Dawn at Frugal for life posed an intriguing question regarding the morality of bringing food into movie theaters. My wife is one such individual who insists on making her own pop corn and packing drinks and other snacks for the movies. It hadn’t occured to me that this practice actually contravenes rules set up by movie theaters. Further, I wasn’t aware that the proceeds from the concession stands are allow movie theaters to afford staff salaries since ticket sales do not bring in enough profits.

My initial response was a slight tinge of guilty feelings for robbing my fellow decent and hard-working citizens of their wages. It also occured to me, as one of the commenters pointed out, that the same might go for theme parks. Whenever we visit Disneyland for instance, my wife packs out our lunches and at the right time, we would all take the tram back to our car to have our lunch in the parking lot before returning to the park again. We save a ton of money since I have four kids!

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It was Friday morning. I was in a hurry to get to a sales meeting. I was driving North on the 5 Freeway. I was on my way to the City of Industry from Irvine. I had 40 minutes to make the meeting, which should be ok under normal circumstances, but it was morning commute time.

While bolting through the 5, just before I hit the congestion around Beach Blvd, I heard something weird in the car over above the morning news talk on the radio. At first it sounded as if an aluminum tray was folded over. I thought my wife had left something from her last shopping trip to Costco’s in the car. Then, I realized that the sound was coming from behind the dashboard. Next I hear a sizzling sound and smoke was fuming out of the radio and CD player! I was shaking. The smell of burnt plastic was stifling.

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Found this interesting article at Chritianity Today via this post at Phil Baker’s blog. I have previously blogged about yoga over here, and also regarding food offered to idols here and here. Actually I was going to blog some more about what I call “the tyranny of the weaker brother” as well, but I have not finished the post yet. I will put up that post soon. Incidentally, I also found two arresting write-ups about her experiences with idols and food offered to them over at Feeble Knee’s blog.

Reading and thinking about evangelicals’ typical reactions and responses to these things that are normally alien to the normal custom and lifestyle make me suspect that perhaps people are afraid of these things merely because they are not familiar with them. It just appears strange to me that we would bestow so much power to these “foreign spirits”, whether “evil”, “New Age”, or simply “non-Christian”.

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It’s not about you…

This post is not about a defense of Rick Warren, nor about the defense of the Purpose-Driven Life Movement.

As I said before, I haven’t read the book, except for the first few chapters, and attending a couple of small group study sessions at a friend’s 40-Day experience, including the final session, including watching the video presentation of that final meeting.

What I would like to do in this post is to add one more question to those I started to ask before. By the way, very few people have attempted to answer any of my questions before. Maybe this blog needs a huge publicity campaign to get more of the right readers, and some kind of bribe to get them to respond when they do visit and read. Ah, well, I can only wish…

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Techno Gypsy has put up Christian Carnival #71 for this week. It looks like a large Carnival, and he has organized the over fifty entries in this week’s carnival in the form of stories of the desert fathers. I don’t know much about these desert fathers, but my entry, Thinking About Nicodemus, was classed under Basic Beliefs. Years ago, I wrote an Honors Project Thesis for my Philosophy degree part of which explored Alvin Plantinga’s reformed epistemology and proper basicality (when it was first introduced in the early eighties and quite novel and “cool” then), but I don’t think this is along the same vein as that. It is probably more to do with “basic beliefs of the Christian faith.”

Anyway, go on over there now, put up your feet, and fix yourself a cuppa and enjoy the stories…

Nicodemus is an enigmatic individual. He is only mentioned in three places in the Gospels. Correction. In one Gospel - John’s.

First of all, we know that he was a Pharisee. When we are initially introduced to him, we find him going to Jesus in the dark of night, presumably because he did not want people to know that he was interested in Jesus’ teachings.

The second time we read of him, we found him deep in a discussion among the Chief Priests and Pharisees who were conspiring to arrest Jesus. He spoke up, by appealing to their testimony laws, questioning whether their plan to secretly arrest and accuse Him without first hearing his testimony contravened their own laws. However, when challenged, he apparently slunk back into virtual oblivion.

