This just in from NB, walking actually causes more global warming then driving.

So much for that “walk to work day” sponsored by EMC that was supposed to save the planet.

Earlier this week Warren pointed me to Scott Adams blog, and there has been some very interesting debate going on there. He began by writing two blogs on Atheism and Pascal’s Wager. In these blogs he presented very simple arguments against Atheism along with some interesting theories concerning which religion is true. All is well and good. However his posts were quite offensive to Austin Cline over at Ask.com, and Austin wrote up quite a fiery response. Scott answered with this post and is now waiting for a response. This is turning into quite an interesting affair.

I have always enjoyed the Dilbert cartoons, but never realizes Scott Adams had a blog. After reading quite a bit of his writing I have found it is very enjoyable reading and quite thought provoking. Here is another Scott Adams post, suggesting that maybe the problem in Iraq is that there are not enough Guns. He says that you cannot test his theory, but I say that it has already been tested and proven, right here in America. Hence the second amendment which states that you can never have too many guns (it might use different words then that).

NewsBusters has found two prominent places where liberal forces of the main stream media are actually reporting that there has been a lot of progress made in Iraq especially since the “surge”. They are even reporting that we might just… wait for it… win. I know, I couldn’t believe it either, but here they are: NBC’s Chris Matthews and a New York Times op-ed. Enjoy every last word.

UPDATE: of course some people just can’t handle good news.

Here is an interesting take on the South Koreans who were taken hostage in Afghanistan last week:  Its Christianities fault, not Islam.  If those “giggling,” “naive,”  Christians, who are just seeking greater “spiritual and financial rewards” would quit “competing,” “like those Japanese television game shows where the prize goes to the contestant who takes the greatest humiliation and still comes up grinning” then these types of problems seen in Afghanistan would go away.  After all, these weren’t even real missionaries.  According to the article these “young women who were not off to try to convert Afghan Muslims to Christianity, but to provide medical and child-care services for needy people.”  The whole problem was the Christians “unfocused desire to do good” and their lack of “even the most basic training in the type of cultural quagmires they will face.”

This makes me sick.

I am not a big fan of the panic surrounding greenhouse gas emissions, but I love the outdoors and want our air to be kept clean and fresh.  So hence I present to you a solution to all of automobile exhaust polution:  the Greenbox.

I think that this is truly genius, especially if it goes mainstream and a system is put in place so that the sludge can quickly and easily be removed from the box at any gas station.  I can easily picture a setup where, while pumping your gas, you hook up your greenbox and quickly empty it into holding tanks at the gas stations.  The gas stations give you a discount for the gas you just bought, and they then sell the sludge en mas back to the oil companies.  The oil companies turn the sludge back into gas which is later sent back out to the gas stations.

Now if we can only hook these things up to cows behinds, since livestock in America actually emits more greenhouse gases then transport.

There are two parts to this piece with Dennis Prager: here and here.  Take a few minutes and listen to both.

Terry Moran makes a great point that freedom and prosperity actually breeds terrorists:

“This is the condition of a free mind in a free world–liberated, but in a fundamental sense, alone as our forebears were not.”

“it is a truth of our time that as the world moves rapidly from the country to the city (more than half the human population now lives in cities–a staggering social change in our species), fewer and fewer people will live amid the old certainties, and more and more will experience the dizzying possibilities of life as an individual set adrift in the human sea of the great city.”

“And they will be insecure in who they are. Not all, perhaps–the poor are insulated, to an extent, by the sheer magnitude of their physical struggle to survive, by their continued reliance on each other and on an older faith that focuses its promises on the next world, and by their isolation. But take a few steps up the social ladder in an immigrant community, or in the sprawling new cities in the Muslim world, and it’s a different story. Doctors, engineers, architects and other professionals are in the vanguard of the movement into modernity. They are immersed in a world of transnational practices, standards, collegial networks and ethics that can be corrosive of their old allegiances. They can get lost, especially if they have migrated to the west, with all of our societies’ temptations, blasphemies, materialism and skepticism.”

 www.livescience.com

“That strong, egocentric communication of Westerners was nonexistent when we looked at Chinese,” Keysar said. “The Chinese were very much able to put themselves in the shoes of another when they were communicating.”

Hot Air

The comments are great.  Here are a few of my favorite:

“I see that Reid and the Dems pulled out of the all-nighter.”

“We must really be impressing all the bad guys around the world who are watching this! And they want this group to run my Health Care? Yea…whatever!”

“It wasn’t a total wash. My daughter was fussy last night and the C-SPAN coverage lulled her right to sleep.”

“No wonder they can’t commit to win a war. They can’t even commit to winning an all night DEBATE!!”

“Code Pink, Answer, Daily Kos, thats who this all- nighter was for. The nutroots.”

“This is the result of women in politics. Now they are organizing slumber parties.”

“How about congress’ approval rating is less than half of GW’S….????…What say you hairy and nanc…???”

“Personally, I think the GOP missed a golden opporuntity when they didn’t show up en masse in footie PJs to make the point that political stunts like this are only as good as the threats behind them. Harry Reid lost the minute he didn’t really make all the Senators stay there- particularly after making repeated statements about “working all night if necessary to bring the troops home now.””

FYI the congress approval rating is at 14% now according to Zogby.

Pope Benedict XVI recently came out with a statement that the only true church is the Roman Catholic Church. An initial tendency might be to be upset at a statement like that because it is declaring that Protestants Churches are invalid.

However Al Mohler makes a great point that a statement like this is a good thing because it makes more clear the lines that were blurred by Pope John Paul II. Pope Benedict’s statement is much more dogmatic then anything Pope John Paul would have said, since he was almost ready to embrace all religions as being equally valid.

In a world that is increasingly adopting post-modernism it is encouraging to see the RCC taking a step away from it, even if their absolutist position is erroneous.

Here is a good quote from Al Mohler:

… I am not offended because this new document actually brings attention to the crucial issues of ecclesiology, and thus it presents us with an opportunity.

…

Evangelicals should appreciate the candor reflected in this document. There is no effort here to confuse the issues. To the contrary, the document is an obvious attempt to set the record straight. The Roman Catholic Church does not deny that Christ is working redemptively through Protestant and evangelical churches, but it does deny that these churches which deny the authority of the papacy are true churches in the most important sense. The true church, in other words, is that church identified through the recognition of the papacy. Those churches that deny or fail to recognize the papacy are “ecclesial Communities,” not churches “in the proper sense.”

I appreciate the document’s clarity on this issue. It all comes down to this — the claim of the Roman Catholic Church to the primacy of the Bishop of Rome and the Pope as the universal monarch of the church is the defining issue. Roman Catholics and Evangelicals should together recognize the importance of that claim. We should together realize and admit that this is an issue worthy of division. The Roman Catholic Church is willing to go so far as to assert that any church that denies the papacy is no true church. Evangelicals should be equally candid in asserting that any church defined by the claims of the papacy is no true church. This is not a theological game for children, it is the honest recognition of the importance of the question.

So now that this crucial difference between the RCC and protestants is defined, this issue can be addressed theologically head on.