WordPress 2 works great, and is full of cool features – unfortunately, they’re mostly admin-side, so you won’t see them! Unless you upgrade for yourself!

Updated to WordPress 2 on both this site, and Bethany’s.

Since then:

1. Restyled my admin menu! (look for wp-admin.css in your wp-admin folder) Not done, but here’s a screenie.

2. If you actually know anything about html, or doing your own posts… turn the stupid wysiwyg editor off. Options->Writing->Formatting->”Users should use the visual rich editor by default” – UNcheck. (Or… look at the screenshot above – that menu is displayed :D)

It stinks. Badly. Unless you really, really don’t know how to read simple javascript quicktags… it’s frightfully bad. Try it, if you don’t believe me.. but trust me.. it’s better to do it by hand. Even Bethany did, and she’s practically brand new at html. That’s how bad it was 😀

3. It fixed the recurring rss issues I was having with Bethany’s site.

It’s pretty cool. Visually, it’s a lot nicer. It’s more fun to play with. It’s more handy, with everything more “at your fingertips”. The “enable wysiwyg by default” crap really, really annoyed me, though.

Oh well. It’s pretty cool, anyways. By the by… unless you are really hacked up? Don’t bother to deactivate plugins, as long as you’ve made a backup of BOTH your files and database – and know how to restore a database. I didn’t have any problems… but if something goes wrong? You just lost EVERYTHING. Period. Don’t mess with stuff… unless you know how to put it back just like it was, that is 😀

WordPress 2 is good. Upgrade. I was late, but I had just a few projects on the burner.

Updating to WordPress 2.0. So, pay no attention to the man behind the curtain.

Cadre Comments reminds apologists of a sin they need to be wary of.

The Good Fight gives his picks for best all-time debates – the catch is… well, you’ll have to read and find out!

Imago Dei takes PZ Meyers to task for equating human worth with appearance.

Apologia Christi explores our fear of theological controversy.

Joe Carter posts “Alice, Atheists, and the Ability to believe impossible things” – lively debate in the comments section already, as always – but a low signal-to-noise ratio so far.

Wheat and Chaff thinks something is fishy about a God-shaped-hole.

Challies, the inveterate reviewer, takes a look at “One Minute Answers To Skeptics’ Top Forty Questions,” by Charlie Campbell.

Added Withallyourmind.net and Twoorthree.net to the Vox Aggregator. I’ve been looking at both for quite a while, and I think they’re both great blogs.

Welcome!

Latest Posts has been updated, and now uses Feed Digest. Want the code? It’s here.

Latest Posts is not working – RSS Digest has been deprecated, and has been upgraded to Feed Digest – thus, the old feed is no longer working – I’ll have to revamp it tomorrow. We had my brother and his wife over tonight, so no blogging…

At work, the other day, I had a discussion with a coworker, which centered around a discussion of The DaVinci Code. We discuss metaphysical or spiritual aspects of life quite often, but I engaged fully, this time – because he was not quite sympathetic to the specific claims made in The DaVinci Code, but sort of asking questions about themes in it – namely, Mary Magdalene’s supposed “marriage” to Jesus, and etc. That didn’t take long, as I explained the history of those claims, and who had made them – but that got me thinking – “what does he really think about the Bible?”

So, I asked him – “What do you think – is the Bible what it claims to be?” His answer, predictably, was to ask “in what way” – because, really, I wasn’t very specific. Have I ever mentioned that I don’t do apologetics in the real world very often? It’s my own shortcoming, and a result of the insular lifestyle I tend to lead. Well, anyway, I began to explain that the Bible claims to be the actual words of God, to man. His response was that it likely wasn’t the whole truth, but maybe part of the truth.

Well, my immediate response was to ask, in effect, that if it isn’t *the* truth, then what is? Is it found in the Mormons, or in Islam? Where? His response was, (also in effect), that truth was found in an individual person. Which, (also predictably), led me to ask – so, if truth is found in each individual, doesn’t truth always change?

What followed was, to me, an odd exchange. His point seemed, to me, to be that all morals are relative, and that what is true to one person is not true to another – and that the “belief” that it is true is what directs morality. My responses followed the pattern that if this is the case, then what Hitler did, or Hussein did, can be credibly justified by their belief that it is right. That was one aspect of the conversation. The other aspect was an attempt, on both parts, to explain exactly what we meant, when we said what we did. I don’t know if I understood him rightly, but by the end, he agreed with me that there is a concept of moral truth that over-arches what we believe to be true – but I don’t know if that was what he thought to begin with, or if it changed his mind. It’s hard to tell. I conceded that some moral decisions are situation dependent (such as killing someone – murder versus self-defense, or war), but that the basic principle remains the same.

It was a good exchange, but not anywhere near the “cut-and-dried” exchanges I’ve had in the past. He agrees that there is a spiritual world, that the physical came into being as the result of a non-physical force, and that there will be an eventual heaven and hell. However, it seems to me that he doesn’t think that the Christian way is what it says it is – the only way to an actual eternal existence in Heaven. We disagreed about the existence of an original or natural sin – but following a consistent moral code is very important to him. I enjoyed the discussion – as well as prior discussions we’ve had about the insufficiency of the limited-to-the-physical atheist/materialist viewpoint; but I’m not quite sure how I’d expand on this from here. Acer is what I’ll call him, since he uses that pseudonym online – and I had a lot of fun talking with him. (He may even read this – he knows about my blog :D) I’m not sure, exactly, what he really thinks, though. I’m not precisely worried about offending him by talking about Christianity – but I don’t want to badger him, either, or try to “win an argument”. That’s not the point. I’m a bit belligerent by nature, and I don’t want to be considered a bully. I also don’t want to lose the grip on the conversation by being too timid, either. I care about him, and I want to make sure he’s on the right track – not to become improperly judgemental and accusing. Speak the truth, in love…

It was interesting, and a bit scary – but I’m not quite sure how to handle it from here. Keep in mind – this is a friend from work, who reads this blog occasionally – so if you have comments, keep this in mind. (and Acer… if I messed anything up in our conversation, or I didn’t understand anything well enough – let me know!)

Thanks,

Click the button “Latest Posts” directly under this. this will show you all of the Aggregator’s latest posts.

Ok, I admit it. I am.

I added 3-5 useless/semi-useful plugins today, fixed a couple annoyances, and figured out why my email wasn’t working. I think.

Hearken: The plugins list can be found at bottom right, under “technology” – where I am testing all of my other new plugins, too.

You can quote comments, now.

You can see recent comments.

You can see recent trackbacks.

You can see a list of most frequent commenters. Catez is in the lead 😀

You can even see where *I* am commenting, elsewhere in the blogosphere.

Lots of neato stuff like that.

Then, of course, there is the ever-uber WP-Hashcash and Polite-ifier (which keeps this blog spam-free and profanity free, respectively), Comment Quicktags, Related Posts, and etc, etc.

I use plenty of java, as I’m sure you’ve seen, and I use several other custom addons.

I’d pull a StrongBad, and tell you to “follow along, with my simple step-by-step instructions”… but, alas, I really don’t make blogging fun.

So, until next time… yeah. I suppose I’ll actually post something meaty and non-fluffy – but, alas… all I’m doing is fiddling with my site interminably – and that’s not very interesting for anyone but ubernerds. So, in fact, I really didn’t do, or think, about anything non-nerdy. Which makes me an uber-nerd, I suppose. Although I have a really cool collection of Strongbad clips that I just listened to, to try and find an appropriate one to end this post with.

I had fun listening, but didn’t find one. I should rip some more clips from “Trogdor”…