5:05p
Our Prayers and Heartfelt Expressions of Concern go out to the People of Great Britain during a Day of Tragedy.

You were there for us during 9/11, and it’s aftermath – we’ll be there for you, in whatever way you need us.

Newly added to Vox Apologia:

Deism, by Chad MacIntosh (Doxazo Theos)

It’s an excellent explanation (and rebuttal) of Deism.

An addition to Vox XX – The Unfairness of Heaven?, from Anne/WeekendFisher at CADRE Comments.

From Anne’s synopsis: Response to atheist Michael Martin’s latest critique of Christianity. Although a few of Martin’s arguments were probably destined to be unique to Martin, I decided to respond because a few of them were common enough. I mostly wanted to retake the ground on whether Judgment Day is fair, being a bit tired of the atheists thinking they have the high ground there. I go some places that Christian apologists usually don’t go, but it was about time we opened up some new ground there and stopped being so defensive.

Anticipating:

The first set of questions for The Theomeme Project. Hint: The first question author is a member of Ten Christian Blogs

Other Cuts:

Parableman writes about The Problem of Evil, in reference to a reference of a paper on it. Follow the link trail – good reading all around.

Aggregated:

From the Apologetics Aggregator, we have a VERY nice collection of posts, of late. I really encourage you to read through one of the aggregator versions every day or two. There are 30 blogs on the aggregator, and I NEVER find less than 3-4 interesting posts.

Another post from Chad, entitled Ontological Musings explores the varying ontologies which necessitate the existence of God.

United Church of Christ and Gay Marriage

A Pastor and His Apologetics informs those of us who may live under a local rock that the UCC has voted to support gay marriage.

Alex Forrest posts about the Creation Science Museum. I’d also recommend this post from blestwithsons. And remind you what I think about evolution, etc.

Which reminds me: someone email me if I forget to do a post on Old-Earth Creationism within the next two weeks. I had an email exchange with my dad, and an interesting im conversation with a friend on the subject recently.

From Daily Apologetics comes America: Yoga’s Greenhouse

From Hux, we can find two posts on T.D. Jakes’ Modalistic Heresy. What is that? Read #1, and #2, to find out.

Check out James White’s fisking of BYU professors Millet and McConkie’s Sustaining and Defending the Faith.

Resource Blog is looking for articles and/or reviews

Should we Defend Doctrines? The Huntington Apologetics Team asks the question – and gives the answer.

Just read Vincent Cheung’s Blog. You’ll enjoy it, I promise. Read it all, if you have to.

Most importantly:

My girlfriend’s blog, which I just finished the basic design for.

Visit now, visit often – I’ll make sure there’s plenty of updates 😀

Now, did you enjoy that? Was it informative?

Well, I can’t do it that often. Look at the post time, in case you’re thinking “but, you did all of that – it’s easy, right?”

It is mind-bogglingly time-consuming to collect links JUST from the Aggregator. If I did half of the posts I WANTED to, this week – this would be three times as long – every day.

I’m still looking for people willing to collect 4-5 links per day – and post them in a similar format to Vox Apologia.

Think, people: 5 people, 5 links a day. That’s 25 links/day.

I just posted 17 by myself. Think about it. It’s not hard, and it won’t take long.

Email me – Contact button – top left.

Cut-Rate Thesaurus:

Team-Swap, (God love em) is the winner of the first award for this post.

A couple samples:

a Afro Africian American

That would be “an Afro-American”, or “African-American” – not both 😀

the roles of Black’s in the Confederacy

The apostrophe is used to denote a possessive – not to denote a plural. In that case, it would be “Blacks”. However, using “Blacks” after using the PC “African-Americans” seems inconsistent, if you ask me!

Civil war

Both words are usually capitalized.

(It happened twice.)

acceptance that the site of the Confederate battle flag

Sight, not site 😀

Several of the sentences would also be borderline (if not actual) run-on sentences, or have commas incorrectly placed. Those are relatively minor, though.

Just so you know – I still love ya 😀 (Don’t get mad at me? lol)

Scornful Skeptics Award:

This week’s award goes to The Evangelical Atheist. Why? (Content Warning) Just check out the title to this post.

Yeah. Plus, he signs all of his posts ~ I AM ~. He wins.

Are You Tongue Tied?

