I couldn't resist...

I own a Mac. But this article is really funny.

Slate/Life With iPad: Do you have what it takes to own this magic and revolutionary product?

While the company's previous offerings in this genre have typically featured Apple Store employees in a neutral space, the iPad videos take us into a model home of an iPad user. It's a pristine environment, fit for an IKEA showroom, with lots of coffee around. This is how Steve Jobs wants us to use his revolutionary device. Let's take a tour through Apple's tour of how an enlightened iPad user lives.
...
Our iPad user, a man, is reclining on a chair, and he props the iPad on his knee with his legs crossed. This is the start of a theme. iPad users prefer the couch and the lounge chair. Should an iPadder have the unfortunate experience of sitting at a desk, he will immediately put his feet up on the desk and rest the iPad on his thighs to type. The iPad world is like an opium den, where one is always reclining, the better to enjoy its strange, new, vivid wonders.

Next, the voice-over begins. It promises us that, with a "multi-touch display this large … you feel like you're actually holding the Web right in the palm of your hand." When I hear that, my first reaction is to drop whatever I'm holding. Our iPad man is reading the following article from the Times: "Happy 1,300th to Nara, Japan." Naturally, he would love to go visit a meticulously restored palace in an ancient city that helped the spread of Buddhism. As an iPad owner, his soul exists on a higher plane.
...
In the "Mail" video, you're greeted with the promise that you can "see and touch your e-mail like never before." Kinky! Our iPad user here is invited to a "Day at the Beach!" and is also informed of a meeting delay. He looks at a "Final Sales Report." Then he learns that salary increases for "his team" were approved today. After that, he decides to join a friend on a trip to Joshua Tree National Park. Then he checks the location for a surprise birthday dinner at the Slanted Door in San Francisco. The message here is that in iPad-land your e-mail inbox is not a torture chamber of obligation, undone tasks, and spam. It's full of bright, crisp photos and groovy reports!
...
On to "Photos," where our iPad user is a woman. She, of course, immediately sits down on the couch and puts her feet up. The photos show good-looking friends, adorable children holding umbrellas in Paris, and the like. Thanks to the iPad, we can have the novel experience of holding our pictures "right in our hands." Uh, thanks. Haven't done that before.
...
The "iBooks" segment contains the guided tour's most shameless attempt to gull us. A mother is reading Winnie-the-Pooh to her Vans-wearing son. On the table is a recently abandoned crayon drawing and a reference book showing illustrations of elephants. The boy points to something on the screen. They are "discovering the joy of reading all over again." Don't worry, the iPad won't replace books in your house, but will live peacefully among them. Your son won't use the device to play Shrek Kart; he'll nest beside you on the couch and then go outside for a game of Pooh sticks. And, if he gets bored, just change the font size! The "iBooks" app also animates the pages being turned, a cute idea that creates a delay that will quickly become intolerable.

The final three videos—"Keynote," "Pages," and "Numbers"—can be lumped together. These apps are Apple's versions of PowerPoint, Word, and Excel. The "Keynote" one was so complicated that I could barely follow the action. "Pages" shows that the iPad will be excellent if you're writing an Earth science textbook for fourth graders filled with photos of giraffes that need to be moved around a lot. In "Numbers," the iPad man seems to be using a spreadsheet to cruelly rank the various players on a girls' youth soccer team. The not-so-subtle message in these productivity-app videos is that you can use your iPad like a laptop. Just make sure that you don't need to do anything silly, like print something out.

His Resurrection will Mean Our Own

“Now I would remind you, brothers, of the gospel I preached to you, which you received, in which you stand, and by which you are being saved, if you hold fast to the word I preached to you—unless you believed in vain.

For I delivered to you as of first importance what I also received: that Christ died for our sins in accordance with the Scriptures, that he was buried, that he was raised on the third day in accordance with the Scriptures, and that he appeared to Cephas, then to the twelve. Then he appeared to more than five hundred brothers at one time, most of whom are still alive, though some have fallen asleep. Then he appeared to James, then to all the apostles. Last of all, as to one untimely born, he appeared also to me. For I am the least of the apostles, unworthy to be called an apostle, because I persecuted the church of God. But by the grace of God I am what I am, and his grace toward me was not in vain. On the contrary, I worked harder than any of them, though it was not I, but the grace of God that is with me. Whether then it was I or they, so we preach and so you believed.

