Yes, yes! Yes!!

Old, but still good, reference to cycling programs and helmet use. Here's an excerpt:

But bicycling advocates say that the problem with pushing helmets isn’t practicality but that helmets make a basically safe activity seem really dangerous. “The real benefits of bike-sharing in terms of health, transport and emissions derive from getting ordinary people to use it,” said Ceri Woolsgrove, safety officer at the European Cyclists’ Federation. “And if you say this is wonderful, but you have to wear armor, they won’t. These are normal human beings, not urban warriors.”

<idle musing>
Yep. Another good little snippet, "Statistically, if we wear helmets for cycling, maybe we should wear helmets when we climb ladders or get into a bath, because there are lots more injuries during those activities." So, get out those helmets next time you enter the shower!
</idle musing>

Thought for today

One’s own folly leads to ruin,
yet the heart rages against the Lord. (Proverbs 19:3 TNIV)

Toy pistols and battleships

"But in the midst of it all I made a great discovery. There were demon forces, of which I had never dreamed, governing this world. The Bible was right. My spiritual weapons in the face of such an enemy were as a toy pistol before a great battleship. I had been attempting to take Leviathan captive with my little toy fish-hook. Furthermore, to my utter dismay, I found that my own carnality and selfishness had given the ground they held to these monsters of hell. I myself had invited them in. I must get rid of 'self'--that was as clear as the noon-day sun. Else there could be no hope of final victory. These powers of darkness (demons are as real to me now as God Himself) which were oppressing me to the point of despair, were standing on the very ground which secret selfishness had conceded to them. How was I to get rid of this 'self-life' which had so long been standing out against Christ and making a way for the enemy to come in like a flood? Ah! had I but known of that 'Standard,' the Cross, which must be lifted up against this prince of darkness. But my hour had come. God was leading me all the while. Not a tear but what had fallen in His bottle. It was then that He focused all my being upon the Cross of Christ, and opened up to me its wondrous meaning. Every day brought its revelation. Such a struggle as mine would never issue in Victory except the Cross be given the place of absolute supremacy in my life and ministry."—F.G Huegel in The Cross of Christ--The Throne of God

Selfishness

Selfishness takes on a thousand forms and types; but each and all are sinful, for the whole mind should give itself up to serve God and to perform every duty as revealed to the reason.—Charles Finney

<idle musing>
The definition of sin: selfishness. We are called to die self and live for God. Of course, we can only do that by the power of the Holy Spirit...
</idle musing>

Today's thought

“Then [when disaster strikes] they will call to me [wisdom] but I will not answer;
they will look for me but will not find me,
since they hated knowledge
and did not choose to fear the Lord .
Since they would not accept my advice
and spurned my rebuke,
they will eat the fruit of their ways
and be filled with the fruit of their schemes.
For the waywardness of the simple will kill them,
and the complacency of fools will destroy them;
but whoever listens to me will live in safely
and be at ease, without fear of harm.” (Proverbs 1:28-33 TNIV)

Psalm for the day

Set a guard over my mouth, Lord;
keep watch over the door of my lips.
Do not let my heart be drawn to what is evil
so that I take part in wicked deeds
along with those who are evildoers;
do not let me eat of their delicacies. (Psalm 141:3-4 TNIV)

Thought for a Sunday morning

Where can I go from your Spirit?
Where can I flee from your presence?
If I go up to the heavens, you are there;
if I make my bed in the depths, you are there.
If I rise on the wings of the dawn,
if I settle on the far side of the sea,
even there your hand will guide me,
your right hand will hold me fast.
If I say, “Surely the darkness will hide me
and the light become night around me,”
even the darkness will not be dark to you;
the night will shine like the day,
for darkness is as light to you. (Psalm 139:7-12 TNIV)

Thought for today

Paul has a doctrine of the saving righteousness of God whereby God acquits and vindicates the ungodly because of Jesus’ death and resurrection, and what is more, this enacted verdict is the gateway for membership into the cosmopolitan people of God. The saving righteousness of God means the end of all boasting whether it is in performance or possession of the law, whether it is in one’s ethnicity or religious effort. Justification is the act whereby God creates a new people, with a new status, in a new covenant, as a foretaste of the new age. Justification is forensic (it refers to status not moral state), eschatological (the verdict of judgment day is declared in the present), covenantal (Jews and Gentiles belong at one fellowship table), and is effective (sanctification cannot be subsumed under justification but neither can they be completely separated).—Michael Bird in The Saving Righteousness of God, page 4

<idle musing>
In other words, all inclusive of your entire life : )
</idle musing>

Psalm for the day

It is better to take refuge in the Lord
than to trust in human beings.
It is better to take refuge in the Lord
than to trust in princes.
I was pushed back and about to fall,
but the Lord helped me.
The Lord is my strength and my defense;
he has become my salvation.
I will not die but live,
and will proclaim what the Lord has done. (Psalm 118:8, 9, 13, 14, 17 TNIV)

The unexpected side effects of GMO crops

You won't see this in a Monsanto ad...

