Chuck Norris wears Jack Bauer pajamas

How freakin cool is 24 right now???? Thats all I really need to say I think!

Lost Spoiler

This may or may not be accurate, but here is a lot of spoilerish info about the next episode:

Not In Portland Exclusive Summary - - The episode opens with Juliet visiting her sister. She is injecting her with an experimental drug that they hope will allow her sister to become pregnant. Juliet is visited by Ethan and someone we haven't met before (he played a terrorist on 24 though) who want her to come work 'in Portland'. Unfortunately, she is bound to a contract with her nasty Ex-Husband. She makes the offhand comment that he would need to be hit by a bus before she could come work for them. Next day, as she is strolling to work... he gets hit by a bus. Juliet is having a bittersweet sending off at the morgue when Ethan and his cronies show up again. She decides to take the job. But the job is "Not in Portland" which reveals the purpose of the title. She only agrees to six months. - - They want her because she is some world-famous fertility researcher. This lends a lot of support to the theory that the Others can't reproduce. - - The situation with Jack gets hairy when Ben wakes up and over-hears Jack telling Mr. Friendly that Juliet asked him to kill Ben. So much for Jack having any loyalty to Juliet! Ben converses with Juliet in private for a while. It is almost as if he sends her out to help Sawyer and Kate escape because immediately after the conversation, that is exactly what she does. - - Speaking of Kate and Sawyer, yes they run through the jungle and exchange gunfire with Pickett and his cronies. Just when the chips seem down, Alex shows up and starts taking out guys with her sling shot. At this point, they have realized they can't get off the island without a boat and Alex promises to alleviate that situation, with a catch: they must help her rescue her boyfriend Karl who is being held in a building on the island. Sawyer beats the snot out of the guard at the building (played by Rob McElhenry from "Always Sunny in Philadelphia"). - - The scene with Karl is definitely one for the freeze framers. He is tied up and drugged and being forced to watch a movie with a lot of fast moving images and words. Very 60's style brainwashing stuff. - - When they finally get to the beach, Pickett is way ahead of them. He knew exactly where they would turn up and is waiting for them. Just as he is about to execute sawyer, Juliet comes in and kills him. She tells Alex that Karl can go with Sawyer and Kate, but she will have to stay. She refers to Ben as "your father". - - Jack finishes the surgery and Ben survives. He talks to Kate via Pickett's radio and tells her to never come back to try to rescue him. It is kind of an emotionally intense moment. You can see that Sawyer is uncomfortable with the amount of pain Kate is exhibiting over this. - - There is an uncomfortable respect between Juliet and Jack now, but Juliet still seems to be open to him... as if the request to kill Ben was a gag maybe? Jack asks Juliet what Ben said to her and she replies that he is finally going to let her go home. She reveals that she has been on the island for 3 years, 2 months, and 23 days. According to the various LOST time-lines out there, this means she arrived on 9/11/2001.

New Semester

So, the new semester started this week and is already well under way and I have not even been to all of my classes yet. I have finished all of my GE classes and all of my lower division major requirements and now have nothing left but upper division and I have to say, it's kind of overwhelming. The classes are hard, half of the students in all of my classes so far are grad students, and I just found out how well I need to do in the classes to continue with my education. I met with a counselor in the history department on Monday (ironically she is also one of my teachers this semester) and I am meeting with a credential advisor next Friday. I was told by the history department counselor that I need to get a C in all of my classes from now on (since they are all upper division) in order to graduate, which is no big deal. But I also found out that in order to get into the credential program I need to get straight B's (not just a 3.0) and I need to get a 3.5 in order to get into the graduate program. I was going to take 6 classes this semester so I can graduate in December, but I do not think that I can get a 3.5 GPA while taking 6 classes. So I dropped to 4, and am graduating in May of '08 instead. Not only is this going to be the hardest semester so far, but it is also the most expensive. I have the same teacher for 2 classes and between the 2, he has assigned 26 books. So, this is going to be an interesting 15 weeks. More to come.....

Lost Fans Unite...Form of....a 6th season

For all of you lost fans out there, one of the writers of the show has announced that they do not plan to do more than 100 episodes which at the current rate would finish the story in mid-5th season. It is not official yet, but in a recent interview he answered direct questions about the length of the series 4 different times with the 100 episode answer. Bummer!

Beware the Rant

You know what one of my most favorite things is: when you are sitting at a red light and the guy in front of you starts to inch forward just as the cross traffic light turns yellow and keeps inching foward so that he is in the middle of the intersection by the time the light turns green for us. You start to think that he is trying to beat some personal record for getting somewhere, but then after the light turns green and we have crossed the intersection he goes 20 freaking miles an hour!!! What the heck?!?!?! Did he try to fool me into thinking that he was going to drive at a reasonable speed? Was he distracted by something on the side of the road? Or maybe he was watching his in-dash entertainment system while talking on his cell phone, eating a big mac and consulting his PDA for directions?
Rant over.

