The most adorable thing

On Sunday mornings I work in the church nursery for two-year-olds. Each week, we read a Bible story out of a young children's Bible to them. When that is over, the nursery coordinator "prays," meaning she says a short prayer using kids' language about the material. Usually - no, always - she says it by herself. This morning, though, when she made the appropriate sentence breaks and pauses, one little boy repeated her prayer, effectively saying it with her. It was the cutest thing! Whether he thought that he was supposed to or he just felt like it, that little boy was just amazing. It's moments like that, or when you have a little child clinging around your neck, that watching toddlers is most worth it.

Francis Collins sermon

Today at church, we had Francis Collins, former Head of the Human Genome Project, preach. He was brilliant. I listened to the sermon on the radio on the way home. It was spectacular. He covered the steps of logic that led him to go from being an atheist to being a believer in Christ - all using pure reason. Starting from he assumption of the existence of the universe, he went on to the almost-necessity of there being a creator. Then, he went on to talk about a personal God, and from there to the deity of Jesus Christ. It was so brilliant. Everyone should listen to it. Check it out at http://www.parkstreet.org/sermon_audio. It really is awesome to listen to someone telling me that what I tell everyone else is both logical and true.

In-house for kindergarteners?

Early childhood time-out rules are generally one minute for each year of the child's age. However, when a six-year-old swore on the playground, he was sent to in-house to work silently and ceaselessly save for a lunch break, for the rest of the day. When he couldn't stay still that long and started dancing, he was told that he had to stay in in-house for the rest of the week. Is this right?
Yes, he used the f-word. Yes, he started dancing through the room trying to make the other people laugh. Is it really worth it?
Of course, he would forget six minutes of time-out in four minutes. He's not going to forget three days in in-house in a hurry. However, it may be over the top... Right now I'm assuming that the people in charge know what they're doing. If this sort of thing happens again, with less provocation, I'm going to rethink that trust.

Yet another song I love

Here's a piece that I love from possibly my favorite band ever. We heard this one at the Revolve Tour in '09, and I was thrilled to find that it was done by Hillsong United.

"A woman without a man is like..."

I know, you're just dying to hear the rest of this quote. I heard it from my Public Speaking professor, but she didn't come up with it. Just Google it when you get the rest. Anyway, I just wanted to address the attitude in our society that led my friend Esther on February 14th to jokingly wish me a happy "Singles Awareness Day," making fun of society. It's ridiculous. I'm going to say this ONCE. There is NOTHING WRONG with a young woman who hasn't dated or married. (No I'm not just saying this because I'm too young to date.) I just wanted to say that.

The quote?

"A woman without a man is like a fish without a bicycle."

Well, it happened. Oh joy.

WARNING. THIS POST CONTAINS MILD ADULT CONTENT.

Remember what I said at the beginning of the semester? I am not enjoying my English Compostition 102 class as much as I could, for the reason that my professor, while fairly good-natured,

• swears in class
• uses crude analogies
• expressed political twisting of the facts
• deals with increasingly adult content

and has made me more and more concerned about whether or not I would need to deal with the situation actively as opposed to passively.

So today, he got right off on a grammatical start, dealing with whom vs. who by giving the example of the Hamilton - Burr duel in early American history. Not particularly bad, no big deal, except that he then went on to lay vs. lie.

"You do not get 'laid.' You get 'lain.' I don't care how any of you do it, same sex, opposite sex, animals, corpses, but you do not get laid! You get lain." Good grief. This is a man with children at home.

I was just going to deal with it, not bother talking to him about it, but then he started...comparing God Almighty to the Greek "deities." You see, we were talking about Sophocles's "Antigone," and he started talking about the concept that people were the playthings of the gods, and he compared the play to the Torah (or Hebrew Bible) which he said had been coming out at the same time as this play. He talked about the suffering of the Greek mythical woman Niobe. Because of her pride, the gods killed her innocent children, then turned her into stone which continued weeping forever.