Marketed as Roundup and other trade names, glyphosate is a broad-spectrum systemic herbicide used to kill weeds. About 95% of soybean and cotton crops and more than 85% of corn in the U.S. are planted to varieties genetically modified to be herbicide resistant.
“Resistant weeds have become a major problem for many farmers reliant on GE crops, and are now driving up the volume of herbicide needed each year by about 25%,” Benbrook says...

Overall pesticide use in 2011 was about 20% higher on each acre planted to a GE crop, compared to pesticide use on acres not planted to GE crops.

<idle musing>
What else should we expect? We used DDT to kill mosquitoes; we created DDT resistant mosquitoes. Why wouldn't the use of GMO crops do the same thing?

The real gem is here, though: "The presence of resistant weeds drives up herbicide use by 25% to 50%, and increases farmer-weed control costs by at least as much." Guess who pays? And guess who benefits?
</idle musing>

Thought for today

Praise the Lord.
Praise the Lord, you his servants;
praise the name of the Lord.
Let the name of the Lord be praised,
both now and forevermore.
From the rising of the sun to the place where it sets,
the name of the Lord is to be praised.
The Lord is exalted over all the nations,
his glory above the heavens.
Who is like the Lord our God,
the One who sits enthroned on high,
who stoops down to look
on the heavens and the earth?
He raises the poor from the dust
and lifts the needy from the ash heap;
he seats them with princes,
with the princes of his people. (Psalm 113:1-8 TNIV)

Primitive? Or common to humanity??

"One final point needs to be made concerning “sacrifice” and history. Theoreticians from Robertson Smith (1973) to René Girard (1979) have portrayed sacrifice as a product of a certain historical moment, an artifact of primitive magico-religious thought or of underdeveloped social mechanisms for mediating violence. These universal originary claims for sacrifice, however, serve Western culture as origin myths of primitive violence and the birth of inequality—yet just as religion became a “thing” in the moment of its marginalization at the hands of science and secular rationality, so too the category of sacrifice serves to exoticize safely and partition us from the social violence with which it is often associated. If the distinction between religion and politics is a modern invention, however, then the possibility of distinguishing purely “religious” violence becomes untenable, and if we recognize the culturally constituted and frequently affectively loaded nature of violence, then we must also admit that ritualized, ideologically charged killing and destruction is still very much with us. Whether they are framed as national interest, progress, ethnic purity, or sectarian atavism, our gods still demand sacrifice, and blood has not ceased flowing down their altars."—Roderick Campbell
in Sacred Killing , page 321

<idle musing>
Ouch! Too true, especially this: "Whether they are framed as national interest, progress, ethnic purity, or sectarian atavism, our gods still demand sacrifice, and blood has not ceased flowing down their altars." Good to remember as we mark 2000 dead in Afghanistan...national interest is a thirsty god! Better to serve the living God than that one.
</idle musing>

Thought for today

My heart, O God, is steadfast;
I will sing and make music with all my soul.
Awake, harp and lyre!
I will awaken the dawn.
I will praise you, Lord, among the nations;
I will sing of you among the peoples.
For great is your love, higher than the heavens;
your faithfulness reaches to the skies.
Be exalted, O God, above the heavens;
let your glory be over all the earth. (Psalm 108:1-5 TNIV)

Religion?

"...attempting to demarcate sacrificial practices on the basis of a distinction between religious and secular actions or motivations is difficult, and I would argue that this approach is fundamentally, historically flawed.

"While my objection to embedding discussions of sacrifice in “the sacred” or “religion” may seem like a case of the perennial anthropological conundrum of finding an appropriate etic term to fit emic realities, the problem, in fact, runs much deeper. The issue lies in the pernicious intellectualist reification of “religion” as a unique and independent sphere of practice and (especially) belief (W. C. Smith 1962). Though scholars of ancient societies frequently note that, in the societies they study, religion was inseparable from politics, daily life, and so on, it is nonetheless difficult for post-Enlightenment Western academics to take home the point powerfully made in Asad (1993) that “religion” has come to denote little more than a perspective in the modern West. That Christianity went from “the faith” to “a faith” and then to “a religion” does not merely reflect the historical development of a concept but rather marks seismic shifts in relations of truth, power, being, and world. Though the contributions to this volume have largely steered clear of direct discussion of “religion,” it nonetheless accompanies the concept of “sacrifice” like a shadow and has problematically entangled writing on the archaeology of religion in general with its conceptual framework. Practices of ritual killing and offering were (as are all practices) embedded in intertwined ways of knowing and being in the world. In other words, “religion” (to the extent that this is even a locally meaningful category) is neither thought of nor practiced as a separate compartment of social life in most times and places. It is not just (or even mainly) about beliefs, and the same is true for putatively “religious” practices such as “sacrifice"."—Roderick Campbell in Sacred Killing , pages 306-307

<idle musing>
The heart of it is here: "In other words, “religion” (to the extent that this is even a locally meaningful category) is neither thought of nor practiced as a separate compartment of social life in most times and places. It is not just (or even mainly) about beliefs..."