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Recently, I commented on Messy Christian’s post regarding her painful experience of going through Wesak Day (a day when Buddhists celebrate the birth of the Buddha) apart from her family.

Before she became a Christian, Wesak Day is a day for her family to enjoy together, going to the temples and celebrating together. But since she started to follow Christ, she feels guilty that she has “split up” her family …

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David Wayne, the Jollyblogger, in his review of the movie Kingdom of Heaven, makes some interesting observations and insights about movies that portray Christianity in less than complimentary light. Commenting on the portrayal of the "aberrant" behavior of apparently devout Christians during the Crusades in the movie, he says:

It is at this point that I have heard evangelicals give the film some well deserved flack.  Like many movies, those with the most Christian zeal are also the most imbalanced and evil in the movie.  The film doesn’t do justice to those who had immense zeal for Christ and were very noble in their prosecution of the crusades.

However, instead of going on a tirade against Hollywood and the way they have spun the story, David called for calm and provides a reasoned approach to thinking about story-telling, narratives and literary reconstruction of historical events, comparing Hollywood style story-telling with Biblical narratives. He suggests that the mere portrayal of abberant Christian behavior is not necessarily detrimental or unhelpful.

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Recently I have been thinking a bit about the what it is that constitute the gospel message - telling others about the good news of God’s grace revealed through Jesus Christ.

I sense that in some quarters folks have a fixed idea about how to preach the gospel. Or, perhaps there is an assumption that the gospel when preached, at minimum, must contain a minimum set of contents. There is a strict formula in telling someone about God’s love from which we cannot and must not deviate. This is necessary before that person can make an appropriate decision to follow Christ.

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Jesus intended to pass through the city of Jericho. He had an agenda. He was on His way to Jerusalem, to enter the city triumphantly. An event that was anticipated by prophets of the Old Testament as well as cherished and re-enacted by Christians even centuries later. He was going to just pass through this city. But for a short, despised, social menace, one who was viewed by the masses with suspicion, distrust and even fear.

This one, Zacchaeus, was the head tax collector. He held a powerful position which he abused often. Doubtlessly, he brought much pain and distress to countless others.

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While blog hopping, I found this phrase from author John Stott’s writing, recommending that Christians ought to be involved in "persuasive engagement" – seeking to educate the public conscience to know and desire the will of God. This approach to dialoging with the culture is in contrast to two extremes that the Church has historically fallen to in its conversation with the culture at large:

At one extreme, the church has practised "imposition" (a crusading attempt to coerce people by legislation to accept the Christian way) which was seen, for example, in the Inquisition (imposition of belief) and Prohibition (imposition of behaviour). At the other extreme, the church has practised "leniency" (an extreme tolerance whereby one does not even propagate or commend one’s views) which was seen, for example, in the German church’s silence regarding Nazism’s anti-semitism. (HT: Phil Baker)

Recently, Chad Hamilton also wrote along a similar theme, calling for "humility and consideration for the opposing viewpoint" (I would say that we need to go further and not think of these viewpoints as "opposing") in dialoging with those who may not share our faith in Jesus Christ.

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So I was tempted when I read the announcement for the release of Wordpress 1.5.1. I had done quite a bit of tinkling on my site, some of which included adding files to various folders in my wordpress folders.

So I was quite downheartened when I read that to do a proper upgrade you need to delete old files and replace with new files. I thought to myself: it would have been good if I had documented everything I tinkled with, but since I did not, I took a deep breathe and went ahead anyway.

Well, so far, so good. It didn’t take too long. I did break a few things, but I managed to get most of everything working and it took me less than an hour (probably much less than that, including backing up everything twice), so since WP 1.5.1 is supposed to fix a few bugs, hopefully this site works much better.

Please let me know if you find anything that is broken. You can use this form to do this, or just send me an e-mail.