The more I think about it, the more it makes sense.  As I’ve grown older, I’ve become more and more accustom to a God who controls everything.  I’m not saying we don’t have free will, but I believe the decisions we make and what we are going to make all fit within his framework.  I look at where I work and where I live, and they all fall within his master plan.  Whose to say sports don’t do the same?  Why would God be involved in every aspect of people’s lives but then decide to back off on this one thing?

My inner dialog goes like this:

“Well, that’s not fair if God favors one team over another and is involved in competition, that doesn’t seem fair.”

“Well, I believe I got this job because of God’s providence and direction for my life, and that means someone else didn’t.  Does it seem fair that God picked me in this job over someone else?”

“You’re right.  You’re so smart.”

Look, I know this is a weird idea, but here’s the thing.  I believe God is involved in every area of our life.  And the people who play sports, and even those who follow sports to a much lesser degree, have sports occupying a major part of their life.  Are you going to tell me that God completely butts out of that area?  People learn valuable lessons from sports, including games won or lost.

That being said, I don’t believe we can infer anything from the win-loss column of our team.  We can’t say our team won all of their games because of their mission trip to Africa or they lost all their games because they partied too much.  The Bible is clear that we cannot know why things happen, see the book of Job or the story about the blind man.  Bad and good things happen in every arena of life, and we don’t always know why, so I believe this is true for sports.

I like many things about the Chrome browser.  It starts up extremely fast.  It has a nice interface and looks ahead of its time in comparison to Firefox.  But, I still use Firefox.

One thing I love about Firefox is its smart bar, in which you type any term and it will search your history and pull up matching URLs and web-page titles.  This doesn’t work as well in Chrome.

Let’s take a look. Click on the pics to see full-size.

In Chrome, I view an article in PCWorld called “Amazon Kindle Tablet Could Shake Up Tablet Wars”.

I close Chrome and reopen. I type “kindle”.  I don’t get the article I just viewed.

Now I open Firefox and visit the same page.  I close Firefox and reopen.  I type in “Kindle”, and I see the site I just visited, 2nd from the top.

I personally like to be able to easily retrieve sites in my history.  I’m surprised Google doesn’t exceed in this area.

However, my pastor said something yesterday that was quite wise.  Christianity is about principles, not rules.  When you focus on following rules and not principles, you can miss out on following the voice of God. I feel that by saying “credit cards are prohibited”, it amounts to legalism.

Also, the arguments I’ve heard against credit cards seem familiar.  “Credit cards destroy people and families.  So many people use them irresponsibly.  People can’t handle credit cards”.  These sound very similar to arguments against alcohol.  Some Christian denominations believe in abstinence altogether.

I do believe abstinence from both can be a very wise decision for many people.  Unfortunately many people cannot handle either and end up harming their lives.  But I believe a key principle in the Christian walk is that of discernment and hearing God’s voice.  My pastor said it well.  “People want rules, they don’t want to listen for God’s voice.”

I’m not saying that is why Dave Ramsey is saying to not use credit cards, or that he is suffering from legalism, or anything like that.  And after reading the article I want to evaluate how I use credit cards.  But the philosophy of  “never use them, never ever” is not one I agree with, and doesn’t necessarily apply to everyone.

As someone who now has a job and is out of college, this is a viewpoint to definitely consider.

College was a lot of fun.  I was on my own and pretty much independent.  I wasn’t a party animal at all, but I rarely went to bed before 1 or 2 am, and the dorms (sorry, residence halls) were a lot of fun, as I hung out in the Parker Hall lounge or played foosball.  Although I was flat broke, usually going to Denny’s to order a side of fries, I had a lot of fun.

College was also a great time of mental stimulation.  Whether it was the classroom, an opinion article in the O’Colly, or a discussion in the lounge, I was faced with all sorts of viewpoints different from my own and had my faith challenged.  It was in college that I started to have a passion to follow along with my aptitude for math, and learned basic ideas about how the universe worked in Physics 1.  It was also then that, through the O’Colly and some comic strips posted on someone’s door, that many libertarian ideas of mine started to take root, although lying dormant for 4 years.

