Mark's Notebook

All Articles - March 2006

An Affront to Civilization

National Review Editorial

The trial of Abdul Rahman, who faces a potential death sentence for converting to Christianity some 15 years ago, is an affront to civilization. Killing or jailing someone for his religious beliefs is always wrong, and is especially galling in a country so dependent on American military forces and aid.

Conservatives in this country have been admirably willing to accept the compromises and frustrations that come with President Bush's attempts to reform recalcitrant parts of the world. The judicial murder of a Christian convert by a government that exists only on the basis of American power and good will, however, would be intolerable.

http://www.nationalreview.com/editorial/editors200603220953.asp

Free Abdul Rahman

Washington Times Editorial

Washington Times Editorial

The case of Abdul Rahman, who faces execution in Afghanistan for having become a Christian 15 years ago, is about as clear-cut as it could be. A democracy founded on the principles of freedom and tolerance does not kill religious dissenters. This was why Afghanistan under the Taliban was considered one of the most oppressive countries in the world. What have American soldiers achieved if they have not eliminated this barbaric medieval legacy?

We expect the administration to use all the leverage it can, which is considerable, to set Mr. Rahman free -- and not only for Mr. Rahman's sake. American soldiers and their families, not to mention taxpayers, have sacrificed much to free Afghanistan. The execution of Christians simply because they are Christians is not what they had in mind.

http://www.washtimes.com/op-ed/20060322-090715-8777r.htm

Congratulating ourselves

Los Angeles Times

Conservatives have questioned the administration's support for democratic governments in Islamic countries.

"How can we congratulate ourselves for liberating Afghanistan from the rule of jihadists only to be ruled by radical Islamists who kill Christians?" wrote Tony Perkins, head of the Family Research Council, a lobbying group, in a letter this week to Bush and congressional leaders.

Afghanistan's new constitution calls for religious freedom of expression, but the document has an unresolved conflict with Sharia, which does not permit conversions out of Islam.

Mawlawi Ghulam Haider, 75, a mullah in a Kabul mosque, said: "If somebody becomes a Christian or converts to any other religion than Islam, he must be given a chance over three days to think and return to Islam. If he returns to Islam, he can live happily ever after. But if he doesn't turn back … he will be punished by death."

http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/world/la-fg-usafghan24mar24,0,3398976.st
ory?track=tottext

Spring Ache

New Orleans Times-Picayune

Thousands of college students who might have spent spring break sunning in Acapulco or on Florida beaches this year are pouring into New Orleans to sleep in dormitory tents or on classroom floors, eat off paper plates and spend a week of vacation hauling foul muck out of homes ruined by floodwaters.

-- Campus Crusade for Christ, a network of campus ministries, has sent 4,400 students to New Orleans this week, the peak of the spring break season, spokesman Tony Arnold said.

-- The Southern Baptist Convention's North American Mission Board has more than 1,500 students here this week, spokesman Steve Manfredi said.

-- Common Ground Collective, a secular grassroots organization of young social progressives, has about 1,000 students on the ground doing demolition, health care, day care, after-school tutoring and other tasks, said Lisa Fithian, a veteran activist from Austin who has been in New Orleans since September.

-- Opportunity Rocks 2006: Rebuilding the Gulf Coast, a network led by former Sen. John Edwards, D-N.C., has nearly 700 college students from 27 states working in Chalmette.

-- United Methodist churches around New Orleans are housing and dispatching more than 1,000 students to work sites daily during this week, said the Rev. Yvonne Dayries, a coordinator at the denomination's headquarters in Baton Rouge.

-- Lutheran encampments in Metairie, Kenner and St. Tammany house 300 volunteers working around the region.

Four major encampments in Chalmette, Algiers, at City Park and in the Lower 9th Ward house more than 5,000 students. Many more are bedded down in independent churches or private homes. The students are scattered around the area, but most are concentrated in the flood zones of New Orleans and St. Bernard Parish.

