Internet filtering...not so good effects of personalization

A day made of glass...

Off the Grid

Check this out...pretty awesome.
http://www.nytimes.com/slideshow/2011/03/10/garden/20110310-TEXAS.html

Incredible

God is Love

I'm reading a book and most of this is ripped right from it, but I've added a thought here and there.

God is Love

Basic to the New Testament understanding of God is this insistence that God is one, that there is a differentiation in the oneness, and that the difference is familial. In Jesus’ picture of the life of God as seen “from the inside” – God’s life as Jesus sees and experiences it – we discover the key to comprehending God: self-giving love. Jesus affirms repeatedly that the Father loves the Son. In fact, this love is eternal; it was there before the foundation of the world. And it is self-giving love. The Father has life in himself and gives this life to his Son. In such love the Son knows that all that the Father has is his. Nothing is withheld. The Son’s response is the other-oriented, self-giving love – love that causes the Son not to delight in doing his own will but in doing the will of the Father. We should not be surprised, then, when we find the author of 1 John giving us a new definition for God: God is Love (1 John 4:8, 16). Love is not just something God does, but it is what he actually is. Love is his inner life, the divine life, which the three persons of the blessed Trinity co-inherently share.

            The monotheism of Islam and Judaism and that of Christianity are readically different in respect to God’s love. Love is an interpersonal reality. It speaks of the possible relationship of one person to another. Thus, it is by definition other-oriented. (The term other-oriented is an intentional attempt to describe the essence of true personhood, human an divine. Have not found a better word to describe the nature of diine personhood and the intended nature of human personhood.) There must be two for love to exist, the lover and the one loved. One needs an other to love. Jesus indicates that in the inner being of the Godhead there is otherness and that and that the relationship is one of self-giving love. The obvious proofs of the love of God for us are in the incarnation and the cross, where Jesus sacrificed his life in love for us. But Jesus says that the Father loves him in the same way that he, Christ, loves us. The greatest possible expression of love, Jesus says, is to lay down one’s life for another. The Father gives life to the Son, who returns that life to the Father. The Father asked the Son to come to earth, become a human being, and give his life so the world might be saved. The Son joyously did as his Father desired. With this new understanding of the nature of God comes a new concept of love as well – a love determined by the nature of the subject who loves rather than by the nature of the object loved.

            A comparison of the biblical idea of love with the Platonic idea of love illustrates the uniqueness of the biblical perspective. Plato gives a revealing picture of Socrates in The Symposium. Socrates reports to his friends how a wise woman explained to him that love is not something the greatest of gods can experience. She said that to love means to desire; and desire is an indication of need. We love another because the other meets a need in our own experience. We know that the great gods are perfect and have no needs. Therefore, how can the gods love? The assumption behind Plato’s whole discussion is the conviction that the lover seeks in the beloved the fulfillment of the lover’s own needs. Socrates could not conceive of love that was primarily concerned with what the lover could do for the loved rather than what the lover could acquire from the loved. To Socrates love is self-oriented and concerned with how the other can satisfy the needs of the lover.

            The unique picture of love Jesus presents was the exact opposite of the picture that the wise men of his world understood. Jesus embodies the Old Testament revelation of God’s hesed, or “steadfast love,” seen in God’s faithful love of Israel throughout the Old Testament. This love of God is a love relationship in which the lover loves not for what can be acquired, but for what can be given to meet the needs of the beloved. In fact, giving is the lover’s greatest joy.

God created us in His image. His image is one of other-oriented love in which

He loves not for what can be acquired (he does not need our love), but rather for what He can give in order to meet our needs. Our needs, as he created us, is to live in communion with Him. The most personal and fulfilling relationship is one of love. Love that can be understood as desiring one’s will above their own. So when God says that he created us in his image, if his image is love than that is what we were created to do. If someone were to ask then, why does God not do our will if he loves us, I would then ask why do parents not do that which their children want? If there really is a God, and he really did create this incredibly complex world we live in with all of its beauty and splendor, wouldn’t it seem possible that he would know more than us and therefore know what is best of us? If he did in fact create us and loves us as he says he does, and as he has shown he does, I would contest that he does have what is best in mind for us.

