Dream gives way to awareness, and awareness soon tells me I'm conscious. There are voices in the distance, lots of them. How many are far-away dreams, and how many are real? And what is the difference between a person far away and one who is yelling in my ear?

Yesterday I met Hume, today I begin an affair with Nietzsche. I tried reading Birth of Tragedy last year, thinking it fit to start at the beginning of his writings. It is his worst work as well as earliest, however, and his critique of Greek art was too foreign to me. I felt like I might be corrupted by his approach to the matter, since I could not contextualize his opinions.

[image: network]
The great Interwebs feel more epically amazing when you learn more about the actual structure of our great human network. It's one thing to sit at a terminal and think "hmm, this is pretty cool." It's another to see a gigantic, brain-like visualization of the entire network, and to realize the truly intricate and complex nature of our civilization (Image courtesy of Lumeta Corporation, lifted by me from a 2006 Power Point presentation by Steve Harnish).

This is another for-class assignment I thought worthy of a blog post. Our assignment was to give our personal reactions to and analysis of three different proposed approaches to biblical interpretation.

J. Scott Duvall and J. Daniel Hays, Grasping God’s Word (2005), 178.

This is a response to comments on The Struggling Masses: World Hunger and What I Should Do About It.

"Around the world many cultures eat more healthy than do Americans." -- Michael

This evening I read comments on BBC's Africa website by Africans discussing their first-hand encounter with the so-called food price crisis. We're barely aware of it in the west, but systemic causes like oil shortage, increasing affluence (i.e. consumption) in Asia, and use of crops for biofuel has led to world-wide food shortage.

Of the portions of Genesis before and after the tower of Babel story, Richard H Moye writes that it is “commonly acknowledged that the first part is predominantly mythical, whereas the second is more nearly historical – or at least something between legend and history.”[1] Many cultures hold legends similar to the Biblical flood and surrounding events (6-11), such as the Greek story of Deucalion and the deluge sent by Zeus, or the Irish tale of Mongán and the flooding of the Lough Foyle.[2] Some patterns can be recognized in these accounts, as they are inextricably connected to idea

[Originally a forum post from http://thetoo.com]

I'm sorry, this post will be long; I don't have the time or energy to trim and edit tonight, but I just had to react.

I'll summarize my post in bullet points:

• The world is complex, and many (If not most) ethical questions are subjective and inherently gray -- to both Christians and non-believers.
• The desire for love is universal.
• A rough guideline for ethics is somewhat obvious from our experience and inherent human nature.

On Saturday, September 6, the South American Division realized a continental wide evangelical outreach, carried by the hands of more than 2.6 million Adventists from twenty thousand different congregations in eight distinct countries. Impacto esperanza, or “Hope Impact”, as the event was entitled, aimed to spread the word of Christ’s second coming through the efforts of local churches.

My father and I had an intriguing discussion this evening which began at the discussion of black holes, Hawking, astrophysics, etc. We'd talked about this several months ago, when he expressed his skepticism of cutting-edge, "theoretical physics" by saying "they end up manipulating the observations to fit the mathematical model we have." It's backwards from the classical scientific approach of observation-first.

A few weeks before that I'd written the following: