An Open Letter to His Honor the Mayor Timothy Titus, of Paradise, California

Church, Local, politics, Worship,

Two thousand years ago, in his Sermon on the Mount, Jesus of Nazareth instructed his followers that they should not pray in public; only hypocrites pray in public, he said.

The National Day of Prayer was founded in 1952 during the Red Scare, as an attempt to ostracize progressives in the U.S. as un-American. It was not an effort to bring peace to this land, but an effort to bring division.

In In April 2010, a federal judge found the National Day of Prayer to be unconstitutional.

An extremist group called the Ridge Ministerial Fellowship has organized a local National Day of Prayer event on on May 2, 2013, at Terry Ashe Park, a municipal facility located in the heart of our dear town. It is publicly documented that this organization has had a history of pressuring His Honor the Mayor, concerning Proposition 8 and its so-called “impact” on the PUSD. We humbly request that you help us to take a stand against them as a matter of civic duty.

It is one thing to host religious organizations for lectures or faith-based initiatives which bring unity to the community. It is quite another to host worship services which bring division to those who either believe praying the way they do is unwholesome and hypocritical (such as people who believe Jesus’ teachings) or other faiths which believe the way they pray is even blasphemous.

Hosting the National Day of Prayer event in the public park implies (intentionally or otherwise) that the secular town government is partial towards certain religions; towards those who wish to pray for supernatural help—who condemn other lifestyles as immoral—over against those who wish to use reason and action to bring change. To put it another way, there are people who wish to hold humans accountable for their actions and neighborly duties on one side, over against those who wish to create division and invoke a supernatural entity to do his will in our land. Our government should promote democracy and accountability, and encourage these interfaith organizations to observe their practices on private land.

A petition has been started on Change.org regarding this issue.

UPDATE: 10:40 AM
After further investigation, we have decided to close this petition. While the so-called “National Day of Prayer” is itself unconstitutional, this group has a right to worship in the park. In similar instances, the ACLU has fought to defend the rights of churches to worship organizationally in a park. If we work to prohibit them from doing so, the ACLU will be against us on this. (See http://www.aclu.org/religion-belief/aclu-tn-successfully-advocates-behalf-student-preachers)

The problem is the National Day of Prayer itself. But I don’t see how it’s possible to force people to use a different name for it if they do it every May anyway…

Thank you for your support.

UPDATE 8:30 PM
The mayor decided to respond despite the cancellation of the petition. This is what he said: “Since the Town neither owns nor controls the Recreation Center, the prayer event is not subject to Town approval, nor are we a sponsor of the event.” So much for my first foray into local politics…

Evernote GTD notes

App Reviews, , ,

I’ve been using Evernote for several years. A few months ago I started using an app called Zendone for my GTD workflow. This required a bit of an adjustment, because it has categories within the app which don’t actually correspond to Evernote tags or notebooks, and it uses the titles of your Evernote notes to create task items, rather than checklist items from your notes, which makes going back and forth between Evernote and the app a bit problematic. So, mostly it’s like its own app which happens to use Evernote as its back-end database. To top it off, they just started charging fees, and I don’t really think it’s a service worth paying for.

So I’m going to go back to using Evernote directly. I might utilize The Secret Weapon for some guidelines, but I’ll also rely on some techniques that I’ve developed over the years and adapted from other apps. Maybe I’ll standardize this workflow and publish it as an alternative to TSW, and perhaps even make an app of my own someday…

Transitioning from Google Reader to feedly

Reblogged from Building Feedly:

Google announced today that they will be shutting down Google Reader. This is something we have been expecting for some time: We have been working on a project called Normandy which is a feedly clone of the Google Reader API - running on Google App Engine. When Google Reader shuts down, feedly will seamlessly transition to the Normandy back end. So if you are a Google Reader user and using feedly, you are covered: the transition will be seamless.

Read more… 125 more words

This is pretty cool. Instead of having a plain old feed import tool, Feedly is abstracting the Google Reader API so that they can keep the rest of the code for their apps intact. From a software architecture perspective, this is brilliant.