Most importantly, I met my wife there.  I remember when I first met her, although we didn’t start dating for a year after that.  She is definitely the greatest thing that happened to me at OSU (although 2002 Bedlam was pretty sweet too).  I sometimes look at my life and feel that, if this was a movie, she’s my happy ending.

That takes me to where I am now.  Now I have a job.  I can afford to order a full meal at Denny’s.  This stage of life doesn’t have the spontaneity of college life, but I wouldn’t trade it for anything.  I now have my wonderful wife and two great kids.  I also have a job that I enjoy, one that challenges me.  While college was great, and sometimes I miss what it offers, that was in the past, a season of my life.  Now I enjoy this one.

That being said, I have to face the consequences for my choices.  I can stay up late, but I’ll be tired for work the next day.  I can eat and drink whatever I want, but I know that has some consequences health-wise.  That is the nature of adulthood.  To some extent, I have external factors governing my decisions, i.e the bank that loaned me money for my house, my employer, but I have much more freedom now than I did as a child, and I don’t have an active force preventing me from making those decisions, I will just face the consequences later, as opposed to a parent or guardian.

I think there are a large contingency of people who don’t like adulthood, or, they want to be the parents for other people.  These people want to ban smoking, or tax fast food, or tell us how exactly how we should spend our savings.  Let’s look at the fast food tax – this is the antithesis of adulthood.  When I was a child, my parents didn’t let me eat happy meals for every single meal, and even if that was affordable, they still wouldn’t have done so because I needed more balance in my diet.  As an adult, they don’t tell me what to do, I make my own choices and pay the consequences later.  The fast food tax, and similar ideas, tells me I’m not responsible enough to make my own decisions, that I need discouragement from making the wrong choices.  For people who are on board with such an idea, I have two words.  Grow up.

How it works.

1. Like Twitter, Google+ is based on one-way relationships.  That is, you can follow someone but they don’t have to follow you.  This is opposed to Facebook where the relationship is two-way.
2. A central part of G+ (as us privileged few call Google+) is the idea of circles.  So, when I add someone to follow, I can choose from the default circles of Friends, Acquaintances, Family, or Following.  Or I can create a new one.  So, when I share something, I can choose what group I want to share with.  What’s important is that others cannot see which circle they are in.
3. What a person shares is public, unless they choose to share with specific circles.
4. I’m not sure what the limit is on posting things, but it is obviously bigger than Facebook’s limit for their status updates.

A few thoughts.

1. I like the idea of Circles, especially since people cannot see what circle they are in.  This is actually implemented in Facebook via friend lists, but it is not nearly as easy to use, although it is a feature I use in Facebook.  I like sharing general thoughts to all my friends, but things that are more personal, or involving holiday plans (or more plainly said, when I’m not at home) I like to limit to a set of closer friends.
2. One way relationships will probably only work if people choose to share things publicly.  For example, I chose to follow a sports blogger.  If he, and others like him, choose to share things with the world, then following them will have value.  If they choose to only share with their circles, and I’m not in their circles, then there is no value.
3. Right now Google+ is not much fun.  While there are probably several pros to Google having a limited group to test G+ and build buzz, it means that not a whole lot is going on.  Right now I have 8 people I’m following and nothing is going on in the Stream (which is G+’s version of the News Feed).

It will be interesting to see how G+ competes with Facebook.  I think people will like the Circles option, although, as some tech-bloggers have pointed out, it’s probably only a matter of time before Facebook makes their Friend Lists feature easier to use and/or more like Circles.  I do like the one-way relationship structure, but as I said above, this will only have value if people share things publicly, as they do in Twitter. I don’t know if right now, in terms of my usage, G+ offers anything new other than something to play with.  But at the very least, I’ll keep the profile around awhile.

