Site updates

Until I come up with a good way to post my site updates automatically on the front page, I'll write a brief entry to let the blog subscribers know what's new. I've just posted the start of a new, ongoing list (and accompanying Google map!) of preachers online that I think are worth listening to. Take a look!

Welcome to my new Drupal site! I still have plenty to tweak, but hopefully this arrangement will make it easier (psychologically) for me to post. The theme is itheme. Sometime I'll make my own.

I'm pretty much done with the initial configuration of my new Drupal site, and I will be uploading it soon. For those of you who are subscribed to the RSS feed or email updates, visit the site sometime in the next 24 hours and I should have some instructions for resubscribing. I'll be using FeedBurner for that, helping Google take over the RSS world.

Thanks to my miraculous C-Pen, I have been able to whip together another project. It's an expanded version of the tools index at the back of Refuse to Choose. I wanted to make it more useful and give people a guided tour of some of the book's features. Here it is:

The Annotated Scanner's Toolbox

Do you have a lot of different interests? Do you find yourself trying to juggle all of them? Do you rarely get bored, and when you do, do you find it to be an intolerable condition? Do you have a large and diverse library or collection of half-completed projects? Do you have trouble settling on a college major or a career path? Do you want to travel everywhere and experience everything? If you said yes to any of these, you might be a Scanner!

Scanner is the term that life coach and motivational speaker Barbara Sher has given to these Renaissance people, and she has written a book to help them along their path in life, Refuse to Choose!: A Revolutionary Program for Doing Everything That You Love. And I have written a review of her book and posted it here on my site!

If you're a Scanner, I think you'll find a lot of encouragement in Sher's book. I found a lot of her insights to be true of me. I already know the value of having diverse interests, which many Scanners have been taught to believe is somehow a defect; but I do have trouble finishing what I start, and my Scanner Panic started when I hit 25 and realized I was halfway through my 20s and what did I have to show for myself? And it only got worse from there. My life was slipping by and I wasn’t making anything of it, and I almost felt I couldn’t make anything of it. And Sher says we are right to feel this way! “Scanners are not being dramatic or inventing this danger. When you have unused potential, you’re driven to use it. Since, by your very nature, you can’t devote yourself to one goal and you don’t know how to manage many goals, you are in real danger of living an unused life” (38). My problems are more than just being a Scanner (being slow and a hermit are equally hindersome), but now I see my prospects a bit differently, thanks to Barbara’s helpful ideas.

I have one more project to do with this book, and then I'll probably move on to other subjects.

The Thinkulum version 1.2 is up! And it's only two-and-a-half weeks late, hehe. Hopefully most of you forgot I had a deadline.

The major changes I made were that I (1) moved the navigation from the bottom of the page (terrible) to a new left column, (2) moved my links to del.icio.us, and (3) moved the whole site into WordPress. I also added some new graphics for the section headings and a little favicon in the form of my handwriting. :)

Having the site in WordPress will hopefully make it much easier to add new pages. Maybe I'll even update it more often! I'll probably add links more often, since it's such a snap with del.icio.us. I won't post a blog update every time I do that, but the new links will appear in the "Latest links" list on the blog page. See over there? *points to the right* Moving my links off the site to del.icio.us has made this place look bare, so that will be another motivator. I have plenty of ideas; I'm just very slow and distractible.

Putting the site in WordPress was a lot of work! That's because I had fairly specific ideas about how I wanted my site to work, and I had to mess around with my template files a lot and look for plugins, which didn't always behave or cooperate with each other. But now it's mostly the way I want it. There are still a few things I'd like to change, but those will require poking around in the WordPress source code a bit, and this update is late enough! Let me know if anything seems broken or ways you think the site's design could be better.

Since my pages are in WordPress, you can now comment on some of them as if they were blog entries. So far I've only turned on comments for the main OBAC essay. Being in WordPress has also changed the URL structure, so if you have links or bookmarks to anything here, you'll need to update them.

I'm sure I'll continue to tweak things here and there, but for now, I'm Thinkulummed out!

So it's been a couple of weeks since I posted OBAC, and I wanted to give you a progress report.

First, I've come up with a shorter version for people who don't know me and don't have time to read 25 pages (note that if you do know me, you still have to read the original even if you don't have time, heh heh). It's only 5 pages, and it's here. I liken it to a technical drawing rendered with a paint roller, but it'll give you a general idea of what I'm thinking.

One of my hopes in writing the essay was that it would spark some interesting conversations and thought processes. I love writing something and giving it to multiple people and then getting feedback that comes from their differing perspectives. It generates so much interesting interaction. It also reminds me that nobody is completely independent; you're always influenced by contributions from others. So with that in mind, I'll give you the highlights of the conversations I've had so far.

