Renaistre

“Would it not be better to simplify the system of taxation rather than to spread it over such a variety of subjects and pass through so many new hands.”

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Barack Obama’s Inauguration Speech

(Brought to you courtesy of the Inauguration Speech Generator)

My fellow Americans, today is a black day. You have shown the world that “hope” is not just another word for “computer”, and that “change” is not only something we can believe in again, but something we can actually run.

Today we celebrate, but let there be no mistake – America faces white and purple challenges like never before. Our economy is woody. Americans can barely afford their mortgages, let alone have enough money left over for fingernails. Our healthcare system is sweeping. If your ear is sick and you don’t have insurance, you might as well call a plumber. And America’s image overseas is tarnished like a bison fork. But clanking together we can right this ship, and set a course for Mexico.

Finally, I must thank my golden family, my poor campaign volunteers, but most of all, I want to thank Cubans for making this historic occasion possible. Of course, I must also thank you, President Bush, for years of bowling the American people. Without your cheesy efforts, none of this would have been possible.

Gary Thomas wrote a must-read (IMHO) article at Focus on the Family’s Boundless called Ignorant Christians. In it, he points out the importance of keeping the ol’ gray matter in shape.

We need a generation of first-rate thinkers, but we also need a generation in which every Christian sees himself or herself as a scholar.

Not, mind you, as an academic, but as one who takes seriously Paul’s charge to “watch your life and doctrine carefully; persevere in them because if you do, you will save both yourself and your hearers” (1 Tim. 3:16).

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The consequences of ignorance are many and severe: Our witness suffers greatly from Christians who speak up without having really thought through what they’re saying. Without a developed mind, we are easily led astray by foolish beliefs that the church dismissed as heresy centuries ago.

It saddens me that Christians today aren not generally considered to be among the leading minds of our time. And, honestly, we probably don’t deserve to be.

I saw this quote of Regan’s today:

“The deficit doctors have their scalpels out all right, but they’re not poised over the budget. That’s as fat as ever and getting fatter. What they’re ready to operate on is your wallet.”

How appropriate it is for us now, nationally and as a state. Lock your wallets, Mr. and Mrs. America.

I just bought one of those little round convex mirrors to put on my driver-side rear-view, since the old one is too scratched up to be of any use. On the back of the packaging is this warning: “REPRODUCTION OF EDITORIAL CONTENT IS STRICTLY PROHIBITED WITHOUT WRITTEN CONSENT OF ***.” Huh? “Editorial content”? There’s one line about how to clean the glass first, three lines about the features, and one warning about objects being “closer than they appear.”

Am I missing something?

The year 2009. Has it really been that long since high school? College? Y2K? 9-11?

The past few years have been so unpredictable that I’ve had reservations about making any kind of new year resolutions at all. Could it be that I was just making the wrong kinds of resolutions? In any event, I think it’s time to try again.

The Good Lord willin’ and the crik don’t rise, in 2009 I will:

• Read through the entire Bible. The last time I read it cover to cover in one year was in 1999. It’s beyond time to do it again.
• Get my church’s website up and running.
• Run at least one 10k race.
• Complete at least one of the personal software projects I’m working on.
• Backpack the Grand Canyon.

What are your resolutions this year?

Christians have been engaged in a battle to put “Christ back in Christmas” for as long as I can remember. There have been uproars over the use of “happy holidays” instead of “merry Christmas,” outrage over lawsuits that have been filed to keep Christmas trees or nativity scenes out of public view. The hostility toward anything Jesus-related is hard to miss. While I do find this opposition disheartening at times, and I do mourn over this PC-run-amok nonsense, I sometimes wonder if Christians are fighting the wrong battle.

While celebrating the birth of my savior is certainly a good thing, the term “Christmas” isn’t inherently biblical. It’s a man-made celebration of a heavenly event, and as such, if the celebration has become meaningless, maybe it’s time to move on. Seriously, how many different times have you heard someone - usually a voice-over artist in a commercial - tell you the “true” meaning of Christmas this year? How many of them have actually gotten it right?