(Mild Content Warning)

Ales Rarus, A Form of Sound Words (I wonder if he’ll be upset to be mentioned in the same post as a “Romanist“?), Joe Missionary, Messy Christian and Jeff the Baptist have all dicussed swear words. Much different from The Evangelical Atheist’s discussion. Which is retarded.

Our friends above, however – are not. The discussion is interesting.

Update: 6:55p

Found this while my girlfriend was flipping through a photoblog.

Slick Willie is wearing a Kabbalah wristband. Guess he’s trying to impress Madonna. Well, it could have been “Kabbalah water“, I suppose.

Now, in the last post (see directly below), I brought up a new idea of mine.

The TheoMeme ©.

There are two reasons for this.

First:

Vox Apologia needs a retooling. It wasn’t working. This is an attempt to do so.

Second:

It’s a way to claim at least some portion of the “meme” craze for Christ. Considering it’s origin, I find it fitting. read the preceding link. You may find it eye-opening, Christian, where the word comes from. Our friend, the pragmatist – Richard Dawkins. It teaches theology to those who may need to read it, allows others to teach it, and makes us all think about it, if we get involved.

The Way it Works

We’ve all seen memes, by now. Book memes, community memes, movie memes, Star Wars character memes – whatever you can think of, there’s been a meme about it. Except Theology.

Why, Christians, is that? Are we not to take every thought captive? Let’s take one meme captive, shall we?

Ok, so here’s how it goes. The questions – every time – will be written by a pastor, or a theologian. Period. As much as I adhere to Sola Scriptura – the people who know how to succinctly, correctly phrase theological questions are theologians, and pastors. That way, we will minimize the effect of poorly worded questions on the responses. We hope 😀

The additional question is as follows: “Do you attend church? If so, what denomination or congregation do you attend at?”

The purpose: To give us a “doctrinal map” of comparative theologies between branches of Christianity. This, friends, is a useful thing. Comparative theology is a pain, at best – but this may be something the blogosphere is uniquely suited for. If we take it seriously.

How to do it effectively:

A pastor writes the questions. The questions are inserted into the initial meme. That meme post “tags” 5 higher-profile Christian blogs, for a good “first seed”. (Evangelical Outpost, Jollyblogger, Adrian Warnock, SmartChristian, Parableman?) Those blogs can each seed 5 in turn – and the meme spreads. I’ll posit, though, that those 5 blogs can reach 75% of the God-bloggers within 3 links of their blog. I’d almost guarantee it. So, it would be possible to reach the vast majority of the Christian blogs with a real live theological discussion, every week.

How about that for meta-niching?

Seriously – think it over. What downsides are there? It is worth a shot, most definitely.

Technical:

Have as many blogs as possible trackback to the original meme post – include the trackback url in the meme. Have the blogs who understand technorati tags – tag their posts with “TheoMeme” – as this post (and it’s predecessor) just were. Create javascript updater, which gives current information about Meme info, which can be included on any blog, and centrally updated. (See King of the Blogs, or the New Blogs Showcase for examples)
Technorati Tag: TheoMeme

I just coined this word – and because I just coined it, I’m going to use it fairly soon – and I’m taking the credit for it, should it take off 😀

I just had one of those “stroke of lightning” ideas, while I was on one of my nightly “thinking cap” sessions.

The Supposition:

A meme is a popular thing, in the blogosphere. There are book-memes, quiz-memes, community-memes…

Memes can be powerful – so, let’s harness them for something the Godblogosphere can uniquely address – theology. Not to mention actually learning about theology. The catechism – blog style.

The Structure:

Post something short, which brings up a point of theology – and list 5 short questions which serve to bring out doctrinal stance on that theological issue. Add one question to the end: What denomination or church group, (or neither) do you belong to. I’ll explain that soon.

The Strategy:

Address that meme to 5 people who regularly read your blog, and will find it quickly. Spread meme. Have them trackback to your original post, and collect the links to their answers. Answers will be collected for the next Vox Apologia, two weeks later, so that the meme has time to spread. Start meme two weeks ahead of time, and keep the pace going – post a new meme every week, and maintain that pace. You will always get an answer, and there will always be content, and discussion on that content, which adds to the body of information.

Categorize the answers by doctrinal/congregational affiliation, so that the stances from various groups can be annotated and tracked – and provide a sort of “comparative theology” study.

Thoughts?

