(Say that title ten times fast)

"Lying is sin."

I challenged for the sake of clarification, "But what's the definition of a lie?"

It started as "saying something that isn't true is a lie, and that is always wrong"

and ended as "saying something that isn't true, or withholding any part of the whole truth is a lie, and it's always wrong unless you're not comfortable revealing all of the truth (if someone asks you too personal of questions) or you think that lying will lead to a greater good (protecting someone from harm)."

I don't think anyone was happy with the beginning or the ending definition. What surprised me is how a very straightforward and harsh moral guard dog became a soft, comforting little kitten.


I see the problem in two ways that are a pattern from Eden.

1. We re-define God's laws. Eve told the serpent God did say the couldn't eat from this tree, or even touch it. (She added the part about touching it.) In our case, I'm convinced that God is far more concerned about deception than lying.
2. We justify breaking God's laws. Eve saw that the fruit was "useful for obtaining wisdom" - how can obtaining wisdom be wrong? And when is wanting to be like God bad? Isn't that what we're called to do? In our case, we justified lying and deception, though mostly in reaction to our poor defintion of what part of lying/deception is wrong.
   

I Just got my new Blackberry cellphone, and I'm writing this blog post
from said phone. It's taking me a little long, not because of the
small keyboard but because my wife found out I'm doing this and is
beating me for being such a nerd.

I'm glad I didn't check the stove when I heard the weird noise.

A few minutes earlier I had turned on a burner to boil some water for tea, then went upstairs to get ready for my commute to work. I heard some popping from the stove downstairs and though about checking, but figured something probably just spilled on the burner and was popping as it heated up.

A then I heard the glass shattering.



I had turned on the wrong burner.



On this other burner was a large glass dish, which had heated up and exploded, shooting glass shrapnel across to all corners of the kitchen. If I had gone down to check when I heard the popping noises, I would have gotten shot with red-hot splinters of glass.

Authorship has defined credibility - who wrote the book? If you don't know, you don't know if it's trustworthy. Thus, defending Biblical authorship became a strong part of apologetics (see the intro to any book in the Student Bible or NIV Study Bible).

Some scholars state that the closest you get to 'authorship' in a biblical sense is that God is ultimately the author. It was not considered wrong or even strange to append a previous writing and still assign authorship to the presumed original author.

If the printing press caused this huge change in perspective brining in the modern era, is there a similar invention or changes that marks a move on to 'the era after modernism'?

I propose the answer is Wikipedia.

With Wikipedia, it doesn't matter who wrote the information. Instead there are two factors involved in assigning credibility to the text:

1. The Necessity of Community. The text is created, corrected, filtered, and interpreted in the context of community. The idea behind Wikipedia is that the community can continue to refine what's true about a given topic, even suggesting alternate theories, and linking to external references for support.
2. Individual Responsibility. Everyone who reads the article is required to use critical thinking, and make contributions when necessary, to provide footnotes, and alternate readings.

These are two of the most necessary things that are far too often missing in the Protestant and Evangelical church. What a great move in the right direction!

There's the weakness too:

• Lack of Authority. Because authorship is disconnected from authority, what does that mean for God's ultimate authorship of the scriptural text?

Your thoughts?

In The Nanny Diaries a college grad tells her story of taking a happenstance job as a nanny for a set of awful parents, phrased in anthropological terminology, which made it all the more interesting.

The tools of cross-cultural anthropology, even in New York can help one understand what is going on, who is doing what, why they're doing it, and what they mean when they talk.

Last night in a class I'm taking we were discussing some cultural difficulties in studying the Bible and how we've made it worse with modern methods.

We try to prove the Bible by our current Western cultural views of what it means to be historically accurate, scientifically accurate, and non-contradictory.

But in an ancient near-east they didn't see the world the way we do, or think in the ways we do.

One specific example could be in quotations. There are different quotes of Jesus' sermon on the mount, for example.

What if more important than repeating a teacher's exact words, you were to remember specifically what was meant when they spoke? Arguable, you could more accurately passing on the teaching.

This doesn't lessen the authority of the scripture, but it makes it much much more interesting, and more fun, and more work - instead of critiquing a given passage by our standards for literature or history text-books, we venture into another culture in another time.

We have translations from the language from Hebrew, Aramaic, and Greek into English, but we cannot assume that the culture, worldview, and traditions have also been translated. That work is still left for us to do.

Add one more movie to the list of movies we've walked out of to get our money back. We loved Arrested Development, so we had high hopes, but we walked out of Superbad last night.



Why did we walk out? I think that persistent phallic or sexual humor is geared toward forcing nervous laughter. If your comedy is so bad that's the only way you can get people laughing, it reflects very poorly on your quality of comedy.

I think it's true of stand up comedians and of movies.