In shorts and rubber boots, bandannas and face masks, they immerse themselves in the wreckage. Often a boom box pumps out music to relieve the work. But the experience remains sobering.

http://www.nola.com/archives/t-p/index.ssf?/base/news-0/1142582050218460.xml&col
l=1

Democratic Apostasy

Prison Fellowship - Chuck Colson

by Chuck Colson

The irony is inescapable: This is the country that we rid of the Taliban because of its religious oppression. This is the country in which we have spent at least $70 billion to establish a free democratic government. This is the country whose freedom cost us three hundred American lives and eight hundred casualties. And this is the country that is preparing to execute a man for becoming a Christian after he witnessed other Christians caring for his countrymen.

Is this the fruit of democracy? Is this why we have shed American blood and invested American treasure to set a people free? What have we accomplished for overthrowing the Taliban? This is the kind of thing we would expect from the Taliban, not from President Karzai and his freely elected democratic government.

I have supported the Bush administration’s foreign policy because I came to believe that the best way to stop Islamo-fascism was by promoting democracy. But if we can’t guarantee fundamental religious freedoms in the countries where we establish democratic reforms, then the whole credibility of our foreign policy is thrown into serious question. I hope the president and the administration can recognize what a devastating setback Rahman’s execution would be to the cause of democracy and freedom.

http://www.pfm.org/AM/Template.cfm?Section=BreakPoint1&Template=/CM/ContentDispl
ay.cfm&ContentID=18289

Satellite May Have Found Noah's Ark

ABC News

This article reads like something from the National Enquirer, but ...

Satellite May Have Found Noah's Ark

March 15, 2006— A satellite image may launch a scientific expedition to search for Noah's Ark. The snapshot captures a mysterious object on Turkey's Mount Ararat.

"I see for a 1,015 feet in length a shiplike object that has almost unbroken symmetry," said Porcher Taylor, an assistant professor at the University of Richmond.

He calculated that the object in the photo had the same length-to-width ratio — 300 cubits by 500 cubits — of the ark described in the Bible. That is about the size of an aircraft carrier.

http://abcnews.go.com/GMA/story?id=1727536&gma=true

Southern Baptist mission to rebuild Big Easy houses

The Southern Baptist Convention, in conjunction with Promise Keepers, plan to rebuild 1,000 homes in New Orleans. They hope to find 52,000 volunteers.

Samaritan's Purse has contributed $25 million and over 5,000 volunteers to rebuild 7,000 homes.

The Lutheran Church is sending 1,000 college students who will spend their spring break helping the area rebuild.

http://www.washtimes.com/national/20060315-105857-6895r.htm

Voluntourism

Washington Post

By Linton Weeks, Washington Post Staff Writer

NEW ORLEANS -- Anita McClendon, 48, and about a dozen other volunteers were gutting the innards of the flood-ravaged Greater Little Zion Baptist Church in the Lower Ninth Ward. It was tough, sweaty work, and for some of the volunteers, it was their vacation.

McClendon, a health care worker from Oakland, Calif., was here for three weeks, ripping down demolished buildings by day -- and dancing to zydeco by night. She and thousands of other volunteers are combining work and play to help rebuild this devastated city.

This month, they are being joined by hundreds of college students spending spring break here and on Mississippi's Gulf Coast. They include 200 students from Howard University, more than 40 from George Washington University and more than two dozen from American University's Washington College of Law. The effort is dubbed "voluntourism," and local leaders say it is critical to the rebuilding because it provides dollar-spending fun lovers and hammer-wielding fixer-uppers all rolled into one. The more than 1,000 students expected here in the coming weeks will clean out houses and churches and day-care centers.

The Web site www.VolunTourism.org points out that the combination of volunteerism and tourism dates back centuries: Missionaries, sailors, explorers and others performed social services while visiting new places. The modern iteration began in the 1960s with the launching of the Peace Corps. Study-abroad programs in the 1970s and ecotourism in the 1980s expanded the notion. Volunteer vacations, with organizations such as Earthwatch, really took hold in the 1990s.