Some quotations to help you understand me

Uncategorized

“The man who prays is the one who thinks that god has arranged matters all wrong, but who also thinks that he can instruct god how to put them right. Half-buried in the contradiction is the distressing idea that nobody is in charge, or nobody with any moral authority. The call to prayer is self-cancelling.” —Christopher Hitchens

“There are two governments: the one religious, by which the conscience is trained to piety and divine worship; the other civil, by which the individual is instructed in those duties which, as men and citizens, we are bound to perform. To these two forms are commonly given the not inappropriate names of spiritual and temporal jurisdiction, intimating that the former species has reference to the life of the soul, while the latter relates to matters of the present life, not only to food and clothing, but to the enacting of laws which require a man to live among his fellows purely honorably, and modestly. The former has its seat within the soul, the latter only regulates the external conduct. We may call the one the religious, the other the civil kingdom. Now, these two, as we have divided them, are always to be viewed apart from each other. Let us now return to human laws. If they are imposed for the purpose of forming a religious obligation, as if the observance of them was in itself necessary, we say that the restraint thus laid on the conscience is unlawful. Our consciences have not to do with men but with God only.” —John Calvin

“I think that if the data is overwhelming in favor, in favor of evolution, to deny that reality will make us a cult, some odd group that’s not really interacting with the real world.” —Dr. Bruce Waltke

“Properly read, the bible is the most potent force for atheism ever conceived.” —Isaac Asimov

Piper/Meyer transition timeline

Religion,

Due to sub-par search engine optimization on the part of Bethlehem Baptist’s own website, my blog has somehow become the source for all things John Piper—at least when it relates to the subject of his retirement from pastoral ministry. So I’ve gone ahead and found a copy of Bethlehem’s transition timeline so I could place a link here where it would be easier for people to find it.

According to the timeline, Jason Meyer would have preached the recent advent series before the holiday break, and starting yesterday has taken up regular preaching duties until his installation in April 2013.

(Also see Piper’s blog post at Desiring God from last April.)

The Ten Commandments of the Late Mr. Hitchens

Family, Parenthood, politics, Science, Scripture,

It has been said, “Religion is doing what you are told, regardless of what is right, whereas morality is doing what is right regardless of what you are told.” As an acquaintance of the Schatz family this truth is hugely important to me. Christopher Hitchens produced the following for Vanity Fair:

  1. Do not condemn people on the basis of their ethnicity or color.
  2. Do not ever use people as private property.
  3. Despise those who use violence or the threat of it in sexual relations.
  4. Hide your face and weep if you dare to harm a child.
  5. Do not condemn people for their inborn nature.
  6. Be aware that you too are an animal and dependent on the web of nature, and think and act accordingly.
  7. Do not imagine that you can escape judgment if you rob people with a false prospectus rather than with a knife.
  8. Turn off that fucking cell phone—you have no idea how unimportant your call is to us.
  9. Denounce all jihadists and crusaders for what they are: psychopathic criminals with ugly delusions.
  10. Be willing to renounce any god or any religion if any holy commandments should contradict any of the above. In short: Do not swallow your moral code in tablet form.

See the whole article/video on Vanity Fair.

Eleven facts about guns in the U.S.

Depression, Family, Parenthood, politics

Ezra Klein writes:

If roads were collapsing all across the United States, killing dozens of drivers, we would surely see that as a moment to talk about what we could do to keep roads from collapsing. If terrorists were detonating bombs in port after port, you can be sure Congress would be working to upgrade the nation’s security measures. If a plague was ripping through communities, public-health officials would be working feverishly to contain it.

Only with gun violence do we respond to repeated tragedies by saying that mourning is acceptable but discussing how to prevent more tragedies is not. But that’s unacceptable. As others have observed, talking about how to stop mass shootings in the aftermath of a string of mass shootings isn’t “too soon.” It’s much too late.

Read more: Eleven facts about guns and mass shootings in the United States.