My friend from my old job April, who gets the award for being the first person to read the essay other than the people who read the earlier draft, e-mailed me asking why I felt I needed to stay an inerrantist, and she explained the view she picked up in seminary, the idea that God uses fallible humans to accomplish his goals and that this fallibility extends to the Bible. The Bible is authoritative only in the things it intends to teach, and it generally doesn't intend to teach history and science. This is something I've considered, and I haven't ruled it out.

My TWeb friend Rob reminded me that the resurrection is the key issue in Christianity, along with the general reliability of the Gospels. The general authority of the Bible is secondary, even though I list it first in my "things to study." I recognized later that the reason I'm more focused on inspiration is that that's what I'm doubting. I'm not really doubting the resurrection. But it's a good idea to shore up on the basics, so I decided to give it some study and picked up off my shelf William Lane Craig's Assessing the New Testament Evidence for the Historicity of the Resurrection of Jesus. I'm 66 pages into it. Rob also reminded me that it's not too good to sit around in doubt (he wasn't exactly making that point, but that's what I took from it). I agree, but then that's why I wrote the essay.

My mom was concerned that I might be overintellectualizing. She and I probably have different definitions of that term, but I agree that it's possible to do. Overintellectualizing happens when (1) you spend all your time thinking about something that's meant to be lived and never get around to the living part, thus missing the point; (2) you give equal weight to every conceivable question about a thing and put off making decisions about it until you've answered them all; or (3) you think about a livable topic only on an abstract level and overlook the information that can come from experience, thus getting off track because you don't have all the relevant data; and there are probably others. I'll try not to do any of those.

As a side note, I don't consider it overintellectualizing when you simply think more than necessary about something. Some people just like to think, and if they're not neglecting other important parts of life, why should they restrict themselves? Of course, the question is what the important parts of life are, and the people who like to think will have a different answer from the people who don't.

She was also concerned by the fact that I couldn't assure her that I'd come out all right (as in with my Christianity intact). Well, that's the nature of doubt! To be fair, I had only just told her about the essay, so she hadn't read it yet.

The most significant conversation has been with my coworker Don. He subscribes to a combined John Calvin/Jonathan Edwards view that God authenticates himself through his Word and that the sign of being saved is that when you read his Word, you see and love God's beauty and truth. So he asked me what kinds of experiences of God I'd had, because I give the impression in my essay that I haven't had any. I don't know if I've had any true, spontaneous experiences of God, but I have had some noteworthy experiences of worship, so as our conversation progressed I began remembering those and relating them.

And I realized that of the few spiritual things I've tried, the Edwards/John Piper variety is one I'd like to return to. It feels the deepest and most genuine, as opposed to the more charismatic things I tried to get into. Those may work perfectly well for other people, but they don't make a good starting place for me. The main problem I have going the Piper route is that while I love the idea of the finding our joy in God, etc., I can only really appreciate it in the abstract. When I try to think about the details and figure out what it all means---what exactly is God's glory, and how do I find my fulfillment in it?---I get lost and back away from it. But anyway, that's the direction I'd like to take my spiritual life. Maybe later I'll branch out into other areas.

Don recommended that I read the Bible and look for the sense of God's truth and beauty as I read. I had had the same idea, so the next day I tried it. I mean, I've been listening to the whole Bible on CD, but it hasn't really been for the same purpose. I somewhat randomly turned to 1 Chronicles 10-11. I could have read Paul, but that would have been too easy; it's easy to get a sense of God's glory when Paul talks about it so constantly. I wanted to see what I could come up with in some other section of the Bible. So I picked David.

What I found, ironically, was a difficulty (the inerrantist's term for a contradiction) and something that sounded legendary. That doesn't usually happen; I'm usually oblivious to those things. But this time I noticed. The difficulty was that in 1 Chron. 10:3-5 Saul kills himself by falling on his sword. In 2 Sam. 1:1-16 a man tells David that Saul asked him to kill him, so he did, and then David had the man killed for killing the king. So which was it? On the other hand, 1 Sam. 31:3-5 agrees with 1 Chronicles. So I guess the guy was lying to David, which turned out to be a dumb idea.

The legendary-sounding material was the description of David's warriors. One of them, Jashobeam, killed 300 people with a spear, apparently all in the same battle. It takes a long time just to count to 300. It's hard to believe anyone has the stamina to battle that many people at once and win. But maybe it means something else. Or maybe he really did and it was a miracle.

The interesting thing is that I didn't care, even if both a contradiction and a legend were involved. For me it didn't take away from the fact that God had set David up as king to be the shepherd of God's people (11:2). I'm not sure it's good to approach the Bible that way---falsehoods galore but still authoritative---but that's the way I felt at the time. But apart from that, I didn't get any overwhelming sense of God's self-authentication. Maybe another time.