Now if Christ is proclaimed as raised from the dead, how can some of you say that there is no resurrection of the dead? But if there is no resurrection of the dead, then not even Christ has been raised. And if Christ has not been raised, then our preaching is in vain and your faith is in vain. We are even found to be misrepresenting God, because we testified about God that he raised Christ, whom he did not raise if it is true that the dead are not raised. For if the dead are not raised, not even Christ has been raised. And if Christ has not been raised, your faith is futile and you are still in your sins. Then those also who have fallen asleep in Christ have perished. If in Christ we have hope in this life only, we are of all people most to be pitied.

But in fact Christ has been raised from the dead, the firstfruits of those who have fallen asleep. For as by a man came death, by a man has come also the resurrection of the dead. For as in Adam all die, so also in Christ shall all be made alive. But each in his own order: Christ the firstfruits, then at his coming those who belong to Christ. Then comes the end, when he delivers the kingdom to God the Father after destroying every rule and every authority and power. For he must reign until he has put all his enemies under his feet. The last enemy to be destroyed is death. For “God has put all things in subjection under his feet.” But when it says, “all things are put in subjection,” it is plain that he is excepted who put all things in subjection under him. When all things are subjected to him, then the Son himself will also be subjected to him who put all things in subjection under him, that God may be all in all.

Otherwise, what do people mean by being baptized on behalf of the dead? If the dead are not raised at all, why are people baptized on their behalf? Why are we in danger every hour? I protest, brothers, by my pride in you, which I have in Christ Jesus our Lord, I die every day! What do I gain if, humanly speaking, I fought with beasts at Ephesus? If the dead are not raised, “Let us eat and drink, for tomorrow we die.” Do not be deceived: “Bad company ruins good morals.”Wake up from your drunken stupor, as is right, and do not go on sinning. For some have no knowledge of God. I say this to your shame.

But someone will ask, “How are the dead raised? With what kind of body do they come?” You foolish person! What you sow does not come to life unless it dies. And what you sow is not the body that is to be, but a bare kernel, perhaps of wheat or of some other grain. But God gives it a body as he has chosen, and to each kind of seed its own body. For not all flesh is the same, but there is one kind for humans, another for animals, another for birds, and another for fish. There are heavenly bodies and earthly bodies, but the glory of the heavenly is of one kind, and the glory of the earthly is of another. There is one glory of the sun, and another glory of the moon, and another glory of the stars; for star differs from star in glory.

So is it with the resurrection of the dead. What is sown is perishable; what is raised is imperishable. It is sown in dishonor; it is raised in glory. It is sown in weakness; it is raised in power. It is sown a natural body; it is raised a spiritual body. If there is a natural body, there is also a spiritual body. Thus it is written, “The first man Adam became a living being”;the last Adam became a life-giving spirit. But it is not the spiritual that is first but the natural, and then the spiritual. The first man was from the earth, a man of dust; the second man is from heaven. As was the man of dust, so also are those who are of the dust, and as is the man of heaven, so also are those who are of heaven. Just as we have borne the image of the man of dust, we shall also bear the image of the man of heaven.

I tell you this, brothers: flesh and blood cannot inherit the kingdom of God, nor does the perishable inherit the imperishable. Behold! I tell you a mystery. We shall not all sleep, but we shall all be changed, in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, at the last trumpet. For the trumpet will sound, and the dead will be raised imperishable, and we shall be changed. For this perishable body must put on the imperishable, and this mortal body must put on immortality. When the perishable puts on the imperishable, and the mortal puts on immortality, then shall come to pass the saying that is written: “Death is swallowed up in victory.” “O death, where is your victory? O death, where is your sting?”

The sting of death is sin, and the power of sin is the law. But thanks be to God, who gives us the victory through our Lord Jesus Christ.

Therefore, my beloved brothers, be steadfast, immovable, always abounding in the work of the Lord, knowing that in the Lord your labor is not in vain.”
(1 Corinthians 15:1–58 ESV)

There are some things you probably shouldn't joke about...

Like the number of children you are allowed to have. #60 on top 100 April Fools day jokes.