My professor then went on to compare Niobe to Job, asking whether anyone was familiar with the story of Job. I raised my hand, and was granted the "honor" of telling the story. He cut me off after the beginning, the permission granted to Satan to torment Job. He said, "Look, they are playing with a man's life on behalf of a wager." He then went on to complain that Job's children were innocent, and brought up the classic problem of suffering in the case, namely "How can Job (who has been established as a good man) suffer with the permission of a just and all-powerful God?"

I pointed out that at the end Job got everything back and more, but it didn't especially seem to bother him. I figured, enough is enough and I'm not going to take this garbage all semester. Let me tell him where I stand. So after class, I went up to him. "Great points on Job earlier, by the way." he commented. "Yeah, actually, I wanted to talk to you about that." "Please, go ahead." he invited.

I politely told him that I had been offended by his way of addressing that, and that it had sounded like he had started from the assumption that the Bible was false. He responded by apologizing and saying he didn't see how that was what it had sounded like. I then went on to point out that when I signed up for the class, I didn't know that it would contain this level of adult content. He told me, "I'm sorry that you were offended, but I'm interested in results, and experience has shown me that there will be fewer of those grammatical mistakes on tests and papers when I make these analogies." I nodded, thanked him and left.

So now the question is whether it will happen again.

HAHA guess where I am

I'm spending the weekend with my friend Esther! Haha, it's awesome. I don't need to worry about my visual aids speech that's coming up :P or anything. We went to the mall and window shopped and looked at jeans, and we had dinner at the Rainforest Cafe (thanks Becky!).
Also, this is my fortieth post! YAY!

Yes, people care.

There's a bake sale going on at the college today, a fundraiser to support the victims of the earthquake in Haiti. Not only was the stand crowded, but the signs on it read, "Sponsored by..." everything from the Christian Club to the PACE program to the Gay-Straight Alliance. So many groups on campus were supporting this event with their donations and lip service. It was like this after Hurricane Katrina, too. Often people don't really care when an individual accident or tragedy occurs, but when a natural disaster wreaks havoc on so many, it can be inspiring to watch people rise to the challenge.

(That's also why I had chocolate fudge for breakfast.)

People, do your research!

You know how I talked about my friend Keller who said government is like a corporation? Well, he's a deist (meaning he believes God created the universe and left) and we have debates on religion. He uses the Bible to create arguments and questions, and then he comes back and I use the Bible to counter his arguments. Sometimes he'll come back later and ask about one of my arguments. It's actually kind of fun, because he isn't one of those people who will never concede a point or admit that he's wrong. He comes up with really good questions and pushes them if I haven't answered well enough.
So the thing is, what if someone went and threw these questions at someone who didn't know the answers? I've got a fairly minor grounding in certain apologetics, but I think that a good background in apologetics is important to have so that when a person like my friend Keller comes and asks you about a seeming contradiction, you don't leave him or her with the impression that they've hit upon a problem that's unanswerable.
(Oh, and if you're an atheist reading this, ask the questions that bother you instead of just assuming that we're stupid. There's been a lot of research and reasoning put into justifying Christianity.)

If it's the beginning of the second semester...

then just wait until I graduate. Hoo boy, thus far in my college career I've sent letters to the campus paper protesting articles attacking theism, wound up president of the campus Christian Club and now I've been volunteered to present on the panel we're having early March. It's the beginning of my second semester. I'm not even sixteen. I think this is so awesome - how many people my age are blessed enough to get to do this sort of stuff? The answer is, not many, but it helps to put yourself out there like that.
By the time I graduate, I bet almost the whole campus will know me as a driven, almost single-minded religious enthusiast.
(Yes, that's a good thing.)

Another piece from Casting Crowns

Casting Crowns is truly awesome. Here's another moving masterpiece from them.