                        -me

The true fulfillment in Jesus’ paradigm is in no way related to self=satisfaction unless a person comes to the place where the other’s welfare is more important than his or her own. Jesus’ paradigm is of one who loves to give whether the recipient responds or not. For Jesus love is the giving of oneself to and for the one loved. Greek has no word to express that thought because such a thought is not natural to human beings as we know human beings.  (The will be discussion later about how we deal with the fat that the fall took from us this other-oriented-ness and left us centered in ourselves. An inversion occurred in the fall that affected, not only what a human could do, but also what a huan, without the assistance of the Holy Spirit, could think.)

            The early Christian writers of the New Testament had to develop their own vocabulary to express their message. They had to inject language that reflected humanity’s fallen state with new meaning. Thus, they took a noun (agape) that hardly occurs in classical Greek, poured into it their own meaning, and adopted it to speak of the nature of the relationship that characterizes the inner life of God. The thought of a love that cares more for another than for itself was formed and nominally and verbally expressed. That understanding then come to predominate the meaning of the Greek verbal root (agapao) from which the noun was formed. The New Testament writers and the father of the early church then had the linquistic equipment necessary to describe this God who is seen in Jesus Christ, his essential nature, and his relation to us. Something new had entered fallen human thought. The prophet Isaiah had a foreglimpse of this new thought when he asked, “Who has believed our message?” (Isaiah 53:1). To the one who does not know Christ, the story of Christ is unbelievable. But in Christ and the cross such love can be seen, and with the church’s new vocabulary the story can be told.

This is another article from Albert Mohler that I came across. It is incredibly sad and pretty unbelievable that people can not see what they are doing and seem to have no sense of responsibility.

 

The Scandal of Gendercide — War on Baby Girls

Thursday, March 11, 2010

The reality has been known for years now, though the Western media have generally resisted any direct coverage of the horror. That changed this week when The Economist published its stunning cover story — “Gendercide — What Happened to 100 Million Baby Girls?”

In many nations of the world, there is an all-out war on baby girls. In 1990, economist Amartya Sen estimated that 100 million baby girls were missing — sacrificed by parents who desired a son.  Two decades later, multiple millions of missing baby girls must be added to that total, victims of abortion, infanticide, or fatal neglect.

The murder of girls is especially common in China and northern India, where a preference for sons produces a situation that is nothing less than critical for baby girls. In these regions, there are 120 baby boys born for every 100 baby girls. As The Economist explains, “Nature dictates that slightly more males are born than females to offset boys’ greater susceptibility to infant disease. But nothing on this scale.”

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• The Ultrasound Generation — Ten Million Missing Baby Girls in India
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In its lead editorial, the magazine gets right to the essential point: “It is no exaggeration to call this gendercide. Women are missing in their millions–aborted, killed, neglected to death.”

In its detailed and extensive investigative report, the magazine opens its article with chilling force. A baby girl is born in China’s Shandong province. Chinese writer Xinran Xue, present for the birth, then hears a man’s voice respond to the sight of the newborn baby girl. “Useless thing,” he cried in disappointment. The witness then heard a plop in the slops pail. “To my absolute horror, I saw a tiny foot poking out of the pail. The midwife must have dropped that tiny baby alive into the slops pail!”  When she tried to intervene she was restrained by police. An older woman simply explained to her, “Doing a baby girl is not a big thing around here.”

The number of dead and missing baby girls is astounding. In some Chinese provinces, there are more than 130 baby boys for every 100 baby girls. The culture places a premium value on sons, and girls are considered an economic drain. A Hindu saying conveys this prejudice: “Raising a daughter is like watering your neighbor’s garden.”

Midwives even charge more for the birth of a baby boy. But the preference for a boy rises with both economic power and the number of children born to a couple. The imbalance of boys to girls is no accident — it reflects a prejudice that runs throughout the societies where the abortion and killing of baby girls is considered both understandable and routine.

Add to this the widespread availability of ultrasound imaging services. Even though the governments of China and India have officially declared sex-selection abortions to be illegal, they persist by the millions. (And, interestingly, the magazine notes that Sweden actually legalized sex-selection abortions in 2009.)

This sentence from the investigative report is particularly horrifying: “In one hospital in Punjab, in northern India, the only girls born after a round of ultrasound scans had been mistakenly identified as boys, or else had a male twin.”

