05/16/06
I don't know about you but I think the hype over the upcoming DaVinci code movie is just a tad bit over the top. I read the book last year and found it was an entertaining potboiler only slightly grounded in reality.
As I was driving home last night I heard a report on CBC radio about how some Christian groups are using the DaVinci Code as an opportunity to engage others in faith discussions instead of just griping about how Dan Brown was making money off of Christianity. You can here the report here. It seemed like a great idea. Being a died in the wool Lutheran I wondered if there were some Lutheran friendly resources, so I spent a few minutes browsing for Lutheran friendly resources. Unfortunately neither the ELCIC (the national body for Lutherans in Canada) or ELCA (the national body for Lutherans in the United States) have any specific collected resources. I offer here what I have found along with my comments.
Most of these resources are not specifically Lutheran and should be read with as critical an eye as one should use when reading the DaVinci Code. Please feel free to add your own comments and websites, I'm sure there is some great stuff out there I missed.
DaVinci Code: Beyond fact vs. fiction Very short, read this one.
Truth Is Stranger than Fiction: The Da Vinci Code and Early
Christianity A longer, more scholarly work from the Journal of Lutheran ethics.5 Big Questions from The Da Vinci Code Bullet points for discussion. Christianity Today's statement of faith includes a statement on the inerrancy of scripture which is not ELCIC doctrine (My branch of Lutheranism). I mention this in the interest of full disclosure. The ELCIC position is that "This church confesses the Scriptures of the Old and New Testaments as the inspired Word of God, through which God still speaks, and as the only source of the Church's doctrine and the authoritative standard for the faith and life of the Church." (from Article 2, Section 3 of the ELCIC constitution) You may think I am splitting hairs but their is an important distinction between the two positions.
The Truth about the DaVinci Code An article in the magazine of the Lutheran Church Missouri Synod (the other major branch of Lutheranism in North America), which also professes the inerrancy of scripture. This link takes you to a PDF of the complete magazine, the article starts on page 5.
DaVinci Code - the errors
This great article is reproduces in it's entirety below, It is written by Bart Ehrman, a well known theologian, historian and writer, a longer interview with him can be
found at http://www.beliefnet.com/story/167/story_16783_1.html. Buy his books and read them. He has helpful included an excerpt from his book Truth and Fiction in The Da Vinci Code on his website. Chapter 7 covers Jesus, Mary Magdaline and Marriage, it's worth the time to read these paperback size 22 pages.
With the world-wide release of The DaVinci Code movie fast approaching, as a service to our readers, we post Bart Ehrman's list of the 10 historical errors contained in the book.
1. Jesus' life was decidedly not "recorded by thousands of followers across the land." He didn't even have thousands of followers, let alone literate ones.
2. It's not true that eighty Gospels "were considered for the New Testament." This makes it sound like there was a contest, entered by mail. . .
3. It's absolutely not true that Jesus was not considered divine until the Council of Nicea, that before that he was considered merely as "a mortal prophet." The vast majority of Christians by the early fourth century acknowledged him as divine. (Some thought he was so divine he wasn't even human!)
4. Constantine did not commission a "new Bible" that omitted references to Jesus' human traits. For one thing, he didn't commission a new Bible at all. For another thing, the books that did get included are chock-full of references to his human traits (he gets hungry, tired, angry; he gets upset; he bleeds, he dies...).
5. The Dead Sea Scrolls were not "found in the 1950s." It was 1947. And the Nag Hammadi documents do not tell the Grail story at all, nor do they emphasize Jesus' human traits. Quite the contrary.
6. "Jewish decorum" in no way forbade "a Jewish man to be unmarried." In fact, most of the community behind the Dead Sea Scrolls were male unmarried celibates.
7. The Dead Sea Scrolls were not among "the earliest Christian records." They are Jewish, with nothing Christian in them.
8. We have no idea about the lineage of Mary Magdalene; nothing connects her with the "house of Benjamin." And even if she were, this wouldn't make her a descendent of David.
9. Mary Magdalene was pregnant at the crucifixion? That's a good one.
10. The Q document is not a surviving source being hid by the Vatican, nor is it a book allegedly written by Jesus himself. It's a hypothetical document that scholars have posited as having been available to Matthew and Luke, principally a collection of the sayings of Jesus. Roman Catholic scholars think the same of it as non-Catholics; there's nothing secretive about it.