#60: PhDs Exempt From China’s One-Child Policy

1993: The China Youth Daily, an official state newspaper of China, announced on its front page that the government had decided to make Ph.D. holders exempt from the state-imposed one-child limit. The logic behind this decision was that it would eventually reduce the need to invite as many foreign experts into the country to help with the state's modernization effort. Despite a disclaimer beneath the story identifying it as a joke, the report was repeated as fact by Hong Kong's New Evening News and by Agence France-Presse, an international news agency. Apparently what made the hoax seem credible to many was that intellectuals in Singapore are encouraged to marry each other and have children, and China's leaders are known to have great respect for the Singapore system. The Chinese government responded to the hoax by condemning April Fool's Day as a dangerous Western tradition. The Guangming Daily, Beijing's main newspaper for intellectuals, ran an editorial stating that April Fool's jokes "are an extremely bad influence." It went on to declare that, "Put plainly, April Fool's Day is Liar's Day."

Amazing New Discovery: The Flying Penguin

Beauty, Edmund Burke

It is not by the force of long attention and enquiry that we find any object to be beautiful; beauty demands no assistance from our reasoning; even the will is unconcerned; the appearance of beauty as effectually causes some degree of love in us, as the application of ice or fire produces the ideas of heat or cold.

Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Sublime and Beautiful, 129

John Piper, stepping back to battle pride/love his wife

I've never seen anything like this:

I asked the elders to consider this leave because of a growing sense that my soul, my marriage, my family, and my ministry-pattern need a reality check from the Holy Spirit. On the one hand, I love my Lord, my wife, my five children and their families first and foremost; and I love my work of preaching and writing and leading Bethlehem. I hope the Lord gives me at least five more years as the pastor for preaching and vision at Bethlehem.

But on the other hand, I see several species of pride in my soul that, while they may not rise to the level of disqualifying me for ministry, grieve me, and have taken a toll on my relationship with Noël and others who are dear to me. How do I apologize to you, not for a specific deed, but for ongoing character flaws, and their effects on everybody? I’ll say it now, and no doubt will say it again, I’m sorry. Since I don’t have just one deed to point to, I simply ask for a spirit of forgiveness; and I give you as much assurance as I can that I am not making peace, but war, with my own sins.

Noël and I are rock solid in our commitment to each other, and there is no whiff of unfaithfulness on either side. But, as I told the elders, “rock solid” is not always an emotionally satisfying metaphor, especially to a woman. A rock is not the best image of a woman’s tender companion. In other words, the precious garden of my home needs tending. I want to say to Noël that she is precious to me in a way that, at this point in our 41-year pilgrimage, can be said best by stepping back for a season from virtually all public commitments.

Hey! Mark Devor! (sic)

A story on Mark Dever and Capital Hill Baptist: LINK / Photo Gallery

Too bad the Christian Science Monitor can't spell.

Quotable: Edmund Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Sublime and Beautiful

I say then, that whilst we consider the Godhead merely as he is an object of the understanding, which forms a complex idea of power, wisdom, justice, goodness, all stretched to a degree far exceeding the bounds of our comprehension, whilst we consider the divinity in this refined and abstracted light, the imagination and passions are little or nothing affected. But because we are bound by the condition of our nature to ascend to these pure and intellectual ideas, through the medium of sensible images, and to judge of these divine qualities by their evident acts and exertions, it becomes extremely hard to disentangle our idea of the cause from the effect by which we are led to know it. Thus when we contemplate the Deity, by his attributes and their operation coming united on the mind, form a sort of sensible image, and as such are capable of affecting the imagination. Now, though in a just idea of the Deity, perhaps none of his attributes are predominant, yet to our imagination, his power is by far the most striking. Some reflection, some paring is necessary to satisfy us of his wisdom, his justice, and his goodness; to be struck with his power, it is only necessary that we should open our eyes. But whilst we contemplate so vast an object, under the arm, as it were, of almighty power, and invested upon every side with omnipresence, we shrink into the minuteness of our own nature, and are, in a manner, annihilated before him. And though a consideration of his other attributes may relieve in some measure our apprehensions; yet no conviction of the justice with which it is exercised, nor the mercy with which it is tempered, can wholly remove the terror that naturally arises from a force which nothing can withstand. If we rejoice, we rejoice with trembling; and even whilst we are receiving benefits we cannot but shudder at a power which can confer benefits of such mighty importance. When the prophet David contemplated the wonders of wisdom and power, which are displayed in the economy of man, he seems to be struck with a sort of divine horror, and cries out, fearfully and wonderfully am I made.