Friday night

Finally. It's been a loooong week, and I think I'd lose my mind if the week was any longer or the weekend was any shorter. Classes, a speech, a quiz, a "paper" that barely qualifies as an essay... And what better way to wrap up the week by talking about serious and not-serious matters that do NOT concern schoolwork with your best friends, along with...ping-pong and futons. I just wanted to say, time to do the dance of ecstacy. It's FRIDAY!

First speech

I'm taking public speaking this semester, and today we gave our first speeches. We each introduced a classmate, using info taken from interviews conducted last Thursday. So other people were giving their speeches, and it was almost time for me to give mine, and I felt nervous. As in, my legs felt like jelly, my heart rate was elevated, and my mind kept sprinting through my notes, reciting key facts. No matter that the speech was ungraded, no matter that everyone there was doing it for the first time.
Finally, it was my turn to go. I walked up and delivered my speech while ignoring the fact that my hands were as awkward as sausages and I kept needing to look at my notes. It really wasn't as bad as the waiting had been. Go figure. So that hurdle is over with, so...onto the next one.

I love this article...

Read it all.

Ibn Ishaq Al Kindy1 says: “Allah, may he be blessed and exalted, is absolutely one, and does not allow any multiplicity or composition. He is beyond description, and can not be described by any category. (The magazine of the University of Umm-Al-Qura, Vol. 6, p. 123)
----
1. The Qur’an says about Allah “nothing is like him”.
2. This means that Allah is other than anything that comes to your mind about him.
3. Muslims believe in the doctrine of "Mukhalaft مخالفة" ‘unlikeness’, which means there is no likeness whatsoever between Allah, and his characteristics, on one hand and all that pertains to creatures on the other.
4. The Qur’an is Allah’s word which is not like human words. (Arabic source for the fourth point.)

The above demonstrates that it is impossible to use human language to talk about Allah. That means if the Qur’an is credible in what it tells about Allah’s nature and characteristics, then it cannot be a revelation from that Allah. In other words, if it is false, it is false; if it is true, it is also false; therefore, it is false.
This teaching of the Qur'an leads to the impossibility of using human language to define Allah.
Therefore, since the Qur’an is written with human language, it can not be an expression of Allah, it cannot be a revelation from him, nor can it be his word.
That is to say if the Qur’an is true about who Allah is, it cannot be true about what the Qur’an is, and vice versa.
The only way, for Muslims to solve this dilemma is by considering that all words of the Qur’an are other than facts and that they are not equivalent to any human concept even if the wordings of both agree. Expressed differently, those words actually mean nothing, they are in fact only empty words.
Thus, the Muslims’ teaching that Allah is other than what comes to our minds logically means that if we have understood what the Qur’an said about Allah, He is other than what the Qur’an has said about him.

If you like this, go to http://www.answering-islam.org/ for more.

You're going to offend someone...

Last night at fife and drum rehearsal, I was chatting with one of the drummers, and he suddenly changed the topic. "Tomorrow at school we're starting to learn about Jesus." Naturally I was intrigued, and he continued, "I'm Jewish, you know?"

"Is this a Jewish school?"

"No, it's a private school but it's for everyone. My teacher told us today that tomorrow we're starting to talk about Jesus, and this Hindu kid raised his hand and he was like, 'Who's Jesus?' And there was this atheist that said that Jesus wasn't real, and someone else said 'No, it's God that's not real.' And my friend started crying..."

"You know, someone is going to be offended by this class."

"Yeah, probably." he said nonchalantly.

I was not a happy camper.

Follow-up

Oh, and here's the song.

How many people are like this?

I was looking on YouTube for a song I like, "Voice of Truth" by Casting Crowns, to post on here. Irritatingly enough, I discovered that the sound on the computer wasn't working. I happened to scroll down and see the comments, and what did I see but a comment battle between the "forces" of faith and the "forces" of atheism. People actually went to the song "Voice of Truth" and posted things like, "I so hate religion" and "I don't follow Christianity anymore."!

