, or invite them to attack his country
• He will not cause more abortions to happen
• He will not cause more people to catch “the gay”
• He will not turn America into a socialist country

Last night, we watched actual live TV for the first time in months. We got it over the Internet, from MSNBC.com. Obviously I’m referring to the presidential election coverage. We pretty much had it on all night, along with a CNN.com map showing electoral results by State.
One guy on Reddit suggested that this was like the night before Christmas. I kind of have to agree — I was on the edge of my seat every time the results were about to be refreshed. Things were looking a little shaky as the middle States started submitting results, and McCain re-gained some ground. But then the west coast weighed in, and it seemed like it was over. I went to bed with Obama holding 284 seats in the Electoral College.
I woke up at 6am from a nightmare that somehow McCain had turned it around while I slept. I pretty much raced downstairs to check online to make sure that didn’t happen. Turns out I didn’t need to worry — Obama won a resounding victory:

I am proud of America this morning. Not just because they’ve made history by voting in their first black President, but because they booted out the NeoCon gang that has done their level best to crush their country under their oppressive foreign policy, their irresponsible economic decisions, and their vile hatred and fear.
Things can change now, and I sincerely hope they do. That Obama keeps the promises he’s made during his campaign — that the man is more than just flowery speeches. I’m concerned that the Democrats control the Presidency and the Senate. I would prefer a more balanced arena — power corrupts, and no one should go unchecked. But I’d rather have this situation then an all red one, so the best thing to do now is to pray for our leaders, that they can figure out how to fix all the problems we’re in…

• Here’s a beautiful little story about a guy who did not vote for Obama.
• Here’s some reactions from the rest of the world. (I don’t know many Canadians who weren’t rooting for Obama.)
• Some photo reactions too.
• Here’s McCain’s classy, and earnest concession speech. He sounds more like the McCain we used to know — I hope both parties really do work together now.
• The Onion has a hilarious article related to Obama’s win.

Can we kick W. out now and put Obama in office right away?