Burke, 110-111

Peter Hitchens on His New Book

Peter Hitchens Author Interview--The Rage Against God from Gorilla Poet Productions on Vimeo.

NT Wright, On the Resurrection

The End of the Republican Party?

This is a story I find hard to disagree with:

Healthcare reform supporters who tuned in to the Glenn Beck Show the morning after Sunday’s vote for a dose of schadenfreude were sorely disappointed. For months Mr. Beck, a conservative radio talk-show host, had bewailed the fate of the nation should the healthcare bill pass into law. He warned it would be “the nail in the coffin of our country.”

Yet not 12 hours after the bill’s passage in the House, Beck appeared on air in a chipper mood. Chin up, he told his listeners. If we elect conservative Republicans willing to repeal the bill, the country can be saved.

In other words, no need for panic: The apocalypse has been postponed until November 2010.

Entertaining as it is to watch the goalposts move, the right’s end-of-life-as-we-know-it language has real consequences. It has eliminated opportunities for political compromise and threatens to reduce the Republican Party to a hodgepodge of epithet-hurlers and conspiracy theorists.

And later:

Given this, should anyone be surprised at the latest Harris poll that reveals how thoroughly such overblown rhetoric has infused the GOP? Of the Republicans polled, 2 out of 3 believe Obama is a socialist, nearly as many think he is Muslim, and a full quarter suspect the president may be the anti-Christ.

That’s right: The anti-Christ. This is the current state of the Republican Party. So what’s the end result of all these stoked fears and raised temperatures? For one, they ensure that no matter how postpartisan Obama would like to be, he will not be given that chance. While Democrats compromised on the public option and abortion language in the healthcare bill, Republicans refused to even glance across the aisle, much less reach across it.

How could they? They’ve sold their supporters on the idea that Democratic legislation is the first step to totalitarian dictatorship. Over the past week, Sen. Lindsey Graham threatened not to work with Democrats on immigration reform if they pushed through the healthcare bill. Sen. John McCain went one step further and promised “no cooperation for the rest of the year.”

Over-the-top rhetoric also means the Republican Party will move even more right in the coming years. Politicians who betray a hint of moderation will face Tea Party challengers as formerly local races become national battles to purge the party of any but the most conservative.

David Frum, former speechwriter for George W. Bush, sees disaster for the GOP in this strategy. Immediately after the vote on Sunday night, he declared it the Republican Waterloo. But even Mr. Frum can’t figure out a solution to the Republicans’ extremism problem. Until someone does, the GOP and its supporters will be reduced to railing against an apocalypse that never comes.

The ironic thing is I actually believe in an apocalypse. But when you jump from belief in an apocalypse, to believe that this is the apocalypse, you abandon all sense of reasonability or of cooperative effort in the very real and practical task of governing our country.

I blame Andrew Wymer for getting my all fired up about this in the first place. For those of you who know him see his facebook post from two days ago (read: it's good).

"Surely He hath borne our griefs"

Christ's heart was wrung for me, if mine is sore;
And if my feet are weary, His have bled;
He had no place wherein to lay His Head;
If I am burdened, He was burdened more.
The cup I drink, He drank of long before;
He felt the unuttered anguish which I dread;
He hungered who the thousands fed,
And thirsted who the world's refreshment bore.
If grief be such a looking-glass as shows
Christ's Face and man's in some sort made alike,
Then grief is pleasure with a subtle taste:
Wherefore should any fret or faint or haste?
Grief is not grievous to a soul that knows
Christ comes,--and listens for the hour to strike.

