Mass Transit Etiquette #2

When the bus approaches your stop, don’t wait until the bus has stopped moving and the driver has opened the door to get up out of your seat and start pushing your way through the crowd toward the door, shouting “coming out!” the whole way.

Your fellow passengers want to get where they’re going, and you’re inconsiderately forcing them all to wait for you.

Get out of your seat before the bus arrives at your stop. Get to the door before the bus arrives at your stop. Be at the yellow line waiting for the door to open so you can hop off of the bus and your fellow passengers can be on their merry way.

Mass Transit Etiquette: A Prolog and Rule #1

I’ve lived in cities with great mass transit systems (Boston). I now live in a city that has a not-so-great mass transit system (Seattle). And it occurs to me that one of the big areas of differentiation is how riders act when they’re waiting for or riding mass transit. Could it be that the only obstacle to Seattle having a “great” system is widespread adherence to a few simple, common-sense rules? Probably not, but it sure would take us a long way toward being less awful.

So, without further ado, here is Rule of Mass Transit Etiquette #1: When preparing to board a crowded bus, first wait for everyone who wants to exit to actually exit. Boarding prematurely only serves to make the exit that much more crowded and prolong the stop.

Free Music (Legal and Doesn’t Suck!) from c3worship.com

The latest C3USA worship album, It All Comes Back To You, is available to download — for free — from www.c3worship.com. Some infectious grooves and amp-kicking tracks, performed and produced by some of the best musical minds in the movement. So go get some free music, then tell your friends, and tell them to tell their friends. And who knows? Maybe I’ll get a track on the next one…

The Puritans Got a Bad Rap

Somewhere along the way calling someone “puritanical” started meaning that they hated sex.  To which I say, “ballocks”.

One of the best remedies that can be prescribed to married persons (next to an awfull feare of God, and a continuall setting of him before them, wheresoever they are) is, that husband and wife mutually delight each in other, and maintaine a pure and fervent love betwixt themselves, yielding that due benevolence one to another which is warranted and sanctified by God’s word, and ordained of God for this particular end. This due benevolence (as the Apostle stileth it) is one of the most proper and essentiall acts of marriage: and necessary for the maine and pincipall ends thereof: as for preservation of chastity in such as have not the gift of continency, for increasing the world with a legitimate brood, and for linking the affections of the married couple more firmly together. These ends of marriage, at least the two former, are made void without this duty be performed. As it is called benevolence because it must be performed with good will and delight, willingly, readily and cheerfully; so it is said to be due because it is a debt which the wife oweth to her husband, and he to her (1 Cor 7:4). (William Gouge, “Of Domesticall Duties”, 215-216, quoted in Sex and the Supremacy of Christ — ye olde spellings preserved)

To God be the Glory, great things He has done.

“I absolutely refuse to be dogmatic”

Simon McIntyre is pretty much always worth listening to:

http://www.c3iglobal.org/NEWS/IRefuse2/tabid/137/Default.aspx

On a less-light note, I’m reading Rob Bell’s second book, “SEX GOD”, and so far have been less than impressed. See my review-in-progress.

Update: Well, it looks like the c3i global web site overwrote the article with a new one.  Sorry I didn’t save a copy, and I can’t find a link to the old text anywhere.

Bumper Sticker Philosophy

As I walked my dog this evening, I passed a car with a curious bumper sticker.

EVOLUTION MEANS… No God… No Master

More true than most people realize. Evolution does not mean “truth” or “history” or even “science”. It is a model of biological history that is tautological if you assume there is no Creator, hence its appeal — the hedonistic scientist is spared the hard work of furnishing extraordinary evidence for his extraordinary claims, and the scientific hedonist is spared the bother having to reckon with accountability for his immorality.

Not that I expect any Darwinist to be convinced by this little rant. But it is curious that even Darwinism’s proponents recognize its philosophical ramifications; my only real disagreement with them would, I suppose, be whether those are the cause or the effect of their worldview.

Joel Osteen on Glenn Beck

I rarely, if ever, watch any of the cable news talking head shows anymore.   But tonight I left Headline News on while I was cooking dinner, and I caught Glenn Beck interviewing Joel Osteen.  A lot of Christian thinkers have a lot of questions about Osteen, but Beck beautifully distilled most of them by asking (my paraphrase): “if you’re a Christian leader, shouldn’t you talk about Jesus more?”

Osteen made a tip of the hat to Jesus’ life, death, and resurrection as tenets of faith, but it took him less than 3 seconds on the subject before he shifted to talking about “life beyond that”.  Now, I get the importance of talking about living the Christian life in practical terms — it’s good and right and important to do so.  But the most practical thing you can do as a Christian is to turn your attention toward the Cross and what it accomplished and to fix your mind upon the person of Jesus Christ as our Lord, our great high priest, our savior, our righteousness, our God; when we fail to do that, our attempts at “Christian living” invariably go badly awry.  So I worry about ministries that spend too much time “beyond the cross” because their message starts to become indistinct from Tony Robbins-style “we’re all okay, let’s be better”, diminishing the importance of the Cross and encouraging us to think more highly of ourselves and think less frequently about the place of Jesus in our worlds — which amounts to a sick kind of baptized idolatry.

But, if Your Best Life Now isn’t as “best” or as “now” as you want it to be, I suppose you can take the more modest step of buying Osteen’s new book, “Become a Better You”.

Blogspotting

Taking “going green” to absurd measures…

http://www.treehugger.com/files/2007/02/black_google_wo.php

http://ecoiron.blogspot.com/2007/01/emergy-c-low-wattage-palette.html

By the way, it’s my understanding that LCDs actually consume more power displaying black than white (although the marginal cost is MUCH smaller).  So maybe the econ geeks can tell us what ratio of LCDs to CRTs it would take for a white Google homepage to be more eco-friendly than a black one?

In the meantime, I’m going to start restyling all of my web pages with alternate eco-palette CSS.  Yeah, that sounds like a very productive use of my time.

PS and apropos nothing above — Loving John Mayer’s new album, “Continuum”.

Must-See Movie

Ben Stein is turning out a new flick in February that should ruffle some feathers. Imagine “Farenheit 911″ except done by someone with an understanding of the subject matter and a reputation for intellectual honesty.

Personally, I’m pretty sick of watching objections to Darwinistic orthodoxy get dismissed out-of-hand by atheistic dogmatists holding “Ph.D.”s without a lick of philosophy in them and media pundits who lack even the must cursory understanding of science, scientism, and epistemology. I’m pretty excited to see Stein bring a fair representation of the loyal opposition to the masses.

More light reading, if you’re interested:

• Uncommon Descent
• Post-Darwinist

I’ll say it again…

Death to DRM!