Habitat for Humanity, the Georgia-based home-building group for low-income families, offers voluntourism opportunities, called "global village trips," around the world. Spokesman Duane Bates said, "They build houses during the day and enjoy cultural activities at night."

Through Habitat, volunteers are helping to rebuild New Orleans and the Gulf Coast region. Since January, more than 1,300 people have worked for the group in the greater New Orleans area.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/03/14/AR2006031401536.
html

Girls gone mild - a different kind of spring break

San Francisco Chronicle

by C.W. Nevius

A growing number of college students are opting for spending the spring break week volunteering for good causes.

Erin Cooper, a third-year student at UC Berkeley, is going to the party-hearty hotbed of Tijuana. She wants to help improve conditions for border patrols, raise awareness of domestic violence within Mexico and, just for kicks, help out in organizing labor unions among migrant workers.

Some of her classmates are going to New Orleans to join in the cleanup. Still others are headed to Mexico to lend a hand in impoverished communities.

Cooper says the move toward constructive, even philanthropic, spring breaks is only natural among students today. "I think there has definitely been an increase in community service in the last 10 years," she said. "I think a lot of us got into it when we were in high school because we had to do it to get into college, and it carried on from there."

http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c/a/2006/03/14/NEVIUS.TMP&nl=top

Job gains bring out job seekers, so unemployment rate rises

San Jose Mercury News

By Frank Michael Russell, Mercury News Assistant Business Editor

Now that employers are finally adding to their payrolls, many long-suffering job seekers are returning to the workforce. In fact, they're returning in numbers so huge that the unemployment rate climbed in February, even as employers added 243,000 payroll jobs.

The unemployment rate was still relatively low at 4.8 percent, up from 4.7 percent in January, the Labor Department reported today. "You are seeing a large number of people coming out of the woodwork because there are jobs to be found. People are now looking for jobs because it is now worth looking," said Bill Cheney, chief economist at John Hancock Financial Services, according to an Associated Press report. (The Labor Department doesn't count an individual as unemployed unless that person is actively looking for work.)

http://www.mercurynews.com/mld/mercurynews/business/columnists/business_update/1
4069043.htm

http://www.mercurynews.com/mld/mercurynews/business/14066669.htm

Mark says: Doh! I could have told you that.

God by the Numbers

Christianity Today

Three numbers in particular suggest evidence for God's existence. They are 1/10¹⁰¹²³, 10¹⁶², and e^πi.

The fine-tuning of the four physical forces and the presence of one habitable planet are just two of the components that would go into a formula to predict the probability of a life-supporting universe. Oxford professor Roger Penrose discusses it in his book The Large, the Small, and the Human Mind. Penrose says the number is 1 in 10 to the 10 to the 123.

The second number that points to God comes from the field of biology. William Dembski, in The Creation Hypothesis, suggests the following argument. The odds against getting 1,000 beneficial mutations in the proper order is 2¹⁰⁰⁰. Expressed in decimal form, this number is about 10³⁰¹. 10³⁰¹ mutations is a number far beyond the capacity of the universe to generate. The chance of getting 1,000 beneficial mutations out of all the mutations the universe can generate is 10¹³⁹ divided by 10³⁰¹, or 1 chance in 10¹⁶².

A mathematics professor at MIT, an atheist, once wrote this formula on the blackboard, saying, "There is no God, but if there were, this formula would be proof of his existence."

http://www.christianitytoday.com/ct/2006/003/26.44.html

Real Life Simpsons Intro

YouTube

A real-life Simpsons video. Not bad ...

http://youtube.com/watch?v=49IDp76kjPw

Mississippi's Post-Katrina Boom

Washington Post

By Spencer S. Hsu, Washington Post Staff Writer

BILOXI, Miss. -- On a recent Saturday night, traffic inching toward the 1,100-room Imperial Palace Hotel and Casino backed up for a mile on Interstate 110. Inside, gamblers jammed all 52 tables and 1,900 slot machines on the casino's three burgundy-carpeted floors.