The idea that blogs would succeed in the Christian community ought not be a surprise. When it comes to community, believers should always outstrip those who are not obedient to the Gospel. Believers should always out-community any unbelieving community, whether it be the local Kiwanis or the worshippers at the local football stadium. There’s no biblical directive to blog, but if blogging is community and believers are blogging, we ought to be outdoing any unregenerate blogging effort.

Did you catch that? Excellence – because we are His.

Check out the Blogdom of God, on the TLB communities page. We are the largest blogging community there is. Bar none. We have networked FAR beyond what we would be expected to – and we have more influence than you would expect – and far more readers from outside the Christian community than we will ever know about. I see them come by, like smoke – due to my referral logs, and traffic tracking. I know why they came, and i know why they come back. We have something they want to see. We take what we believe seriously – and we take what we have to say seriously.

Now, with my editorial comments at a close – read the rest of the post I referenced, from Apelles.

(I have them in my “extremely sharp” category for a reason – I reward excellence :D)

Now, if they would only fix their trackbacks…

Fun tools:

Gives you this:

Note: Remove spaces after opening “< " and before the closing "<"

Gives you the latest 15 posts in the Aggregator, to display on your blog.

Gives you this:

Once again, Note: Remove spaces after opening “< " and before the closing "<"

This gives you the external blogrolling list for the aggregator, to display on your blog.

There’s some fun tools for today.

Ok, enough compulsive coding.

But I borrowed this from Nick Queen’s Out of the Wilderness new blog showcase script. I adapted it, themed it to Vox, and something very much like this will be available, should I get some help for Vox, like I mentioned below.

You can put it on your site, and we’ll update it weekly, for Vox – it’ll update everywhere it is displayed.

Now, if you’ll excuse me.. it’s time to go to bed. I’m supposed to be at my girlfriend’s house tomorrow at some sort of decent time – like when it’s still daylight outside.

(Just kidding honey! I’ll be there on time.. albeit tired. Doesn’t it look cool though?)

… awaits his well-deserved thumping when he gets there …

hehe.

News and Updates:

I’ve created a new page for the Aggregator – you can find it below.

Vox Apologia Apologetics Aggregator

It’s powered by RSS Digest – and it’s really, really cool.

Now, for something less cool.

I really like Vox Apologia’s Symposiums – but as you may have noticed, I haven’t been promoting, or planning new ones. For several reasons.

1. It is a MASSIVE time sink.
2. The response is pretty crappy, when I don’t VERY actively promote it.
3. I’m just not getting the necessary response/feedback

Now, don’t think I’m trying to be a nag – I’m really not. But, if I’m going to do this, I’m going to need a few people to help. The volunteers I got to start with really wanted to help – but, unfortunately, almost all of us ran into time issues.

So, here is a request: If you want to see a Vox Apologia Symposium – I need you to help me put it up, and work the logistics required.

It’s a fairly large task, as any of you who have hosted one before can attest to. I moved it to a central location so that we wouldn’t have any “missing blog” issues later on. That tends to happen, if you don’t pay attention, and if the blogs in question change urls, or et cetera. Vox Apologia is a nice site – and I’ve done some neat things with it, I think. However, in order for it to be used, and live up to it’s promise, it needs more than just me maintaining it.

This post will be re-posted to Vox’s blog – and it’s an example of what you could see daily on the blog, if we had the support of multiple posters for it. The Symposium is no different – it also needs volunteers to make it work properly.

The Librarium could use maintenance and additions to it, and I have an “instant update” system in place that only takes seconds to add content or links to pertinent content. It’s really that easy.

If you enjoy this site, and all the cool stuff I have linked here – Vox could be 10 times better. It’s already a lot better. It just needs more hands to run, as it was designed big, to be run by a team. My blog is designed to be run by… me.

You could maintain the Library, help post daily-cut style roundups of apologetics material, work on the symposium, or do a host of other things. Just volunteer. It’s really easy to do something like this, if you have enough people.

If you want to help: email me.

Apologetics:

An absolutely brilliant post from Metacrock, on Cadre Comments.

The post is called Everything Needs a Cause, Right?.

We hear a lot about the cosmological argument – and the Kalam argument, especially. This post does a fair job of blowing that to bits – and coming up with something more interesting in it’s place. Check it out.

I do have a reason for some of the more… unnoticed… members of the Aggregator.

Take a gander at these posts by Jottings from Tertius. I think I overlooked this blog for a while due to a slight sabbatical they were taking at one point, shortly after they were added. I like this blog.
showing no shame
the millions don’t get it
Re-Rethinking the Death Penalty

The Huntington Apologetics Team has two good ones. I’m adding both to the Vox Librarium.

