Maclaurin Institute

I just happened upon this site that is chock full of resources. Its a Christian study center whose motto is to "Bring God into the marketplace of ideas by communicating the Christian worldview
with its transforming potential"


They have a ton of mp3 lectures, including heavy hitters like Dallas Williard, Philip Johnson, and Ravi Zacharias. Check out here

Cracking the DaVinci Code

FREE Audio Download: An Interview with Peter Jones

Free mp3 interview with Peter Jones, author of The Gnostic Empire Strikes Back and co-author of Cracking DaVinci's Code. get it here

Peter Jones, Cracking DaVinci's Code

Benny Hinn on Dateline.

We discussed Benny Hinn in a previous meeting, I thought I should post this report on
Dateline NBC on it at MediaSoul.. Read it here

Submitted by David Sutherland.

Carlos Fuentes

Carlos Fuentes
Originally uploaded by tosh913.

This I Believe


Carlos Fuentes, a novelist who's book"The Death ofArtemio Cruz" established him as a central figure of the Latin America literary boom writes about Jesus in a book called "This I Believe"




"Jesus extends the values of eternal life to the values of earthly life and that is where he becomes something much more than a fragile God who becomes man. He becomes the God whose power resides in his humanity. And, "Jesus is the eternal reproach to the Church"

Charles Towne 

Physicist Wins Spirituality Prize

Co-inventor of the Laser and shared winner of the 1964 Nobel in physics talks about intelligent design.



Read about it here

Mars Hill Audio

Mars Hill Audio has deeply impacted my thinking over the years, and I've been blessed by there crossing of Christianity, post modernity,current issues and culture. They have covered topics such as Bradley J. Birzer, on the mythic roots of Middle Earth in J. R. R. Tolkien's The Silmarillion,Sir John Polkinghorne, on lessons for theology learned from the inductive nature of the work of science , and Craig A. Bernthal, on the theme of judgment in the plays of Shakespeare. They cover quite a bit of what is going on in the world now in terms of movies, literature, politics, science and music.

Order a free sample CD here!

Here's a little blurb on them.

MARS HILL AUDIO exists to assist Christians who desire to move from thoughtless consumption of modern culture to a vantage point of thoughtful engagement.

---

Read more about them here

There also having a great up to 50% off there stock now!

go to it here

Tolkien on Sex?

I just saw this on Leo Partible's site FilmPR

Fascinating article on Tolkien's view of sex, marriage and love.

From Father to Son -- J.R.R. Tolkien on Sex:

In 1941, Tolkien wrote a masterful letter to his son Michael, dealing with marriage and the realities of human sexuality.
The letter reflects Tolkien's Christian worldview and his deep love for his sons, and at the same time, also acknowledges the powerful dangers inherent in unbridled sexuality. "This is a fallen world," Tolkien chided. "The dislocation of sex-instinct is one of the chief symptoms of the Fall. The world has been 'going to the bad' all down the ages. The various social forms shift, and each new mode has its special dangers: but the 'hard spirit of concupiscence' has walked down every street, and sat leering in every house, since Adam fell."

Read the entire article here

Korn Co-founder and Guitarist leaves to follow Jesus

Yep, its true. Read about it here


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Pillars and Props

I read this on Sewardstreet.com and realized I have way too many props!

Sometimes we think we need this and that to make us better artists, when all we need to is just have plain paper and pencil.

Creativity without Props

No, I don't mean when someone looks at your scene and doesn't give you the "props" you think you deserve.

I'm talking about this section out of Hugh MacLeod's post "How To Be Creative" entitled "The more talented somebody is, the less they need the props."

Ouch.

I know world-class animators who have trouble using a fax machine or reading their email. Me?

I've just spent the last couple of weeks building my own Media Center PC, buying all the parts, hooking it all up together, making sure I had the right drivers, the right software - all in an effort to have a really cool interface to quickly access animation scenes.

Supporting that, I've got a TabletPC with Alias Sketchbook Pro, a Rio Karma (MP3 player), an XM MyFi, hundreds of DVDs and laserdiscs, and every screenwriting/moviemaking software/outliner tool devised. All of them purchased with the idea that they would help inspire and motivate me to create my own Secret Project. (A Secret Project is the thing you work on after hours - your own personal vision that you keep a secret because it's so great nobody can know about it, lest they try to steal it from you!)

With all of these props how many Secret Projects am I currently working on?

Zero.

Hugh is big in the blogosphere. His site gapingvoid is one of my favorite to read, although he's so prolific that it's hard to keep up. I've been working my way through "How to be Creative" and when I hit this section about props it sounded way too familiar.

The more talented somebody is, the less they need the props.

Meeting a person who wrote a masterpiece on the back of a deli menu would not surprise me.
Meeting aperson who wrote a masterpiece with a silver Cartier fountain pen on an antique writing table in an airy SoHo loft would SERIOUSLY surprise me. Abraham Lincoln wrote The Gettysburg address ona piece of ordinary stationery that he had borrowed from the friend whose house he was staying at.