Six months after Hurricane Katrina smashed through a fragile necklace of Mississippi coastal towns, the region is enjoying a post-storm boom. Fueled by insurance money, federal reconstruction aid and speculative capital, surviving hotels and restaurants are filled to overflowing, beachfront land prices are soaring, and developers are placing billion-dollar bets that shattered antebellum mansions will give rise to condominium resorts.

The guarded optimism is tempered by continued human suffering in one of the nation's poorest states, where 36,000 families remain housed in trailers and hundreds more live in plywood barracks and tents in the winter chill. To the west, the smaller towns of Waveland (population 7,100), Bay St. Louis (8,300) and Pass Christian (6,800) remain largely obliterated by Katrina.

"It's going to be a long journey -- we know that," said Pass Christian Mayor Billy McDonald, whose beach colony lost every business that generated sales taxes and 75 percent of its housing. Only about 2,000 residents remain. "First, we have to get cleaned up. Then we have to get people to come back. The hard part is in front of us."

But evidence of short-term recovery is everywhere in the cities President Bush visited this week. In Biloxi, a city of 50,000 that lost a quarter of its structures to Katrina, the three casinos that have reopened did $63 million of business in January -- close to the $83 million taken in by the city's nine gambling venues a year ago.

Brent Warr, mayor of neighboring Gulfport (population 72,000), said the nation's discovery of the area's 26 miles of white-sand beaches has boosted land prices along the devastated shoreline by 50 percent -- between $1 million and $2 million an acre. Investors are also seizing on federal post-storm tax legislation, which lets companies immediately write off half the cost of new investments.

Although the storm drew no distinctions between rich and poor, middle- and upper-class residents are rebuilding. But low-income people, fixed-income seniors and renters in poor, low-lying areas -- about 20 percent of the storm victims -- are being squeezed out by demolition and redevelopment, according to such groups as Oxfam America.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/03/09/AR2006030902151.
html

US students toil on Katrina relief for spring break

Alternet, Reuters

By Jeffrey Jones

PASS CHRISTIAN, Miss., March 6 (Reuters) - It isn't the spring-break beach holiday most U.S. college students dream of, but with the shore still strewn with wreckage and homes in shambles from Hurricane Katrina, the Gulf Coast is the destination of choice for thousands.

College kids from across the United States have answered the call to forsake March parties in Daytona Beach, Florida, and Cabo San Lucas, Mexico, in favor of fixing and cleaning homes, schools and community centers in Alabama, Mississippi and Louisiana. Their holiday accommodation is a wind-battered auditorium jammed with cots and sleeping bags.

7,000 students have been marshaled by Campus Crusade for Christ. The United Way and MTV are sending 100 spring breakers to Biloxi and Foley, Alabama. Many students are paying their own way and some have held pledge drives to fund trips to sites where the work is hard and accommodations spartan.

The temporary influx in Pass Christian, a town of 6,500 people, has created few problems for locals despite scant resources, said Lieut. Greg Federico of the Harrison Country Sheriff's Dept. Many displaced residents still live in green military tents. "It means extra hands. And we absolutely need any help," he said. In fact, students began arriving just after Katrina and "they've been just working their butts off."

About 60 miles (100 km) west in New Orleans, where some neighborhoods remain in a state of suspended ruin, grassroots aid group Common Ground Relief expects 1,000-2,000 students to join its cleanup and community relief work in poor areas.

http://www.alertnet.org/thenews/newsdesk/N06354275.htm

Complexity causes 50% of product returns

Washington Post

Reuters

AMSTERDAM (Reuters) - Half of all malfunctioning products returned to stores by consumers are in full working order, but customers can't figure out how to operate the devices, a scientist said on Monday.

Product complaints and returns are often caused by poor design, but companies frequently dismiss them as "nuisance calls."

Consumers find it hard to install and use the wave of versatile electronics gadgets has flooded the market in recent years.