The believers who posted back to them said things in vigorous agreement to the song, and promised to pray for the unbelievers who posted. I don't have a YouTube account or I would have instantly thrown my voice in there with them. But I can't be the only one who thinks it's weird that atheists go to a clearly Christian song to express their disapproval....

Lamest election ever

We held our election of officers for the college Christian Club yesterday. Only one problem: the bylaws call for five officers (the president, vice president, secretary, treasurer and member-at-large) and guess how many people turned up? Yep. Five.

Here's how it went. Hope nominated me for president. I opened my mouth to nominate Christine for president, but Christine seconded Hope's nomination and poof, I was elected. Then Christine nominated Hope for VP, I seconded the nomination and we moved on to secretary. Hope asked Christine, last semester's secretary, "Did you have fun being secretary?"

"Yep."

"Great, you're in."

Mary volunteered to remain treasurer, and I called across the room, "Hey Alex, wanna be member-at-large?"

"What's that?"

"Basically you're the tiebreaker." He acquiesced, and then we all were officers.

No wonder Jillian, the administrator, wants to look at our bylaws to see if we really need that many officers.

Oh, and every time I've spoken to Hope since, she's called me "El Presidente." Har har.

Seriously, people...

Look, it's great to care about the environment, but this is just insane. I mean, talk about loss of rights and freedom, not to mention privacy... And the police are actually supposed to be the good guys? No. No, that is not what America is.

Look who else is looking for the source of the mysterious ticking noise?

The Monk Joke

This joke amuses me. You may have heard a version of this someplace. If you have, bear with me. If you haven't, don't skip to the end at any point. You'll miss the full effect of the joke.

A young boy was given his first bicycle. His mother gave him very specific instructions: Wear your helmet and don't go too far. The boy thought, The heck with you Mom, and followed neither instruction. He went out far beyond the city limits and hit a tree. As he was wearing no helmet, he was knocked out. A monk came along, took the boy back to his monastery and nursed him back to health.
On the boy's last night there, the monk came in and told him, "You'll hear a ticking noise during the night. Don't ask me what it is, because I can only tell monks." During the night the boy did indeed hear a ticking noise. The next morning, forgetting the monk's directive the previous night, asked, "What was that mysterious ticking noise?" The monk answered, "I can't tell you. I can only tell monks." And he sent the boy home to his mother.
Fifteen years later, the young man received his first car. His mother told him, "Don't go too far. and remember to wear your seat belt." Again the man thought, The heck with you Mom, and went far beyond the city limits. He hit the same tree, and the same monk came and took him back to the same monastery and nursed him back to health. Neither of them remembered the other.
On the man's last night there, the monk came in and said, "You'll hear a ticking noise during the night. Don't ask me what it is, because I can only tell monks."
Then the man remembered, and was overwhelmed with curiosity.
He went away the next day, and joined another monastery, and after his official monk certification he returned to the first monastery. He asked if he could spend the night and was of course granted permission. The next morning he went to the monk and said, "Brother Monk, what was that mysterious ticking noise?"
The monk said, "Go to the orchard and dig under the tree in the southeast corner."
The man did so and found a box with an orange key. He went back to the monk and said, "Where does this key go?" The monk took him to the third guest bedroom on the second floor, moved aside the wardrobe and there was an orange door. The key opened the door, and there was a purple door behind it. The monk told the man, "Go to the fifth berry bush from the left in the middle row in the raspberry field." So the man did so, and there was a blue key. Upon discovering that the blue key did not open the purple door, the man was told that there was a blue cabinet under the bed. After looking, he found the box and opened it, and there was the purple key. Behind the purple door was a flight of stairs.
The man climbed and climbed and climbed and climbed and climbed and climbed and climbed and climbed and climbed and climbed and climbed and climbed and climbed and climbed and climbed and climbed and climbed, up and up and up and up and up.
At the top, the exhausted man found a red door.
He slid down the banister and gasped, clutching the stitch in his side, "Brother...Monk...there's a...red...door up there.... The monk gave him a red key and bade him climb again. The man almost died of heart failure on the way up the stairs, but he finally reached the top, unlocked the door and entered a dark room. The mysterious ticking noise was verrrryyyy close...
What was it?