James Joyce wrote with a simple pencil and notebook. Somebody else did the typing, but only much later.

Van Gough rarely painted with more than six colors on his palette.

I draw on the back of wee biz cards. Whatever.

There's no correlation between creativity and equipment ownership. None. Zilch. Nada.

Actually, as the artist gets more into his thing, and as he gets more successful, his number of tools tends to go down. He knows what works for him. Expending mental energy on stuff wastes time. He's a man on a mission. He's got a deadline. He's got some rich client breathing down his neck. The last thing he wants is to spend 3 weeks learning how to use a router drill if he doesn't need to.

A fancy tool just gives the second-rater one more pillar to hide behind.

Which is why there are so many second-rate art directors with state-of-the-art Macinotsh computers.

Which is why there are so many hack writers with state-of-the-art laptops.

Which is why there are so many crappy photographers with state-of-the-art digital cameras.

Which is why there are so many unremarkable painters with expensive studios in trendy neighborhoods.

Hiding behind pillars, all of them.

Pillars do not help; they hinder. The more mighty the pillar, the more you end up relying on it psychologically, the more it gets in your way.

And this applies to business, as well.

Which is why there are so many failing businesses with fancy offices.

Which is why there's so many failing businessmen spending a fortune on fancy suits and expensive yacht club memberships.

Again, hiding behind pillars.

Successful people, artists and non-artists alike, are very good at spotting pillars. They're very good at doing without them. Even more importantly, once they've spotted a pillar, they're very good at quickly getting rid of it.

Good pillar management is one of the most valuable talents you can have on the planet. If you have it, I envy you. If you don't, I pity you.

Sure, nobody's perfect. We all have our pillars. We seem to need them. You are never going to live a pillar-free existence. Neither am I.

All we can do is keep asking the question, "Is this a pillar" about every aspect of our business, our craft, our reason for being alive etc and go from there. The more we ask, the better we get at spotting pillars, the more quickly the pillars vanish.

Ask. Keep asking. And then ask again. Stop asking and you're dead

Antony Flew's "change of heart", or "change of head" causes concern in skeptic's camp.

It would appear that Antony Flew's new position threatens to refute the popularly projected concept that science is composed of one complete "United Front of Evidence-Convinced Naturalistic-Origin Acceptors".

It would probably bring much derision down on anyone, should they publicly attempt to suggest that this united group had anyone in it's influential ranks but those totally bereft of subjective interpretation from the facts.

However, the disconcerting thing is that the "unrefutable facts" seem to be that whatever data we may eventually have, what we do with what we have today seems derived through many less-than-objective steps.

Be it today or a century beyond, we will still not have the ability to mark and measure the phenomena of the "origin of the universe". With no measurements, we can simply propose our own derived theories after the fact.

• After proposing the theory it will, of course, be used as a model to propose certain observable conditions which ought to be present, consistent with that theory.
• We can then test to see if our current data contradicts or co-incides with what these theories predicted.
• If we don't see any contradictions we may conclude our theory is sound.
• And, if not, as the saying goes,

• "If the data doesn't fit the theory, fit the theory to the data..."

Human error can invade in many different places, but worse are the areas that seem to have no option but to depend on subjective human judgement.

Referencing back to the Seminar by Michael Shermer, it would seem that despite its positive contributions, one very disturbing quality of the process of apprehending truth through scientific "revelation" is highlighted through its historical failure rate.

It was posed to Michael Shermer by the host, as a question, something similar to,

"How do you respond to the times when this scientific system, with peer-reviewed error-checking precautions, seems virtually unanimous in indicating something as true, which later is proved drastically mistaken?"

The presenter, apparently in conversation with a Medical Historian, reveals that history contains many incidents of scientifically supported theories, commonly considered as sound, being accepted into basic practices for the field. Yet, historically the practices get revisited and re-evaluated as critically flawed. Many so flawed as to cause the presenter to mention that in our modern times, it was "safer in the past not to have gone to the doctor for a great many years rather than to go."

The question being posed might be stated as,

"If you wish to test a theory, yet do not have all of the information regarding a subject at hand, how can you determine conclusively which data is actually relevant to test?"

and

"If the relevant data might be overlooked, what degree of proof does any test, regardless of results, actually yield in regards to its *actual relevancy to our world?"

"Might the currently accepted 'sound' theories get revisted and refuted in light of future additions of unanticipated evidence?"

"If so, what does it actually mean to say that a theory seems to fit all of the currently available evidence?"

For balance, I think we'll include this skeptic's reply to the news of Flew's change of thoughts.

-G-

*(Actual relevancy, as opposed to its isolated test-metric relevancy.)

Anthony Flew becomes a theist

Sunday night we had talked about Anthony Flew, the noted philosopher and atheist who has become a theist, there's a great interview with him here

Also if you like to buy the DVD "Has Science Discovered God"., where he first made the announcement in a symposium on science and religion, that the discoveries of modern science have led him to accept the existence of God, click here . We'll be watching the video in the near future with a discussion to follow.