In mainstream music, there seems to be a strong divide between secular and Christian music.  There’s the Christian category in music, then there’s everything else.  There’s a few artists, like Switchfoot and P.O.D. that started out in the Christian genre but now have their feet in both sectors of the music industry, or other groups that play secular music but have Christian members, such as U2 and Lifehouse, but they seem to differ from the norm.  For the artists that do exist in both spheres, they are constantly analyzed to determine whether or not they are truly “Christian”.

Such a distinction does not seem to exist in country and Christmas music realms.  Artists like Carrie Underwood sing unabashedly about their faith, but there seems to be much less debate about whether Underwood is a Christian or secular artist.  It’s quite normal for any country artist to sing about their faith or put God in a song, and it’s not a huge deal.  Why does such a huge divide not exist.

A similar thing exists with Christmas music.  It is not unusual for a Christian station to play secular Christmas songs, or a secular Christmas song to sing  an overwhelmingly spiritual Christmas song.

I’m not sure why such a heavy distinction exists in mainstream pop/rock, but not in country.  The only theory I have is that perhaps country music is composed primarily of middle America culturally conservative type people where faith is a big part of their lives, and there’s no separation between their faith and the rest of their life.  But I know the same has to be true for some rock groups as well.  Is there something different about Nashville, and that where a person records (i.e. Nashville vs. L.A.) that makes such a huge difference?  Is it that most rock groups come from big cities, which tend to be more culturally liberal and less involved in faith/religion?

Even then, these theories discuss why the secular stays away from the religious in rock, but why does the religious stay away from the secular?  Do groups that are composed of Christians feel pressure to focus on “Christian” music?  Is this an effect of the “Christian Bubble” in which sometimes Christians want to stay?

Anyway, just thinking out loud.  Brant Hansen, formerly of the Way-FM radio station – I don’t know what he’s doing these days – has some interesting thoughts on the distinction of sacred vs. secular in music, and how these lines are “blurry”.

Deadbeats, Duds, and Doofusses – Dads as portrayed in the media (thanks to my brother in law “the evil conservative”).

A blog post I had about the same issue – portroyal of dads in TV and movies

An earlier post on how conservatives see government as a father figure, and liberals a mother figure.

A post about how our view of God is influenced by our earthly fathers.

In Christian circles much has been made of the HP series, although it’s died down over the years.  But the presence of magic in movies and books is something that Christians should consider and address.

First of all, let’s take a look at “magic” or the supernatural in real life.  Sorcery was condemned in the Bible in the Old and New Testament.  Why?  I think because the supernatural does exist in our world, and it comes from one of two possible sources.  It is either God or his enemy, and I’m pretty sure sorcery as we know it came from the enemy.

In a fictional world, such a dilemma does not exist.  Magic doesn’t have to come from a demonic being.  It is no more unwholesome than a mutation that gives Wolverine his powers or a radioactive spider bite that gave Spiderman his.  This magic, like technology, can be used for good or evil purposes.  Also, if one condemns magic in the Harry Potter series they have to do so in the Lord of the Rings trilogy and even possibly the Chronicles of Narnia (although one could argue that Narnia is different since Aslan represents Christ).

That being said, I recognize some of the issues that Harry Potter can represent to younger children.  For one, these stories are about everyday young kids who appear normal, yet happen to have magical gifts.  Consequently, the idea of a child being able to possess magical gifts seems a little more feasible than a child being able to walk through walls because of a mutation or a visitor arriving from a distant planet.  Impressionable young kids may wonder if they too, could possess magic powers.  But hopefully this can be quickly remedied by the parents steering them back to reality.  Also, the books get progressively more violent and dark, so that’s another thing parents need to keep in mind.  Even in that case, the Harry Potter series becomes an issue of discernment, not a cause to rise against.