And the answer? Ready for this?

--------------------------------------

I can't tell you. I can only tell monks.

The Importance of Prayer

Yes, this is important. People define prayer in different ways. The general consensus is that it is communication with God, but what is it most like? Talking in person? Talking on the phone? Texting? Sending an email or letter? Why is it important? There are several FAQ, such as

-"Isn't it irrelevant because anything that will happen was already going to?"
Who says it didn't happen because you prayed for it?
or
-"How do I know that God hears me?"
Sometimes you don't. It's an issue of faith, to trust Him anyway.

I don't think that praying is like any of the above forms of communication. It's unique. Furthermore, prayer is important because your relationship with God is, well, a relationship. How do you build a relationship with someone you don't talk to? (Yes, for the sake of argument I am including IMing on sites and Facebook, texting and other forms of direct two-sided communication as "talking.")
So, have you talked to God today?

Just to say...

that it's the first time since my dad moved to MA that he's had a representative he voted for. I saw a quote last night that someone complained that Scott Brown was sworn in "early" and that his candidacy was a joke. That's ridiculous. Anyway, chances are that Brown's and Kerry's votes are going to cancel each other out, but that's a good thing.
So I'm happy about this.

I like this video...

My point isn't the cyclists, I just think this is cool. Not that you shouldn't be careful...

Scary numbers...

Since my planned career path is missions in the 10-40 window, I did some research today.

-Iran - Muslim 98% (Shia 89%, Sunni 9%), other (includes Zoroastrian, Jewish, Christian, and Baha'i) 2%
-Iraq - Muslim 97% (Shia 60%-65%, Sunni 32%-37%), Christian or other 3%
-Yemen - Muslim including Shaf'i (Sunni) and Zaydi (Shia), small numbers of Jewish, Christian, and Hindu
-Saudi Arabia - Muslim 100%
-Pakistan - Muslim 95% (Sunni 75%, Shia 20%), other (includes Christian and Hindu) 5%
-Kazakhstan - Muslim 47%, Russian Orthodox 44%, Protestant 2%, other 7%
-Afghanistan - Sunni Muslim 80%, Shia Muslim 19%, other 1%
-Egypt - Muslim (mostly Sunni) 90%, Coptic 9%, other Christian 1%
-Syria - Sunni Muslim 74%, other Muslim (includes Alawite, Druze) 16%, Christian (various denominations) 10%, Jewish (tiny communities in Damascus, Al Qamishli, and Aleppo)
-Oman - Ibadhi Muslim 75%, other (includes Sunni Muslim, Shia Muslim, Hindu) 25%
-Lebanon - Muslim 59.7% (Shia, Sunni, Druze, Isma'ilite, Alawite or Nusayri), Christian 39% (Maronite Catholic, Greek Orthodox, Melkite Catholic, Armenian Orthodox, Syrian Catholic, Armenian Catholic, Syrian Orthodox, Roman Catholic, Chaldean, Assyrian, Copt, Protestant), other 1.3% note: 17 religious sects recognized
-Israel - Jewish 76.4%, Muslim 16%, Arab Christians 1.7%, other Christian 0.4%, Druze 1.6%, unspecified 3.9% (2004)
-Turkmenistan - Muslim 89%, Eastern Orthodox 9%, unknown 2%
-Uzbekistan - Muslim 88% (mostly Sunnis), Eastern Orthodox 9%, other 3%
-Kyrgyzstan - Muslim 75%, Russian Orthodox 20%, other 5%

All information was copied and pasted directly from CIA - The World Factbook.

I think I have more than every right to be concerned.