Saturday, July 18, 2009

Riddles are gay. Oh well.

A little childish, but I think riddles are fun. If you have heard them don’t ruin it.

1)
You are standing in front of a room with a lightbulb inside of it.
You can not see if it is on or off.
Outside the room there are three switches.

You may turn the swithes anyway you want to.
You stop turning the switches, enter the room and know what switch controls the lightbulb…
How do you do that […]

2)
The man that made me what I am won’t tell
The man knows what I am won’t use me
The man who uses me doesn’t know it

What am I?

3)
The man who made me sells me
The man who bought me won’t use me
The man who uses me doesn’t know it

What am I?

4)
An old king is about to die and he has no offspring to inherit the crown. So he summons the three wisest men from his kingdom and puts them to a test. He tells them that he is about to put them in a room and have his aide put a hat on each of them. Each hat may or may not have a dot on it, but at least one hat will have a dot. They may not touch the hats, nor communicate in any way. The first one that correctly identifies whether his hat has a dot will become the next king. If he is wrong, or if he breaks the rules, he will be killed. Then he sends all three wise men into the room.
The king then tells his aide to put dotted hats on all three.
A few minutes later one of the wise men returns and announces proudly that he has a dot. How did he know?

A little less conversation, a little more action

Ok. It is about time to move past suicide putty. May I humbly offer a couple attempts to provoke beneficial blog interaction?

A while back a friend and potentially a member of this blog posed the very good and though-provoking question (an action typical of this individual). It followed as such: how can a God in a religion such as Christianity as it is set forth by Presbyterians justify the combination of original sin and predestination? Where, basically as he put it, an individual not among the chosen would basically be born damned since he/she is born in sin and is also damned by not being predestined to enter into eternal life.

Over a year of occasionally considering this potential deal-breaker, I have a couple of thoughts, but my hope would be to hear some others.

First, although God is full of grace, I believe that he is also perfectly just (If he isn’t then forget Christianity altogether). With this in mind, it would follow that the problem here stems from either our imperfect understanding of justice or our imperfect understanding of predestination… or, as Daniel would say, “it is probably an lack of understanding of justice… and probably also a lack of understanding of predestination”

We have, I believe, a natural intuition of what justice is because a lack of justice or fair play is enraging. So, what are we missing here?

Also, predestination/election, if God is perfectly just and Christ death atones for our sin, satisfying God’s perfect justice, how is it only for the elect?

I know that most of these trails lead to this thing called faith. I have also been told that free will and predestination are like to pillars holding up Christian faith that are wholly separate but somehow coexist. I don’t know. I’m just trying to evoke responses touching any aspect here.

Thursday, July 9, 2009

Remi

more from frenchman remi and his triggerhappy-esque antics


brb