05/07/06
Perhaps hate is too strong a word. What I dislike intensely is the wait in line. My local Home Depot replaced two or three checkout desks with four self service checkouts. I would have used them except that the item I had was too big to fit on the scanner desk and the self service checkouts don't have hand scanners. Even if I would have had a smaller item the lines for the self service checkouts was as long as the lineups for the regular checkout. I saw one guy who had a 10 foot high tree on a cart who had pulled it up to one of the self service checkouts and then couldn't figure out how to scan it. This effectively blocked that checkout while the staff member who was monitoring the self serve checkouts came over to help him figure out what to do. This was a Saturday afternoon and there were 4 staffed checkout desks including the lumber one which had a lineup that stretched half way down the lumber aisle. When I first saw the length of the lineups I actually took my item back and was going to leave the store before I left the store I realized that I really did need my item so I went back, retrieved it and joined the line.
As I waited in line I discussed with other people in the line how we disliked coming to Home Depot because they always have such a long wait to checkout. One of the women in my line had joined the line when she entered the store while her husband went to retrieve the item they were going to purchase just so they could avoid the long wait in the checkout line. Home Depot, how about setting up a cash only, express line with a $1 surcharge? I'd gladly pay for the convenience.
I used to avoid Home Depot and instead shop at the Home Hardware building store in town but it closed soon after Home Depot opened, I really miss it. It had an old fashioned lumber yard, one time the two guys in the yard helped me to tie a 4 by 8 sheet of plywood to the top of my old mustang when it wouldn't fit in the hatchback. It's also the same place that we bought the three sheets of drywall from when we wanted to close up an archway in our house. Home Depot has a fixed delivery charge of $50 which is a bit excessive for 1o bucks worth of drywall. Their other alternative was rent a van for 24.95 for 4 hours. The only problem with that was that you couldn't reserve the vans in advance and they were all taken. Home Hardware delivered the drywall for $15.
Next time it's the Home Hardware in Oak Ridges for me. I wonder if Rona has any plans for a store in Richmond Hill?
While I'm ranting, hey Yahoo, why doesn't Yahoo 360 have a spell checker built in? I'm getting tired of copying my entries to Microsoft Word so I can spell check them. That’s one backwards step the Yahoo mail beta has taken. The spell checker doesn't work on Firefox, the spell checker in the previous version worked fine in Firefox. In the Yahoo Mail beta when you click on the spell check button all you get is a pop up that says the spell check function is under development for Mozilla. Do you think I should believe them?
05/06/06
I recently became a member of emusic.com. Emusic.com is a music site when you can download legal copies of mp3's for many artists. I recently came across the site when looking for mp3's for a CD that my brother had been unsucessful in buying. Though many people attempt to rationalize downloading mp3's as not hurting the artists but just screwing the rich record companies let's face it, downloading mp3's is stealing music. If you feel guilty about it emusic.com will help you aswage your guilt. For $9.99 a month you can download up to 40 songs from a wide collection of artists. The site tends to favour independant bands so if you like these artists this is the site for you. Here is a list of artists I found on emusic.com that I like and have become part of my collection.
On her album " href="http://http//www.emusic.com/artist/11570/11570108.html">Nancy White sings a scathing commentary on the bane of independant musicicans, well inentioned copying of their music by their fans. The song is called And I Copied It. You can hear a 30 second sample by clicking on the title of the song.I am also currently in the middle of a 60 day trial subscription to Yahoo Music Unlimted. It's an OK service but I have some issues with it that will probably mean I won't continue to use it when the trila subscription runs out. The biggest problem I have is that it can't bu used on Linux. This means that I can't use it on the computer I use the most. The other problem I have is that I keep running across albums that are shown in the service but aren't available either for streaming or for purchase. Perhaps there is a way to set filters on the search but I haven't found it. Another problem is no Ipod support. Cnet.com has a more extensive review here.
If you decide after reading this that you want you become a member of Emusic.com please let me know, I get 50 free downloads if I refer you but to do that you have to follow a special link I email you. If you are a Linux user you wil want to get Emusic/J, an open source download manager for emusic.com, emusic's linux download manger is buggy and no longer supported. Now it's time for me to finish downloading my 40 songs for this month.
This David Copperfield parody is my favorite Google video for this week.
05/01/06
Saturday we all went out to plant trees in a quarry. The weather was much nicer than last weekend when I was out camping with the Explorers (a local version of the Scouts). Friday night I hiked into camp after everyone had already went to sleep. I didn't want to disturb my tepee mates so I set up my sleeping bag under the kitchen tarp. When I went to bed I had my sleeping bag half unzipped, by the morning it was zipped all the way up and I had put on my hat. The rain started in the middle of the night and continued all day Saturday and into Sunday morning.