That day I also decided to try something that John Ortberg talked about in one of Doing Life Together lessons, which is a DVD and study guide series my small group is doing. It's related somehow to the Purpose-Driven Life. Ortberg's talk was about spending a day with Jesus, and he took the viewers through various parts of a day and how they might be carried out devotionally.

So I tried paying more attention to Jesus throughout my day, and right at the beginning I gained some insight into one of my questions. I've always had trouble knowing how to view God in light of the fact that he sends his children both blessings and hardships. I guess I have a hard time trusting people after they've hurt me. With God I'm always waiting for the next blow, even though my life generally goes smoothly. But I never really thought that way about my parents growing up, which was the source of my insight.

I was thinking about my terrific job and thanking God for that gift, and I realized that in a relationship there's sort of a hierarchy of interactions. With my parents, I fundamentally thought of them as loving and only occasionally as disciplinary. So with God I can think of the side of him that wants to give good gifts to his children and build them up as the fundamental part of the relationship. Then the part of God that needs to be harsh to remove sin I can think of as something temporary that occurs on top of the more fundamental part. I think viewing it that way would free me to concentrate on understanding and experiencing the positive side of the relationship, which is something I've often shied away from because I knew it could be interrupted at any time by God's anger and disapproval.

I managed to return to prayer and thoughts of Jesus the rest of the day, and I guess it made a difference. I certainly felt closer to him, since I was talking to him more often. I felt serene all day too, maybe a little more than normal, though I can't say for sure.

John Ortberg says that if you can spend one day with Jesus, then you can spend every day with him. Well, it's not as easy as that because it can be hard to get into a routine, etc., but technically it's true. If two days are basically alike, then generally anything you do in one you can do in the other. In my case it became harder after the first day because (1) I forgot about it until later in the day and (2) I discovered I don't have much to think about Jesus about. My thoughts toward him, when I don't have time to dig into them and come up with something profound and specific, end up being just sort of a vague notion of Jesus with the vague sense of communing with him. That just won't do. So I need to figure out how to integrate Jesus with everyday life, like Ortberg did some of in the video.

That Sunday I thought about one of the spiritual practices I recalled during my conversation with Don. For a while during college I would try to get a sense of the fact that God was real. He wasn't just something we talked and sang about. In the spiritual realm and all around us there actually is an all-knowing, all-powerful, holy Supreme Being who is right now receiving the worship of countless angels and saints. I can't really convey this sense in writing. It's like learning to raise one eyebrow---you'll just have to try it out in different ways until you get it. What often happened when I succeeded in thinking this way is that I quickly became overwhelmed. The reality of God seemed so intense that I had to back out of that frame of mind after only a second. Other times it wasn't so intense and I could simply marvel at it.

That's one of the things I wanted to return to, so I decided to try it again. The problem was that I'm not satisfied with thinking about God abstractly anymore, and a lot of spiritual concepts don't make much sense to me right now when I think about the details. But since I can get excited about some of them at a more abstract level, I decided to make a strategy of it. During worship I would imagine the reality of whatever I could at whatever level of detail or abstraction I could get enthusiastic about. If the details weren't making sense, I would back up and think about the more general concept.

And you know, it worked! And it really made a difference in the way I experienced the whole worship service. I felt like I was giving God a little more of his due, and I felt enlivened. But I noticed that it was much easier to enter this God-as-real mindset while singing than while, say, listening to Scripture being read. Still, it's a step.

Since then not much has happened in terms of conversations and experiments (good, because this was getting long!), but I'll keep you posted.

If you want to keep up with the happenings on my site (supposing there are some), but you don't want to check it every day and you don't use RSS for some reason, you can sign up to receive an e-mail whenever my blog is updated, which is where I put my site updates plus other entries. Just type your e-mail address into the field at the bottom of this page, click Subscribe, and you'll get a confirmation e-mail with a URL that you'll have to click to verify your address, and then you'll be subscribed! The blog update e-mails you receive will have an unsubscribe link in case you ever get tired of hearing from me.

You may now comment. The problem was some code in my comments file that the WordPress upgrading instructions didn't cover. So I just used the default comments template and changed the content to match my old one. Somehow my faithful spammer(s) were still able to leave comments for me to moderate even when the comments weren't working.

After eight-and-a-half months of writing, rewriting, distraction, and procrastination, I finally present to you ... my essay!

On Being an Agnostic Christian

Warning: It's long, about 14,300 words, but there's a summary near the beginning. And as you can guess by the title, it might not be entirely pleasant to read if you're a Christian, but not entirely unpleasant either, I hope. If you know me, please read it. There will be a test. If you don't know me, you can read it too, and I won't even give you the test.

Well, that is certainly a weight off my mind. I never thought I'd say this, but I'm kind of tired of self-analysis right now. I'm ready to learn actual things, stuff that's out there in the world and not just in my head.

Next up: working comments, e-mail notification, and an attempt at a partial redesign.