"They are so unlike your Christ"

I have seen a bumper sticker several times over the past month. It says "I like your Christ. I don't like your Christians. They are so unlike your Christ." Its convicting and really sad because even if we try as hard as we can to be a good witness, we are still lumped into the same group as Ted Haggard and Jim & Tammy Faye Bakker.

"The fully enlightened Earth radiates disaster triumphant."

Is technology a good thing? We have progressed in the past two hundred years beyond the wildest dreams of most people living in the early 19th century. And there have been many wonderful advances in several fields, including science and medicine, but is it a good thing? We have developed medicine to cure almost anything, but have we become so dependant on medicine that we have made our bodies loose their natural ability to fight off disease? If we get the slightest headache, do we immediately pop 4 advil? We have caused the "death of distance," as Francis Cairncross has said, with the advent of the internet and the move towards globalization. But is that a good thing? Is globalization a good thing; with a centralization of government (and I admit that a world government is far down the line of globalization) comes some negative things like the end of competition (and maybe the end of progress?) And there was a reason why God destroyed the Tower of Babel. And the point that I have saved for last, technology has made the most efficient ways of killing people. German machine gunners from WWI went into shock because of they were killing people so many people so fast. There were 62 million casualties in the 6 years of WWII. Theodor Wiesengrund Adorno said that "The Enlightenment has always aimed at liberating men from fear and establishing their sovereignty. Yet the fully enlightened earth radiates disaster triumphant." So, is technology itself a good thing? Are we truly better now than we were 500 years ago?

Sola Scriptura

How much faith do we put in science? If we have interpreted a passage of scipture in one way, but then we hear something from science that contradicts that scripture, do we reinterpret that passage or do we reinterpret our scientific findings? For example, Genesis says that God created the Earth on day one, but He did not create the sun until day four. But science tells us that the sun ignited billions of years before the earth formed. So, what do we believe? Do we put so much faith in science that we will say that the Bible must not really mean that the sun was created after the Earth? Or do we put enough faith in scripture to say that science is not Truth?

Young Earth

I believe that the Earth is young, in fact I think that the earth is no more than 10,000 years old and here is why:
The Creation week was exactly that: a week. The original Hebrew word for day that was used in Genesis 1 (yowm) is used 2301 times throughout the Old Testament with verying meanings. It is used to mean (among other things) an epoch in time, a 24-hour period, and the daylight portion of a day. However, when used with a qualifying number (such as the first day of creation, second day of creation, etc) it is seen 410 times in the OT and always meaning a 24-hour period; when used with the qualifier "evening and morning", it is seen 38 times always meaning a 24-hour period; and when used with the qualifiers "evening" and "morning" seperately, 23 times each always meaining a 24-hour period. I think that the Hebrew writers and God Himself was trying to say something with the words of Genesis.
The myriad of available dating methods are not reliable, and they become less reliable the older the object that you are trying to date. Carbon dating (calibrated or non-calibrated) can give different dates when dating two objects from the same time period. And carbon dating can only date objects a few thousand years old. In order to get dates of 4.5 billion years (the supposed age of the earth) you need to use a compound with a longer half-life, the most common being potasium-argon and it has been shown that you can use potasium-argon dating to date a recent lava flow as happening millions of years ago. And there are hundreds of other dating methods that are equally un-reliable. Consider this: if one were to look at Adam the day after his creation, he would appear by all signs to be 35 years old (or whatever age God created Adam to be) when in fact he would be only one day old. The point is, if God created Adam to be fully mature the day after creation, wouldn't it follow that the rest of creation would also start out mature? That would explain how dating methods (however unreliable they may be) can show a 4.5 billion year old Earth and how we can see light from stars billions of light years away.
Now here is why I think that this is important. If when we witness to people and explain to them that we are all sinners needing forgiveness, we need to start at the beginning of the story: we cannot tell people the good news of the gospel without first understanding the bad news ourselves. In Romans, Paul tells us that sin entered the world through one man (Adam) and that death is the punishment for sin. If someone thinks that the earth is millions or billions of years old, then they would have to add those years before Adam and Eve because they will not fit in the geneologies spoken of in the Bible. If there were millions of years before Adam, then there were millions of years of death (represented in the fossil record) before Adam's first sin. I do not in any way think that this is an essential of the Christian faith (i.e. an issue that effects salvation) but I do think that it is a very important issue that involves the inerrancy of Scripture. What do you think?