The average consumer in the United States will struggle for 20 minutes to get a device working, before giving up, the study found.

Product developers, brought in to witness the struggles of average consumers, were astounded by the havoc they created.

She also gave new products to a group of managers from consumer electronics company Philips, asking them to use them over the weekend. The managers returned frustrated because they could not get the devices to work properly.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/03/06/AR2006030600525.
html

Mark says: The essence of engineering is being able to look ahead and predict problems that will occur with the design, development, and deployment of a product. These problems shows that consumer devices suffer from a lack of proper engineering and usability analysis. These problems should have been known before the products were sold.

What is an evangelical?

My good friend Bill M is helping contact pastors regarding the Harvest Crusade that will take place in San Jose later this year.

He said he is contacting pastors of "evangelical" churches. I asked him what is an "evangelical" church. We tossed it back and forth for a while, but we didn't really come to a firm decision. In the end, we decided that pastors of non-evangelical chuches would probably "self-select out" of involvement in the Harvest Crusade. That is, pastors that choose to be involved are probably evangelical, and pastors that choose not to be involved are probably not evangelical.

It can be confusing. "Evangelical" is not the same as "fundamentalist" is not the same as "right-wing" is not the same as "moral majority" (or whatever they like to call themselves these days). And some churches that call themselves evangelical, like the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, might have their evangelical credentials questioned others in the movement.

The term fundamentalist refers to churches who believe the Bible is totally without error. These include most pentecostal and baptist churches.

The term moral majority refers to churches who oppose abortion and homosexuality. It includes some non-evanglical Christian churches, for example Catholics, and some non-Christian groups, for example Mormons.

The term right-wing refers to churches who align themsevles with right-wing political ideals. This goes beyond "moral majority" politics because it includes support for defense and war, support for the death penalty, opposition to immigration, and other right-wing political ideals.

But the term evanglical does not allow such a simple definition. Some would try to say that any church that believes in the gospel is evangelical. But many non-evangelical churches, like Episcopal, Methodist, and Catholic, believe in the gospel. And they believe in preaching the gospel. And they would like to think of themselves as evangelical, even if they are excluded by other churches that call themselves evangelical.

Historians David Bebbington, Mark Noll, and George Rawlyk have identified four characteristic marks of "evangelicalism":

• a stress on conversion,
• a focus on Christ's redeeming work as the core of biblical Christianity,
• an acknowledgment of the Bible as the supreme authority, and
• an energetic and personal approach to social engagement and evangelism.

I'd say that overall this is a reasonable starting point for a definition. But it does seem to work by principle of exclusion. In other words, it defines evangelicalism by contrasting it to what it is not.

The focus on Christ's redeeming work excludes some groups that would like to call themselves Christian, such as Unitarians, Mormons, and Jehovah's Witnesses.

The acknowledgement of the Bible as supreme authority is a device that goes back to the reformation of the 1500's, designed specifically to exclude Catholics.

The stress on conversion is the requirement that is most germane to the upcoming Harvest Crusade. Why would a group that doesn't believe in conversion support an outreach that attempts to convert people? It may surprise you that some Christian groups do not overtly believe in conversion. Many groups believe in catechism ... that is, if you teach the gospel to children and young adults, they will "grow into" a relationship with God, without the need for any conversion experience. Gerberding, in The Way of Salvation in the Lutheran Church, (Lutheran Publication Society, 1887) says exactly this. (The book is available online through Project Gutenberg.) In general, Catholic, Lutheran, and Anglican/Episcopal churches do not believe in conversion. Reformed and Presbyterian churches claim to believe in conversion but many do not act like it ... and some extreme Calvinist churches say that "choosing Christ" is impossible because predestination requires that Christ choose you instead.

Personal social engagement and evangelism seems to exclude just about everyone. Most Christians believe in personal engagement but do not practice it. Most conservative Christians (those who belive in a personal relationship with Jesus) claim to believe in evangelism but few practice it. Most liberal Christians (those who believe in living like Jesus did) believe in social engagement but not evangelism. Only missionaries get even close to doing this.