-Christina Rossetti

ht: Remonstrans

Quotable: Hitchens

Peter, that is. The following are excerpted from Douglas Wilson's review of his book, The Rage Against God:

"I want to explain how I became convinced, by reason and experience, of the necessity and rightness of a form of Christianity that is modest, accommodating, and thoughtful -- but ultimately uncompromising about its vital truth" (p. 11).
...
"As he [Christopher] has become more certain about the non-existence of God, I have become more certain that we cannot know such a thing in the way that we know anything else, and so must choose whether to believe or not. I think it is better by far to believe" (p. 11).
...
As for Christopher's atheism, "As long as he can convince himself, nobody else will persuade him" (p. 12). This is, in my judgment, quite right, along with another observation that Peter makes about the vulnerability of the atheist. As C.S. Lewis once commented, God is very unscrupulous, and leaves traps everywhere. One of those traps is poetry -- atheism can be "countered by the unexpected force of poetry, which can ambush the human heart at any time" (p. 12).

Scruton, "Regaining My Religion"

From "Regaining My Religion" in Gentle Regrets, by Roger Scruton

For there are certain truths about the human condition that are hard to formulate and hard to live up to, and which we therefore have a motive to deny. It may require moral discipline if we are to accept these truths and also to live by them.

For instance, there is the truth that we are self-conscious beings, and that this distinguishes us from the rest of the animal kingdom. There is the truth that we are free, accountable and objects of judgement in our own eyes and in the eyes of others. There is the truth that we are motivated not only by desire and appetite, but by a conception of the good. There is the truth that we are not just objects in the world of objects, but also subjects who relate to each other reciprocally. ... To the person with religious belief -- whether Christian or Muslim, whether monotheist or polytheist, whether a believer in the afterlife or not -- those truths are obvious, and their consequences immediately apparent. Religious people may not express the truths as I have done, since I am adopting a secular idiom. Nor will they normally be aware of the philosophical reasoing that would defend those truths against modernist and postmodernist doubt. Nevertheless that is how they see the world. For them the "human form divine," as Blake described it, is set apart from the rest of nature. Our form bears, for them, the marks of its peculiar destiny; it is capable of sanctity and liable to desecration, and in everything it is judged from a perspective that is not of this world. That way of seeing people enshrines the fundamental truth of our condition, as creatures suspended between the empirical and the transcendental, between being and judgement. But it deploys concepts that are given to us through religion, and to be obtained only with the greatest effort without it.

If you see things in that way you will find it difficult to share the view of Enlightenment thinkers that religious decline is no more than the loss of false beliefs; still less will you be able to accept the postmodernist vision of a world now liberated from absolutes, in which each of us constructs guildelines of his won, and that the only agreement that counts is the agreement to differ. The decline of Christianity, I maintain, involves, for many people, not the freedom from religious need, but the loss of concepts that would enable them to assuage it and, by assuaging it, to open their knowledge and their will to the human reality. For them the loss of religion is an epistemological loss -- a loss of knowledge. Losing that knowledge is not a liberation but a fall.

ht: Rod Dreher

9Marks Audio: The Story of Matt with Matt Chandler

Click image

Gentium: Best Free Unicode Greek Font

LINK

Net Trade

From CIA.gov:

This entry records a country's net trade in goods and services, plus net earnings from rents, interest, profits, and dividends, and net transfer payments (such as pension funds and worker remittances) to and from the rest of the world during the period specified.

1 China $ 296,200,000,000 2009 est.
2 Japan $ 131,200,000,000 2009 est.
3 Germany $ 109,700,000,000 2009 est.
4 Switzerland $ 79,180,000,000 2009 est.
5 Norway $ 58,560,000,000 2009 est.
6 European Union $ 51,400,000,000 2009 est.
7 Russia $ 42,080,000,000 2009 est.
8 Taiwan $ 34,040,000,000 2009 est.
9 Netherlands $ 33,720,000,000 2009 est.
10 Korea, South $ 30,380,000,000 2009 est.
...
186 Greece $ -40,820,000,000 2009 est.
187 France $ -43,670,000,000 2009 est.
188 Italy $ -55,440,000,000 2009 est.
189 Spain $ -69,460,000,000 2009 est.
190 United States $ -380,100,000,000 2009 est.

Tragedy and other bits

I think one of the characteristics that draws me to Russian novels is tragedy-the unfolding of disastrous events as a result of well intentioned choices, stories where there is no concrete villain. Ross Douthat thinks Americans don't get tragedy and it impacts our politics.