Sunday morning I was listening to The Sunday Edition on CBC. You never know what you are going to hear on The Sunday Edition. This week Michael Enright interviewed Dr. Paul Ewald. Dr. Ewald believes that infections are responsible for many cancers, and other diseases that at this point are blamed on genetic predisposition and environmental factors. He also thinks that there is almost no risk of the flu pandemic everyone is so worried about. Remember the swine flue scare of 1976? Interesting stuff, you can listen to what he has to say by clicking here.
I gave away my turntable today. It's been sitting in my basement since I moved here almost five years ago. I remember it sitting on top of the TV stand gathering dust for a number of years at our old house before I disconnected it to make room for some extra video tapes. I can't remember when I used it last, it's probably been 10 years at least. I was quite surprised when one of the guys at work said he bought a vinyl record, I figured he would give it a good home, evidently he wants to use it so he can scratch his vinyl. I didn't know you could still buy vinyl. I waved goodbye to the pops and clicks of vinyl records when I bought my first CD 20 years ago. Now I just have to let go of the vinyl.
04/29/06
Before I start let me make it perfectly clear, I love Linux but it can be so infuriating at times.
We use Linux at Interactive Sports Technologies and it has proven to be rock solid and reliable and we have have no problem with the Soundblaster audio drivers that we use in our flagship product. We have introduced Linux to our digital media guys and they love it too but they had one problem, the audio didn't work on the Dell machines with the built in sound chip installed in the motherboard. All the drivers loaded OK but no sound came out and when I tried to open the mixer I received an unhelpful error message.
Warning Linux Geek section begins!!! Reading this section may make your eyes glaze over. Scroll down to skip over.
Off to the internet I went to search for information on what to do to resolve it. I didn't find the smoking gun but I did garner enough clues that it might be kernel related so I decided to update the kernel to the lastest revision. Rebooted with the new kernel and X whined, complained and barfed when it started evetually started up with the generic SVGA driver. I had forgotten the Nvidia drivers needed to be reinstalled because they were compiled against the kernel. Sigh. Then realized that I couldn't reinstall the Nvidia drivers because I hadn't installed the kernel source. Double Sigh. Downloaded and installed the kernel source, reinstalled the Nvidia drivers, got X up and running as before, popped a CD in the drive, Gnome CD player automatically started and ..... no sound. Checked with a test sound, everthing sounded OK. Remembered that in the past I had used alsaplayer because the CD player to sound card audio connection wouldn't work.
Even though ALSA drivers and tools are installed, alsaplayer isn't included in the distro. Choices, download, compile or install alsaplayer or find a precompiled binary for my distro. Decided to go the precompiled route so I ran a quick Google search and found that the Dries RPM repository had what I needed. So I updated yum.conf, got it to fetch alsaplayer and the dependant packages I needed but they wouldn't install because I had forgotten to import the GPG key for Dries. Sigh. Off to the Dries website again, get the key install it, install alsaplayer, pop in the CD and ....... success! Stop alsaplayer, push the eject button so I can eject the CD and go home and ....... nothing. CD drawer stays firmly closed. No disk icon on the desktop for me to right click on the eject the disk. Run the disk management tool, it tells me there are mounted filesystems I can unmount. Open a shell prompt, try to unmount the cdrom, mount tells me the filesystem isn't in fstab.
Off to Google again, find out about the eject command. Try it, cryptic error message. Su to root, try eject command again, CD drawer opens. Mutter to myself, what kind of an OS lets me put a CD in the drive but won't let me take it out? A little more Google research and I find out about PAM (Pluggable Authentication Modules). Fiddle with /etc/security/console.perms, add the user into the disk group, think it worked on one machine but doesn't seem to work on another. Finally lose patience, set the sticky bit on the eject program and call it a day.
Linux Geek section ends
Like I said at the beginning I love Linux but some days it can be like the old dog who sits beside your easy chair who you reach down to pet every so often. The one day you reach down to pet him and he bites you.
I know what you are going to say, I should have used another distro, there is a much easier way to do what I did..... My main point is that it really shouldn't be this hard. Many people would have reached either for the screwdriver or the Windows CD.
BTW the picture above is from Lazy Daisy Log, I've asked her for permission to use it I hope she says yes.