But maybe that's the point. It's not enough to just have a personal relationship with Jesus, one must also "be Jesus" to the world without. And it's not enough to want to live according to the ethical ideals of Jesus, one must also have the personal relationship with Jesus that makes that kind of lifestyle possible.

(The Christianity Today article is about Richard Baxter; it is worthwhile in and of itself, and it describes these four characteristics of evangelicalism as they were displayed in Baxter's life.)

Bible Reading Progress

I've posted a couple times before about my new plan for reading through the New American Standard Bible in one year.

One month ago I was quite far ahead of plan, way far ahead on two tracks, and a little behind on the two other tracks. At that time I had completed 30 percent of the Bible, enough to finish in only seven months if I were to keep up that pace.

Here's my cumulative progress to date, through three months:

I've read a total of 615 chapters, which is just over half the Bible. At this pace, I should finish in six months, or around the end of May.

Because I'll finish Track 1 shortly, I can start doubling up on Track 3, where I'm a little behind. But I'm worried that even if I tack Job and Proverbs onto the end of Track 1, I may not finish even the Psalms at the end of six months, because I'm not even half way through that one book. I don't really like to read more than one Psalm per day; but the later ones are shorter.

Churches vs. Starbucks

London News-Telegraph

By Jonathan Petre, Religion Correspondent

More than 1,000 new Christian churches have been created over the last seven years, double the number of Starbucks coffee shops, new research has found.

All the major denominations opened new churches but the biggest growth was among the black Pentecostal churches. The remaining new churches were scattered among the mainstream denominations.

About 450 branches of Starbucks were opened over the same period.

(Mark says: NOTE this was in England)

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2006/02/27/nchur27.xml&sShe
et=/news/2006/02/27/ixhome.html

The Simpsons vs. The First Amendment

Yahoo News, AP

By Anna Johnson, Associated Press

Only one in four Americans can name more than one of the five freedoms guaranteed by the First Amendment (freedom of speech, religion, press, assembly and petition for redress of grievances.)

The study by the new McCormick Tribune Freedom Museum found that 22 percent of Americans could name all five Simpson family members, compared with just one in 1,000 people who could name all five First Amendment freedoms.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20060301/ap_on_re_us/freedom_poll

Learning to Listen to God

Christianity Today

by Philip Yancey

I've become more convinced than ever that God finds ways to communicate with those who truly seek him, especially when we lower the volume of the surrounding static. I remember reading the account of a spiritual seeker who interrupted a busy life to spend a few days in a monastery. "I hope your stay is a blessed one," said the monk who showed the visitor to his cell. "If you need anything, let us know, and we'll teach you how to live without it."

http://www.christianitytoday.com/ct/2006/003/21.112.html

The Joke Is on Katrina

Los Angeles Times

"Chasing after Moses, the Pharaoh came to the shore of the parted Red Sea, cast his eyes toward the heavens and asked God, 'Lord, may we also cross?' God replied, 'Sure, Pharaoh. I don't see why not. The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers swears the walls are secure and it won't flood.' "

— Joke told by engineers in New Orleans

"I just got back from Vegas. You'd think the people in Las Vegas would be different than us here in New Orleans, but they're not.

They're all walking around saying, 'I lost everything. I lost the car. I lost the house ...' "

— Comic Jodi Borrello, performing in front of shipyard workers

"I Stayed in New Orleans for Katrina and All I Got Was This Lousy T-Shirt, a New Cadillac and a Plasma TV."

— We really saw this T-shirt in New Orleans

"Being an evacuee changes every aspect of your life, doesn't it? It changes your dating life, I can tell you that much. I'm in Houston and I'm talking to this woman, and things are going pretty well. I said, 'You want to go back to my place?' She said, 'Sure, I'd love to.' I said, 'Yeah, so would I.' "

— Comic Strecker, performing at Lucy's

http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na-humor1mar01,0,4953518.story

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