Personally, I feel that this battle has been lost on a cultural level. The work “Christmas” has no real meaning to the majority of Americans today. So what’s the value of constantly fighting to keep it from being censored?

Is it possible that it’s time for a new angle?

My pastor always gives a little introductory thought at the beginning of our church services, before we sing and he transitions into his actual topic of the day. And it was with these thoughts about the Christmas battle already in my mind that I listened in amusement (due to my pastor’s West Virginian style) to him expressing many of the same sentiments in one of his introductions. But he had a solution.

There is an other term used by some Christians to describe the arrival of Christ. In some contries, it is actually still in wide use. It is the word “advent.” It means “The coming or arrival, especially of something extremely important.”

What is more important than the arrival of our Savior on Earth? My pastor’s suggestion was that we stop using the phrase “merry Christmas” and instead say “blessed Advent!” It’s a wonderful idea, because it both avoids the controversy surrounding the word “Christmas,” and it also gets people’s attention. And, as my pastor put it, once you have their attention and ask what you mean by the phrase, you can hand them the book The Prodigal God by Timothy Keller. It’s a perfect one-two punch. :)

Don’t get me wrong. I’m not trying to say that using the word “Christmas” - or doing what we can to bring Christ back into it - is wrong or completely useless. But when we step back and look at what has been made by God and what has been made by man, it might create a subtle but effective shift in our perspective. We just might find better ways of glorifying God and proclaiming His son’s redeeming work on Earth. And that, my friends, is the true meaning of Christmas… err… the Advent. :)

Have a blessed Advent celebration, everyone!

The next time someone claims that the Founding Fathers wanted a total separation of church and state, try asking them who made these statements:

It is the duty of every man to render to the Creator such homage, and such only, as he believes to be acceptable to him. This duty is precedent both in order of time and degree of obligation, to the claims of Civil Society. Before any man can be considered as a member of Civil Society, he must be considered as a subject of the Governor of the Universe.

Written by James Madison in in 1785 in his “Memorial and Remonstrance Against Religious Assessments.”

It is the duty of all Nations to acknowledge the providence of Almighty God, to obey his will, to be grateful for his benefits, and humbly to implore his protection and favors.

Said by George Washington in his Thanksgiving Proclamation, October 3rd, 1789.

And can the liberties of a nation be thought secure when we have removed their only firm basis, a conviction in the minds of the people that these liberties are the gift of God? That they are not to be violated but with his wrath? Indeed I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just: that his justice cannot sleep for ever.

Written by Thomas Jefferson in his “Notes on the State of Virginia,” Query 18, in 1781.

Via PatriotPost.US

This will be huge someday. Researchers have found a way to take the output of a neuron, or group of neurons, in a monkey’s brain and route them through electrodes to their destination muscles. Basically, they can bypass a section of nerves, meaning that at some point doctors will be able to reverse the effects of some forms of paralysis. From the IEEE Spectrum Online:

Though it will be years before spinal bypass surgery reaches even the clinical-experiment stage, researchers at the University of Washington (UW) and the Washington National Primate Research Center, both in Seattle, have figured out a way to get macaque monkeys in their lab to manipulate temporarily paralyzed muscles in their arms using brain-controlled electrical stimulation. In research reported last week in Nature, they describe what happened when they attached electrodes to neurons in a monkey’s motor cortex—the part of the brain that controls voluntary movement—and used fairly simple algorithms to translate activity in these cortical cells into electrical signals that tell muscles when, how much, and how forcefully to contract.

This by itself will be a huge advance in medical technology when it is ready for prime-time.

But wait, there’s more.

Not only have they been able to re-connect the existing brain cells that control, say, a wrist to the muscles in that area, but they found that the monkey could retrain other brain cells to do the same thing.

The most surprising outcome of their experiments is the revelation that motor cortex cells that had previously been dedicated to moving, say, the big toe on a monkey’s left foot or bending its knees could be trained to control its wrists. This flexibility, says Fetz, may allow patients with head injuries that damaged part of the cerebral cortex to still be candidates for a neuroprosthesis.

It’s hard to even imagine the kind of impact this kind of research will have in the future.