Day: August 25, 2011

Kinky is way too liberal for my blood even though he has a little bit of a libertarian streak.  I like him a little better today after reading an article he wrote for the Daily Beast.  I liked this paragraph a lot:

When I ran for governor of Texas as an independent in 2006, the Crips and the Bloods ganged up on me. When I lost, I drove off in a 1937 Snit, refusing to concede to Perry. Three days later Rick called to give me a gracious little pep talk, effectively talking me down from jumping off the bridge of my nose. Very few others were calling at that time, by the way. Such is the nature of winning and losing and politicians and life. You might call what Rick did an act of random kindness. Yet in my mind it made him more than a politician, more than a musician; it made him a mensch.

Rick Perry was willing and thoughtful enough to make the call. Kinky Friedman was willing to take the call and gracious enough to respond to it positively. I liked Rick Perry a lot before I read the article and Kinky Friedman almost not at all. I think I like them both a little bit better now.  Read the whole thing.

H.T.  Kevin Williamson at National Review Online

I did a little calculating and determined that the 1000th day from when I started posting again is on Monday, May 19 2014.  That is perfect.  Commencement for the 2013-2014 school year at NCSU is on Saturday, May 10, 2014.  Graduation in four years from start to finish with hard degrees like Statistics and Applied Math is very difficult.  It will be equally difficult for Lorena to finish her first two years of college for a 4-year college transfer (Associate of Science) degree while she runs (with an iron fist) our household.  I will need to pitch in at home more often to make that happen.  I have thought a lot about what I want to accomplish, too.  I do not want any more degrees, but there are lots of new and old things I want to learn.  I just need to pare my wants down to something tractable in the allotted time.  I figured that beyond the duties of my day job and household duties, there are several things at which I can aim.  I reserve the right to modify some of these goals as circumstances change, but I think it help to write them down and track progress.

• Blogging and reading – I attribute part of my blogging hiatus to the fact that I quit taking time to read for both edification and pleasure.  I had less things about which to write.  I have two-fold goal here:  1) Daily progress through a book unrelated to my other goals.  Reasonable Faith qualifies as does Farnsworth’s Classic English Rhetoric whose author I heard on Bill Bennett’s Morning in America this morning.  I will try to throw in a novel now and again.  Most importantly, I will continue to track my daily Bible reading here.
• GaugeCam – I make my living as a technology researcher.  There is so much stuff I would love to learn to allow me to do my job better, that I do not have time to learn everything.  We have identified a new project at GaugeCam to “webify” the work we are doing there.  My part of that task will be to write some vision libraries and to make the cameras and I/O devices available from an Android tablet.  My goal then, will be to learn how to program Android well enough on my Nook Color to write and publish a program to access GaugeCam connected cameras and I/O devices over the internet.
• Get my weight down to 170 pounds.

I think those are good goals.  Enough to keep me focused and interest, but not so much I cannot help out with everyone else’s school and around the house.  The kids have additional goals on which they work, but I will leave that to them to talk about in their own blogs.  We might not make it all, but these appear to be worthy goals.

Day 3 of 1000

I talked about a book titled Reasonable Faith that I downloaded to my Nook Color while I walked on a treadmill at the YMCA.  It is a great book, but not one that is easy to digest as a light read.  I have often listened to William Lane Craig debates and podcasts as I do my nightly walks (well, four times per week anyway).  I think different apologetic arguments appeal to differently to different people.  What I mean by that is, even though I am totally entranced by discussions of the historicity of Christ, the historical reality of the resurrection of Christ, cosmic fine tuning, and intelligent design, others are more interested in more philosophical questions such as the problem of evil (theodicy)  and other philosophical arguments for the existence of God.  Reasonable Faith covers all of these.

I started reading about these kinds of topics over twenty five years ago when I had a close relative start beating me up about what I believe.  He had been a serious Christian, but had doubts, and, for a period of time, tried to convince others of the rightness of his apostate worldview.  I was shaken to my core and wanted to figure out what I really believed.  This relative was very taken with the writings of Marcus Borg, a knee-jerk liberal (in the scholarly sense) professor of religion at Oregon State University who is a member of the fringe group called the Jesus Seminar and does not believe Jesus was bodily resurrected, but still claims he is a Christian.  After a few fits and false starts I found many, much more reputable scholars such as Gary Habermas, Ben Witherington III, N.T. Wright, and J.P. Moreland, and William Lane Craig.  It was quite gratifying to see both N.T. Wright and William Lane Craig destroy Borg in scholarly debates several years after I had started reading this kind of scholarship.  You can watch the Craig’s debate with Borg on YouTube.  The first in the series of videos can be found here.  Borg did not do any better in his debate against N.T. Wright.  It is very sad to me as a second generation alumni of Oregon State that this charlatan has been given an endowed chair and continues to promulgate his fringe views at a public university.

At any rate, I have started reading Reasonable Faith.  The first section is a very accessible treatise on some philosophical considerations.  It talks about Augustine, Aquinas, John Locke, Bultmann, Barth, etc.  I think I will get the most out of those sections of the book where I, because of my disposition, have less interest.  I am glad for that.  I need to be more well-rounded in my understanding of these importand topics.