The secular/sacred distinction doesn't exist in reality; your whole life is lived either for God or for self—all of it, all the time...
</idle musing>

Alien thoughts

"As diverse as the various local or regional settings of ritual killing might have been, the intricate relationship between killing and order is a particular feature of the world view in ancient Near Eastern communities. Killing, rather than being considered a complete annihilation, served either transformative, reordering, or reintegrative purposes when occurring in a ritually controlled environment, a concept alien to Western thought."—Beate Pongratz-Leisten in Sacred Killing , page 292

<idle musing>
It is hard for us in the Western world to get our minds around ritualized killing. We can handle it in the name of science, though...
</idle musing>

Thought for today

So men, in their sins, treat the realities of the spiritual world as if they were not real, but follow the most empty phantoms of this world, as if they were stern realities.
They also act as if self were of supreme importance, and everything else of relatively no importance. Suppose you were to see a man acting this out in common life. He goes round, day after day, assuming that he is the Supreme God, and practically insisting that everybody ought to have a supreme regard to his rights, and comparatively little or no regard for other people's rights. Now, if you were to see a man saying this and acting it out, would you not account him either a blasphemer or insane?—Charles Finney

Sacrifice

"In the ancient Near East in general, the sacrifice as an offering to otherworldly beings is always part of a complex ritual as a communicative action that also includes greeting, kissing, and clothing the deity, exorcistic rites, and liturgical and performative procedures. It is usually performed in a sacralized space that serves cultic practice dedicated either to the gods or to the ancestors. Rituals such as these must be distinguished from other forms of ritual killing, which pertain to eliminatory rituals designed to dispel evil and generally occur outside the temple."—Beate Pongratz-Leisten in Sacred Killing , page 291

<idle musing>
So, she makes a distinction between "sacrifice" and scapegoat or appeasement offerings. How valid is that distinction, I wonder...
</idle musing>

Thought for today

In spite of all this, they kept on sinning;
in spite of his wonders, they did not believe.
So he ended their days in futility
and their years in terror.
Whenever God slew them, they would seek him;
they eagerly turned to him again.
They remembered that God was their Rock,
that God Most High was their Redeemer.
But then they would flatter him with their mouths,
lying to him with their tongues;
their hearts were not loyal to him,
they were not faithful to his covenant.
Yet he was merciful;
he forgave their iniquities
and did not destroy them.
Time after time he restrained his anger
and did not stir up his full wrath.
He remembered that they were but flesh,
a passing breeze that does not return. (Psalm 78:32-39 TNIV)

Ritual or religious?

"I define rituals as acts that have a social meaning and are designed to communicate with an audience. Such acts are not necessarily related to the supernatural and thus are not necessarily part of religion (for example, Kyriakidis 2007); however, based on accounts provided by the ethnographic record, formal and repeated actions that result in the death of humans and modification of their remains are almost always tied in some way to beliefs in a supernatural world (Ucko 1969: 264ff.). "—Mary Voight in Sacred Killing , page 264

<idle musing>
A very good distinction. Not every ritual act is necessarily a "religious" act...
</idle musing>

Intersection or union?

"In our view ritual and sacrifice are concepts that intersect rather than interbed. Ritual implies repetition, the routinized sequence of actions, patterns that may or may not intersect with concepts of the sacred. The daily setting out of pens and pencils on your desk may be a “ritual”; whether that sequence is determined by ideas about the ineffable is a separate question. The point is that the actions are done again and again, so they may leave certain types of archaeological traces. Structuralists would suggest that these routines/rituals are expressions of core cultural values/issues (usually of a dualistic nature: male/female, us/them, and so on); thus, comparing the organization of these rituals may expose these deeper cultural skeletons. Here we enter the realm of sacrifice and its dual aspects of giving up and giving to, events that may be ritualized by repetitive sequence or events that may happen only once but, in either case, events that are infused with a deeper meaning in relationship to the sacred."—Hesse, Wapnish & Greer in Sacred Killing, page 230

<idle musing>
Our life is full of rituals—big ones, small ones, important ones, trivial ones. They are what give our lives order. As a Christian, our goal should be to live out our lives as a sacrifice—and, as they say here, that isn't necessarily the same thing!
</idle musing>