Americans believe in evil, but we’re uncomfortable with tragedy. We accept that there are wicked people in the world, with malice in their hearts and a devil whispering in their ears. But the idea that many debacles flow from choices made by decent, well-intentioned human beings is more difficult for us to wrap our minds around.

This is apparent in our politics, where we’re swift to impute the worst of motives to anyone slightly to our left or right. It’s apparent in our popular culture, thick with white hats and black hats, superheroes and supervillains. But it’s most egregious where the two spheres intersect: in our political fictions, which are nearly always Manichaean, simplistic and naïve.

ht: Rod Dreher

-----
See also: Groothuis, Epistemology in Moby Dick
After several careful pages of musing on whether the whale's "spoutings are, after all, really water, or nothing but vapor," Ishmael (the narrator) sets off this epistemological explosion on faith and reason:

And so, through all the thick mists of the dim doubts in my mind, divine intuitions now and then shoot, enkindling my fog with a heavenly ray. And for this I thank God; for all have doubts; many deny; but doubts or denials, few along with them, have intuitions. Doubts of all things earthly, and intuitions of some things heavenly; this combination makes neither believer nor infidel, but makes a man who regards them both with equal eye.--Herman Melville, Moby Dick, chapter 85, "The Fountain."

-----
Two part series by Edward Feser on Scientism, part 1, part 2:

Scientism is the view that all real knowledge is scientific knowledge—that there is no rational, objective form of inquiry that is not a branch of science. There is at least a whiff of scientism in the thinking of those who dismiss ethical objections to cloning or embryonic stem cell research as inherently “anti-science.” There is considerably more than a whiff of it in the work of New Atheist writers like Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens, who allege that because religion has no scientific foundation (or so they claim) it “therefore” has no rational foundation at all. It is evident even in secular conservative writers like John Derbyshire and Heather MacDonald, whose criticisms of their religious fellow right-wingers are only slightly less condescending than those of Dawkins and co. Indeed, the culture at large seems beholden to an inchoate scientism—“faith” is often pitted against “science” (even by those friendly to the former) as if “science” were synonymous with “reason.”

The power of rock

Rod Dreher makes some interesting observations here:

I recall reading Allan Bloom's "The Closing of the American Mind" when it came out in paperback, in 1988, when I was an undergraduate, and scoffing at his negative judgment on rock 'n roll. As I recall -- and please correct me if I misremember -- Bloom, who was a very deep thinker, connected the reckless, anti-rational, culturally destructive passions released in the 1960s to the instinctual power of rock. I remember at the time thinking this was stupid, but not because I had an intellectual answer to Bloom. To me, it simply sounded like the kvetching of an old fart. I was frustrated at the time to learn that Bloom was not some sort of right-wing Christian, but was in fact a secularist homosexual. I was living in Washington then, doing an internship, and made an idiotic remark to someone at a party that Bloom was a traitor to his class, having written a book that was being used by conservatives as ammo in the culture war. I remember my interlocutor, an older liberal, looking at me with puzzlement and pity at the crudity of my judgment.

Now, I see that I was wrong, but I don't say that in an ideological sense. It's not that I've turned on rock and roll -- most of my music collection is rock -- but that I see that Bloom was onto something, that rock is a far more ambiguous a phenomenon than I could possibly have grasped at 21. To the extent that rock music hastened the demise of the despicable Soviet regime, hooray. But the same energies called forth from the human spirit by rock music, and its descendants, have affected our own institutions, traditions and self-understanding.

I remember another night long ago, when I was in college, and listening to George Michael's "I Want Your Sex." A thoughtful Christian who lived on my hall in the dorm asked me how I could listen to those lyrics and remain so unaffected by the sentiment. He wasn't asking in a prudish way; he was a fan of classic jazz and pop, and as an appreciator of the refined longings expressed in, say, the songs of Cole Porter, he was appalled by the barbarism in the George Michael song. I didn't have an answer for him, but he did make me reflect on how the lyrics of so many songs I dearly loved expressed sentiments I found at the time distasteful, and, as I matured, would come to find gross.

I gave up listening to George Michael and that lot years ago, not out of moral conviction, but because I was bored by it. But I still don't have an adequate answer for that question posed to me in my dorm room decades ago.

Go Deep

ht: Thabiti Anyabwile