God the Contradictory?
Doctor Washington’s Argument from Harm

Cut-Rate Thesaurus:

I have a confession to make. I like country music, and I’m not even from the South. I’m marrying a southern girl, though, if that counts…

Anyway, I ran across a truly funny song recently, called The Talking Song Repair Blues, by the inimitable Alan Jackson. There’s an absolutely funny line in there.

An’ I know you’ve been using a cut-rate Thesaurus
‘Cause your adverbs are backed up into your chorus:
Now your verse is runnin’ on verbs that are way too weak.

I love it! So, as I’m running through the blogosphere, I’m going to be on the lookout for posts with serious issues.

Don’t be that blogger. You might get an award you really don’t want.

Scornful Skeptic Award:

This week’s award goes to Positive Blasphemy – mostly because they are just so over the top – it isn’t funny.

You’ll see why.

Anyway, each week will give you a different blog – which will be “awarded” the title of “Scornful Skeptic”. They get this award by being so outrageously anti-Christian, they aren’t even amusing. Just eaten up by their own self-deceit.

Science and Science Fiction:

The Minor Prophet has a couple in this category.

Would Jesus Die Twice?
Space, not even close to the final frontier

John Zuhone has a scientific point to make, and a resource to give us. One I agree with, one of which I don’t. My regular readers know by now which is which.

Appearance of Age:
The Lutheran Witness pushes appearance of age
A good explanation of what’s wrong with appearance of age

Teleological Arguments Resource

Stanford encyclopedia of Philosophy: Teleological Arguments for the Existence of God
John’s Post: Del Ratzsch’s Article On Design in the Standford Encyclopedia of Philosophy

Just as a supplement – I had a recent discussion with my dad about Old Earth vs. Young Earth creationism. I also had a discussion with Chad, from Doxazo Theos, about the same basic subject over im.

Are we ready for another scientific topic for Vox Apologia? I do believe that #7 – “Creation vs. Evolution: So What?” was the biggest draw, as far as entrants, in Vox Apologia history.

So: Do we need to take another look, or a more specific look at the subject, or one similar?

How about my recent infinity discussion?

Stem Cell Research? (*cough* Imago Dei *cough*)

Note, first – before you go ANY farther. This post is a specific answer for this post, and the material found within it’s comments. It is nothing more – and nothing less.

It is neither an apologetic for the institution of slavery, nor an endorsement of any sort of racial supremacy. It is certainly not a call to return to the practices of early American slavery – not by any means. It is a simple answer, in response to this question:

If slavery were still around today, then those of us who claim to be God’s children would have to fight against it, even at the cost of our own lives. Right?

My answer: Slavery, as an institution, is not something which is Biblically mandated that we fight against. Abuses in slavery is what we fight against.

A minor delineation, perhaps – but one I feel has to be made.

Read on for more, including a point by point response to Shrode’s comments.

Read the rest of this entry

Welcome Vincent Cheung to the Aggregator!

This guy really knows his stuff.

I’ve also asked two more members of the Apologetics Resource Center to join as well. Hopefully, they’ll both say yes 😀

Incidentally – click the link to your left, underneath the aggregator links, that says “other apologists”. If you’re listed there, i want you to join too.

Also note that I have updated the aggregator links on Vox Apologia to match, and did some minor link update maintenance as well.

I don’t have a Vox Apologia Symposium topic – nor have we had many entries at all the past few weeks (prior to my suspension of it). I had my daughter the past two weeks, so I really didn’t have time for it, to be honest. I’m still looking for some frequent contributors for a REAL “daily cut” style apologetics roundup as well, over at Vox. As in, you help roundup posts. I just don’t have the time, kids. I’m really just looking for some help with that group blog.. that’s basically just been a second personal blog for me. As you can see, i rarely have time to even keep this blog updated. So, a second one just isn’t working well.

Who’s up for it?

Anyway. Hope you had a nice Father’s Day. I was “lucky” enough to have to take my daughter back home the day before Father’s day, for various scheduling reasons. Consider yourself blessed if you have your kids with you. The alternative is not very palatable – nor does a phone call really substitute. (Although I thank her mother for being considerate and ensuring I got to talk to her today)

So… that’s about it. Oh, my birthday is coming up. I’ll be 27 years old. Yay for me.