In other words, even as the spread of ultrasound technology has greatly aided the pro-life movement by making the humanity of the unborn baby visible and undeniable, among those determined to give birth only to baby boys, in millions of cases the same technology has meant a death warrant for a baby girl in the womb.

There are multiple factors that lead to the preference for boys over girls. In China, the government’s draconian “one child only” policy has led to both forced abortions and an effective death sentence for baby girls when a couple is determined that, if their children are to be so drastically limited, they will insist on having a son. As the magazine explains, “For millions of couples, the answer is: abort the daughter, try for a son.”

Consider this:

In fact the destruction of baby girls is a product of three forces: the ancient preference for sons; a modern desire for smaller families; and ultrasound scanning and other technologies that identify the sex of a fetus. In societies where four or six children were common, a boy would almost certainly come along eventually; son preference did not need to exist at the expense of daughters. But now couples want two children—or, as in China, are allowed only one—they will sacrifice unborn daughters to their pursuit of a son. That is why sex ratios are most distorted in the modern, open parts of China and India. It is also why ratios are more skewed after the first child: parents may accept a daughter first time round but will do anything to ensure their next—and probably last—child is a boy. The boy-girl ratio is above 200 for a third child in some places.

The social consequences of this imbalance are vast and uncorrectable. China and India now face the reality of millions of young men and boys who have absolutely no hope of a wife and family. In China, these young men are calledguanggun or “broken branches.” Just consider this — the 30 to 40 million “broken branches” in China are about equal in number to the total number of all boys and young men in the United States.

These young men represent a looming disaster on the societal level. Young males commit the greatest number of criminal acts and acts of violence. Marriage has been the great taming institution for the social development of young males. Without prospect for marriage and a normal sex and family life, these multiple millions of unmarried young men are becoming a significant social challenge in China and India. Some observers even argue that this may lead to an increased militarism in the region.

Of course, the greatest disaster is personal for the young men and boys who face the future as “broken branches.” The parents who insist on having boys are dooming their own sons to lives of brokenness, frustration, and grief.

And the future looks even more ominous for baby girls. Nick Eberstadt of the American Enterprise Institute points to “the fatal collision between overweening son preference, the use of rapidly spreading prenatal sex-determination technology and declining fertility.” As the magazine adds, “Over the next generation, many of the problems associated with sex selection will get worse. The social consequences will become more evident because the boys born in large numbers over the past decade will reach maturity then. Meanwhile, the practice of sex selection itself may spread because fertility rates are continuing to fall and ultrasound scanners reach throughout the developing world.”

While imbalances such as now found in China and India are unknown in the West, the practice of sex-selection abortion is found here as well. Indeed, there is no current law against the practice in the United States, where abortion is legal for any reason, at least in earlier stages of pregnancy. In reality, sex selection abortions happen here, too. After all, proponents of abortion in the United States infamously insist on a woman’s unrestricted right to an abortion “for any reason, or for no reason.”

The Economist is right to call this tragedy gendercide — the targeting of baby girls for death and destruction simply because of their gender. The magazine deserves appreciation for its no-holds-barred report on this tragedy, and for forcing the issue to be faced. Furthermore, The Economist ends its editorial with the right message, “The world needs to do more to prevent a gendercide that will have the sky crashing down.”

Will reports like this awaken the conscience of the world to the unspeakable crime and global tragedy of gendercide? If not, what will it take? The blood of millions of murdered and missing baby girls cries out to the world’s conscience. Will we hear?

Christian Belief and Secular Tolerance

I thought this was an interesting article about the idea of secular tolerance, which has really become a mainstream philosophy in America and how it is butting heads with Christian belief. Many things intrigue me about this situation, but one of them that I have not thought about much before is how tolerance, if executed purely, would mean that no one has a right to impose their beliefs on another. However, if they are fighting this case, it seems quite peculiar to me that they are saying that Christain organizations are being discriminant by not allowing people of different beliefs into their organization. It is as if they are expressing their intolerance of christian beliefs and that they believe they they have the right to decide what should be tolerated and what shoud not be. This is sounding a lot more like a religion and less like an opinion...who or what has given them the authority to claim that they have the right, just like everyone else, to do whatever they want to and that everyone should tolerate it, but then turn around and have not just an opinion, but a right and authority to not tolerate other beliefs.

Check out the article for yourself at Albert Mohler's blog, the link is provided in the Post Link's on the right.